[Steven Zahm]

@ Jerry

First time I’ve heard that Connections was poorly written … I usually hear quite the opposite from other devs who use it for their clients with site as large dbs, more than 20K entries.

Any way … I know it is not your hosts job to debug the code, but, if they have specific area(s) which they can point to as being an issue being caused by Connections. I will definitely look into those and make what ever fixes may be necessary.

With that said, I browsed around your site and I see what you mean by slow loading. Some definitely seems “hokey”. I’ll try to explain.

When I click a state and I’m presented with a list of city links. These seem to be hand created on the page, yes? Ok…

Lets say I click on Idaho and then click on any city, looking at the network activity, the first thing that happens is a 301 page redirect. This redirect seems to be the bulk of the page load. You can view this for yourself by opening the pages in Chrome with the dev tools open, hit F12 and then click the network tab. After the pages load scroll to the top of the requests. Every page I visited the first request is a 301 redirect. That important because a redirect in WP will occur before the Connections shortcode runs and that’s the meat of any processing Connections does. Anything before that, Connections related, takes mere milliseconds.

When I visit PA, thing are better. It seems most pages/cities do not have this redirect and the page load in about 3–5 seconds which is about average for a WP site without caching (I see W3TC is being used, but lets ignore that for the moment) even and WP tuned managed hosts. This load time is indistinguishable from page load time where Connections is not being used like the About us, Bail Jumpers, Bail Tails, FAQ and Feedback pages.

It could be that the current service level that you are subscribed to with the host is not enough. It appears the site might be hosted with GoDaddy. Is that correct? At the very least, the domain seems to be registered thru them. Any way, if you are on their basic shared hosting plan you could very well be being throttled (very common on shared hosting, cycle have to be available to all the accounts on the server which can range into the hundreds) depending how popular your site is. That could explain why page load times vary quite bit, even why some pages and the admin fail to load.

Back to W3TC. I see after a page is cached by W3TC, the page loads in about a half second. You could setup its preload or prime the cache. What this does is it’ll crawl your site in the background pre-caching the pages. That could help significantly as you users should only hit a “slow” page if it isn’t already preloaded in the cache. Even though I have not used it yet (I will be giving it a try very soon), I’ve heard some pretty good things about WP Rocket (I’m in no way affiliated), ie lighter and faster than W3TC while being easier to configure. There is a cost attached to the plugin but it could be worthwhile checking out if you have the time and funds available.

[Steven Zahm]

@ roy

I’ve added the stop word support to the search, just like WP handles it (actually uses the exact same code).

I still do not have a solution for doing legitimate short word searches yet. I am working on improving the search results right now … so maybe I’ll come up with something.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jerry

My best guess without be able to see the issue is that the memory assigned to PHP is being exhausted. Here’s a link to an excellent blog post that covers several different methods on increasing this limit. Which method that will work for you really depends on the host. I suggest starting at the top and working your way down the list to see if one of them resolves the issue for you.

If that does not work, then it may be some type of plugin conflict. I suggest temporarily deactivating all unrelated Connections plugins. Likely the issue will resolve at this point. Activate them one at a time until the issue returns. When the issue returns, the last plugin activated was the conflict.

Let me know what you find out. Hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

No, there are no licensing restricts or such. The only thing you’ll have to do is deactivate the support license key before the domain change and reactivate afterward.

AS for category specific pages, you can use the category shortcode option in conjunction with the http://connections-pro.com/documentation/cmap/#Can_I_use_cMap_on_two_different_pages_showing_different_categories_in_the_drop_down.

This is how the Wollombi Valley site is setup.

Hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jimmie

You could use a plugin such as Widget Logic, Widget Context or Restrict Widgets to limit which pages a widget would be displayed on. That’s how I would suggest you handle your specific requirement.

Hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Avi

Yes, but you would need both the Link and Form extensions.

I hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Xavier

You can not order by custom fields, only the fields listed by in the order_by documentation. Custom fields are a new feature, eventually they will be able to be used to order by.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Ron

Are you certain you’ve replaced the file? I ask because those line numbers match the old version, not the new. Could you please double check? The version at the top of the file should be 0.33dev in the replacement file.

[Steven Zahm]

@ ncjwghs

re: Our password protected membership directory is suddenly open to the public without requiring a password.
Which method did you use to password protect the page? Add a password to the page or made it private?

Did you enable either of the shortcode overrides on the Connections : Settings admin page under the General tab? If you did, are you using either or both of the shortcode overrides? If any of this is, yes, disable both shortcode overrides and then remove those shortcode overrides from the [connections] shortcode. That should fix it up.

re: Also it takes several minutes to load. How do we fix this?
How many entries are you showing on a page? Ifit more than 20, 50 absolute max, you need to reduce the limit set page_limit shortcode option. If you have disabled pagination or have a high number and you must have that, then you will need to look into adding a caching plugin to you site, it help quite a bit. Why? pretty much for the same reason WP limits the blog posts to only a few posts per page … the more you show, the longer the page load will be.

Hope that helps!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Allen

If you are copy/pasting the options from the webpage into the Visual editor it is very likely you are also pasting the HTML which will break the shortcode an it options. This is not a limitation in Connections but in the WP core shortcode parser. My suggestion is to delete the shortcode and its options completely and retype it manually. Or. Edit the page, switching the editor to the Text tab and then remove any HTML in and around the [connections] shortcode and its options.

Here’s a link to a QuickTip on working with shortcodes. Useful info for working within any plugin and its shortcode(s).

Hope that helps!

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