Temporarily edit your index.php file and add these lines at the top (after the first opening tag):

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', TRUE);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', TRUE);

// $Id: index.php,v 1.94 2007/12/26…

Then I went back again to the blank white page and I saw that there were some syntax errors in my template. After fixing those errors in my template I deleted again that chunk of code to avoid others seeing diagnostic errors in the site.

It was a quick solution, but if that did not solve your problems, try checking out these links:

• http://drupal.org/node/158043
• http://www.chromaticsites.com/blog/15-common-drupal-problems-that-make-you-scream-solutions-included/

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Display Tags In A Dropdown Menu

In your theme folder, paste the following code to the functions.php file. If you don’t have a functions.php file, create one.

<?php
function dropdown_tag_cloud( $args = '' ) {
	$defaults = array(
		'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,
		'format' => 'flat', 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC',
		'exclude' => '', 'include' => ''
	);
	$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );

	$tags = get_tags( array_merge($args, array('orderby' => 'count', 'order' => 'DESC')) ); // Always query top tags

	if ( empty($tags) )
		return;

	$return = dropdown_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args ); // Here's where those top tags get sorted according to $args
	if ( is_wp_error( $return ) )
		return false;
	else
		echo apply_filters( 'dropdown_tag_cloud', $return, $args );
}

function dropdown_generate_tag_cloud( $tags, $args = '' ) {
	global $wp_rewrite;
	$defaults = array(
		'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,
		'format' => 'flat', 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC'
	);
	$args = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );
	extract($args);

	if ( !$tags )
		return;
	$counts = $tag_links = array();
	foreach ( (array) $tags as $tag ) {
		$counts[$tag->name] = $tag->count;
		$tag_links[$tag->name] = get_tag_link( $tag->term_id );
		if ( is_wp_error( $tag_links[$tag->name] ) )
			return $tag_links[$tag->name];
		$tag_ids[$tag->name] = $tag->term_id;
	}

	$min_count = min($counts);
	$spread = max($counts) - $min_count;
	if ( $spread <= 0 )
		$spread = 1;
	$font_spread = $largest - $smallest;
	if ( $font_spread <= 0 )
		$font_spread = 1;
	$font_step = $font_spread / $spread;

	// SQL cannot save you; this is a second (potentially different) sort on a subset of data.
	if ( 'name' == $orderby )
		uksort($counts, 'strnatcasecmp');
	else
		asort($counts);

	if ( 'DESC' == $order )
		$counts = array_reverse( $counts, true );

	$a = array();

	$rel = ( is_object($wp_rewrite) && $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() ) ? ' rel="tag"' : '';

	foreach ( $counts as $tag => $count ) {
		$tag_id = $tag_ids[$tag];
		$tag_link = clean_url($tag_links[$tag]);
		$tag = str_replace(' ', '&nbsp;', wp_specialchars( $tag ));
		$a[] = "\t<option value='$tag_link'>$tag ($count)</option>";
	}

	switch ( $format ) :
	case 'array' :
		$return =& $a;
		break;
	case 'list' :
		$return = "<ul class='wp-tag-cloud'>\n\t<li>";
		$return .= join("</li>\n\t<li>", $a);
		$return .= "</li>\n</ul>\n";
		break;
	default :
		$return = join("\n", $a);
		break;
	endswitch;

	return apply_filters( 'dropdown_generate_tag_cloud', $return, $tags, $args );
}
?>

Now open the file where you want the list to be displayed and paste the following code:

<select name="tag-dropdown" onchange="document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;">
	<option value="#">Tags</option>
	<?php dropdown_tag_cloud('number=0&order=asc'); ?>
</select>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: WpHacks

Get Posts Published Between Two Particular Dates

Just before the loop starts, paste the following code. Change the dates on line 3 according to your needs.

<?php
  function filter_where($where = '') {
        $where .= " AND post_date >= '2009-05-01' AND post_date <= '2009-05-15'";
    return $where;
  }
add_filter('posts_where', 'filter_where');
query_posts($query_string);
?>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: Codex

Get Posts With A Specific Custom Field & Value

Add the query_posts() function just before the Loop. Change the meta_key and meta_value accordingly. The example shown below will get posts with custom field “review_type” with value “movie”.

<?php query_posts('meta_key=review_type&meta_value=movie');  ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
...
...

Via: WpRecipes Credits: John Kolbert

Get Latest Sticky Posts

Paste the following code before the loop. This code will retrieve the 5 most recent sticky posts. To change the number of retrieved posts, just change the 5 by the desired value on line 4.

<?php
	$sticky = get_option('sticky_posts');
	rsort( $sticky );
	$sticky = array_slice( $sticky, 0, 5);
        query_posts( array( 'post__in' => $sticky, 'caller_get_posts' => 1 ) );
?>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: Justin Tadlock

Automatically Insert Content In Your Feeds

In your theme folder, functions.php file, paste the following code. This code will automatically insert the content after each post in your RSS feeds. Hence you can use this code to insert ads or promotional text.

function insertFootNote($content) {
        if(!is_feed() && !is_home()) {
                $content.= "<h4>Enjoyed this article?</h4>";
                $content.= "<p>Subscribe to our <a href='#'>RSS feed</a></p>";
        }
        return $content;
}
add_filter ('the_content', 'insertFootNote');

Via: WpRecipes Credits: Cédric Bousmane

Display The Most Commented Posts

Just paste the following code in your template file where you want to display the most commented posts (eg. sidebar.php). To change the number of displayed posts, simply change the 5 on line 3.

<h2>Popular Posts</h2>
<ul>
<?php $result = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5");
foreach ($result as $post) {
setup_postdata($post);
$postid = $post->ID;
$title = $post->post_title;
$commentcount = $post->comment_count;
if ($commentcount != 0) { ?>

<li><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($postid); ?>" title="<?php echo $title ?>">
<?php echo $title ?></a> {<?php echo $commentcount ?>}</li>
<?php } } ?>

</ul>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: ProBlogDesign

Display Most Commented Posts In 2008

<h2>Most commented posts from 2008</h2>
<ul>
<?php
$result = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title, post_date FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_date BETWEEN '2008-01-01' AND '2008-12-31' ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 10");

foreach ($result as $topten) {
    $postid = $topten->ID;
    $title = $topten->post_title;
    $commentcount = $topten->comment_count;
    if ($commentcount != 0) {
    ?>
         <li><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($postid); ?>"><?php echo $title ?></a></li>

    <?php }
}
?>
</ul>

Via: WpRecipes

Display Related Posts Based On Post Tags

This code will display related posts based on the current post tag(s). It must be pasted within the loop.

<?php
//for use in the loop, list 5 post titles related to first tag on current post
$tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
if ($tags) {
  echo 'Related Posts';
  $first_tag = $tags[0]->term_id;
  $args=array(
    'tag__in' => array($first_tag),
    'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
    'showposts'=>5,
    'caller_get_posts'=>1
   );
  $my_query = new WP_Query($args);
  if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
    while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>

      <p><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></p>
      <?php
    endwhile;
  }
}
?>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: MichaelH

Display The Number Of Search Results

Open search.php, copy and paste the following code.

<h2 class="pagetitle">Search Results for <?php /* Search Count */ $allsearch = &new WP_Query("s=$s&showposts=-1"); $key = wp_specialchars($s, 1); $count = $allsearch->post_count; _e(''); _e('<span class="search-terms">'); echo $key; _e('</span>'); _e(' — '); echo $count . ' '; _e('articles'); wp_reset_query(); ?></h2>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: ProBlogDesign

Display The Comment Page Number In The <Title> Tag

Open the header.php file. Paste the following code in between the <title> tag.

<?php if ( $cpage < 2 ) {}
else { echo (' - comment page '); echo ($cpage);}
?>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: Malcolm Coles

Display The Future Posts

The following code will display 10 future posts.

	<p>Future events</p>
	<?php query_posts('showposts=10&post_status=future'); ?>
	<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

			<p><?php the_title(); ?> <?php the_time('j. F Y'); ?></p>

	<?php endwhile; else: ?><p>No future posts.</p><?php endif; ?>

Via: WpRecipes

Randomize Posts Order

To randomize posts order, just add the following code before the Loop.

query_posts('orderby=rand');
//the Loop here...

Via: WpRecipes

Display Word Count Of The Post

Open single.php and paste the following code where you want to display the word count.

<?php function count_words($str){
     $words = 0;
     $str = eregi_replace(" +", " ", $str);
     $array = explode(" ", $str);
     for($i=0;$i < count($array);$i++)
 	 {
         if (eregi("[0-9A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ]", $array[$i]))
             $words++;
     }
     return $words;
 }?>

 Word count: <?php echo count_words($post->post_content); ?>

Via: WpRecipes

Fetch RSS Feeds

To display RSS feeds, you can use the WordPress built-in RSS parser. To do so, include the rss.php file, and then use its wp_rss() function.

<?php include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php');
wp_rss('http://feeds2.feedburner.com/WebDesignerWall', 5); ?>

Via: WpRecipes

Highlight Searched Text In Search Results

Open search.php file and find the the_title() function. Replace it with the following:

echo $title;

Now, just before the modified line, add this code:

<?php
	$title 	= get_the_title();
	$keys= explode(" ",$s);
	$title 	= preg_replace('/('.implode('|', $keys) .')/iu',
		'<strong class="search-excerpt">\0</strong>',
		$title);
?>

Then open the style.css file. Add the following line to it:

strong.search-excerpt { background: yellow; }

Via: WpRecipes Credits: Joost de Valk

Display A Greeting Message On A Specific Date (PHP)

The following code will dispaly a greeting message only on Christmas day.

<?php
if ((date('m') == 12) && (date('d') == 25)) { ?>
    <h2>Merry Christmas!</h2>
<?php } ?>

Via: WpRecipes

Automatically Create A TinyURL For Each Post

Open the functions.php file and paste the following code:

function getTinyUrl($url) {
    $tinyurl = file_get_contents("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=".$url);
    return $tinyurl;
}

In the single.php file, paste the following within the loop where you want to display the TinyURL:

<?php
$turl = getTinyUrl(get_permalink($post->ID));
echo 'Tiny Url for this post: <a href="'.$turl.'">'.$turl.'</a>'
?>

Via: WpRecipes

Exclude Categories From Search

Open the search.php file in your theme folder, paste the following code before the Loop. The code will exclude categories with ID 1, 2, 3 in the search results.

<?php if( is_search() )  :
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts("s=$s&paged=$paged&cat=-1,-2,-3");
endif; ?>

//the Loop here...

Via: WpRecipes

Exclude Categories From RSS

Open the functions.php file from your theme. If your theme doesn’t have a functions.php file, create one. Paste the following code in it:

<?php function myFilter($query) {
    if ($query->is_feed) {
        $query->set('cat','-5'); //Don't forget to change the category ID =^o^=
    }
return $query;
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts','myFilter');
?>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: Scott Jangro

Using Shortcodes

Open the functions.php file, paste the following code.

<?php function wprecipes() {
    return 'Have you checked out WpRecipes today?';
}

add_shortcode('wpr', 'wprecipes');
?>

You’re now able to use the wpr shortcode. To do so, paste the following line of code on the editor (in HTML mode) while writing a post:

[wpr]

This short code will output the “Have you checked out WpRecipes today?” message.

Via: WpRecipes Source: Codex

Display The Number Of Your Twitter Followers

Paste the code anywhere you want to display the Twitter follower count. Replace “YourUserID” with your Twitter account in last line.

<?php function string_getInsertedString($long_string,$short_string,$is_html=false){
  if($short_string>=strlen($long_string))return false;
  $insertion_length=strlen($long_string)-strlen($short_string);
  for($i=0;$i<strlen($short_string);++$i){
    if($long_string[$i]!=$short_string[$i])break;
  }
  $inserted_string=substr($long_string,$i,$insertion_length);
  if($is_html && $inserted_string[$insertion_length-1]=='<'){
    $inserted_string='<'.substr($inserted_string,0,$insertion_length-1);
  }
  return $inserted_string;
}

function DOMElement_getOuterHTML($document,$element){
  $html=$document->saveHTML();
  $element->parentNode->removeChild($element);
  $html2=$document->saveHTML();
  return string_getInsertedString($html,$html2,true);
}

function getFollowers($username){
  $x = file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/".$username);
  $doc = new DomDocument;
  @$doc->loadHTML($x);
  $ele = $doc->getElementById('follower_count');
  $innerHTML=preg_replace('/^<[^>]*>(.*)<[^>]*>$/',"\\1",DOMElement_getOuterHTML($doc,$ele));
  return $innerHTML;
}
?>

<?php echo getFollowers("YourUserID")." followers"; ?>

Via: WpRecipes

Display FeedBurner Subscriber Count In Text

<?php
	$fburl="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feed-id";
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $fburl);
	$stored = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	$grid = new SimpleXMLElement($stored);
	$rsscount = $grid->feed->entry['circulation'];
	echo $rsscount;
?>

Via: WpRecipes

Display The Latest Twitter Entry

Just paste this code in the template file (eg. sidebar.php) where you want to display the latest tweet.

<?php

// Your twitter username.
$username = "TwitterUsername";

$prefix = "<h2>My last Tweet</h2>";

$suffix = "";

$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1";

function parse_feed($feed) {
    $stepOne = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);
    $stepTwo = explode("</content>", $stepOne[1]);
    $tweet = $stepTwo[0];
    $tweet = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $tweet);
    $tweet = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $tweet);
    return $tweet;
}

$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
echo stripslashes($prefix) . parse_feed($twitterFeed) . stripslashes($suffix);
?>

Via: WpRecipes Credits: Ryan Barr

Social Buttons

Facebook Share Button

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?php the_permalink();?>&t=<?php the_title(); ?>">Share on Facebook</a>

Digg it

<a href="http://www.digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink();?>">Digg It</a>

Stumble upon it

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>">Stumble upon it</a>

Add to delicious

<a href="http://delicious.com/post?url=<?php the_permalink();?>&title=<?php the_title();?>">Add to delicious</a>

Share on technorati

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=<?php the_permalink();?>">Share on technorati</a>

Tweet this

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>">Tweet this</a>

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1. Login to your server using SSH then create an updated .repo file (you need to be root user to do this)

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/centos-test.repo

2. Paste the following lines in it:

[c5-testing]
name=CentOS-5 Testing
baseurl=http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://dev.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-testing

3. Run a yum update:

yum update php

That’s it! Your PHP installation should be updated in about 5 seconds! :)

BUT! There are known issues on this, specifically for Zend Optimizer, mcrypt and mhash PHP modules because they are the for the older version of PHP. I fixed the Zend Optimizer issue by re-installing the package itself by yum:

wget -q -O - http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic.sh | sh
yum install  php-zend-optimizer

For the mcrypt and mhash issues, I just installed updated rpm packaged for these:

wget -c ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/centos/5.4/extras/i386/RPMS/php-mcrypt-5.1.6-15.el5.centos.1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh --nodeps php-mhash-5.2.5-7.i386.rpm
wget -c ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/yum.trixbox.org/centos/5/RPMS/php-mhash-5.2.5-7.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh --nodeps php-mcrypt-5.1.6-15.el5.centos.1.i386.rpm

Let me know if this helps or what issues you came across.

References:

http://www.freshblurbs.com/install-php-5-2-centos-5-2-using-yum

http://www.atomicorp.com/wiki/index.php/PHP

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1 – Disable Re-Building of Theme Registry

When a Drupal implementation is under development, themers and/or developers will often enable an option that forces Drupal to rebuild the theme registry on every page load. This registry tells Drupal what template files and overrides exist in the theme’s directory. This is a very costly operation and would cause noticeable slow down on any production website. It is important to disable this option upon going live. Under Administer > Appearance choose the Configure option for your theme and scroll to the bottom of the page. Make sure the option named “Rebuild theme registry on every page.” is disabled.

2 – Enable Page and Block Cache

Another simple option to enable is Drupal’s caching engine (Administer > Configuration > Performance). When enabled, Drupal will render the page and associated blocks once, and then save that result in the database. This can drastically reduce the number of database calls run on a page since the results are pre-rendered.

A point to consider about caching is that the more interactive the site is, the less effective the cache may be. Especially if complex permissions are at play, Drupal won’t be able to effectively cache since most of the page content may change depending on the permissions of the currently logged in user.

Drupal’s caching engine is most effective for anonymous visitors – if your site is mostly “read only” and doesn’t have visitors logging in, caching can make a dramatic improvement in site load speed.

3 – Increase Cache Lifetime

An option for some sites may be to increase the cache lifetime. This determines how long Drupal will hold onto a cached result before it will re-generate the page. If you have frequently changing content, you may want to set the cache lifetime to only 5 minutes, but if your content doesn’t change often, an acceptable value may be several hours.

On high-traffic sites, the less often Drupal has to re-generate pages, the better.

4 – Optimize JavaScript and CSS Files

Also in the Performance settings is an option to optimize both JavaScript and CSS files. When enabled, Drupal will consolidate all CSS and JS files included on each page into a single file, and compress the code by removing whitespace. This will reduce the overall file size and improve page load speeds.

5 – Disable Un-used Modules

Due to the staggering array of available contrib modules listed on Drupal.org, it’s common to download and install dozens of modules to test out and see if they meet your site’s needs. In the process of doing this, it’s easy to forget to uninstall the modules you don’t end up using. Additionally, the default install of Drupal comes with a minimum number of modules pre-enabled. Again, if your site isn’t using it, there’s no reason to keep it enabled.

Drupal will fire callbacks for all enabled modules which may come with their own database queries. Be sure to take the time to clean out your enabled modules list before going live with a site.

6 – Configure Cron to Run

One thing that’s easy to overlook is setting up Drupal’s cron tasks to run. Most web hosts provide a way to configure “scheduled tasks” or “cron jobs” in the hosting panel. Drupal’s cron.php fires updates for RSS aggregators, launches the search indexer, and any tasks defined in installed modules. In addition, it will perform some basic maintenance tasks like deleting temporary files and clearing logs.

The Drupal installation guide covers cron in detail with several methods for configuring it.

7 – Disable CCK Content Permissions

While this tip technically falls under tip 5, I figure it’s important enough to be explicitly outlined. The CCK module comes with several sub-modules. One of which is “Content Permissions”. This enables site administrators to set permissions on a per-field basis. Unless your site absolutely needs per-field permissions, this is a no-brainer to disable.

The less permission checks your site has to run the better!

8 – Disable Database Logging

Again, another one that technically falls under tip 5, but I feel is especially important is disabling the database logging module. This module will log a wide variety of actions performed on the site to the database. If you’re the only administrator, this module’s usefulness is greatly reduced and should be turned off. Alternatively, you can enable the syslog module which ships with core instead. This will write the more technical log entries to the server’s standard log on the file system and save the database queries.

9 – Use a Third Party Comment System

This one isn’t necessarily Drupal specific, but an easy way to off-load quite a bit of processing on a popular site. Since Drupal’s caching system is far more effective when only serving to anonymous users, if the only reason you have user registration enabled is to allow them to write comments, you may consider off-loading that task to a free third party service like Intense Debate or Disqus. A small clip of javascript is all you need to include into your template (or include it via a block), to embed a robust comment system into your site. Also, if your visitors read other sites that use Intense Debate or Disqus and already have an account (or use OpenID), they’ll already have an account to comment on your site.

As of this writing, there is a published module to add Disqus support as well.

Source: http://fenix-solutions.com/blog/2009/12/09/tips-for-improving-drupal-performance/

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Lately I’ve been working on a Drupal project, and one aspect in our priority list is the user-friendliness for the people who will submit their contents to the site. A good solution would be to divide the submission form into different steps so that the form page would not be so crowded. Thanks to David Newker for his solution on how to create muliple step forms using CCK Fieldgroups in Drupal. Here are the instructions I followed:

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I was hooked up with Last.fm before when it was still a free mp3 music streaming site since I needed some get-up music to give a little nudge on that late night graveyard web designing schedule. But then they started to charge monthly fees and that is totally a killer to my free music lifestyle.

Then came GrooveShark.com, and I think its absolutely the best music streaming site ever! Why?

If you’re a sucker for free music, do check it out! Grooveshark.com

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To give an overview of our setup, we have a few (like 20 ?) websites hosted on the GoDaddy server and its occasionally bugging down. One optimization I did was to kill some processes that are not needed most of the time which takes up a few MBs of RAM from the server.

So here is the solution that I implemented on the said VPS as suggested by Colin McNamara – basically to stop the Apache Tomcat and Godaddy Simple Control Panel, which are used very rarely. But of course, if you need to use the Simple Control Panel, you can always start it up again then turn it off when you are done.

Here are the steps:

If you are on Windows use the following procedure to get shell access to your GoDaddy VDS -

• you will want to download a ssh client called putty – Download Here
• Copy this file to your desktop, double click putty.exe , and you should see something like this -

• In the host name field I have www.yourdomain.com . replace yourdomainwith your domain name.
• Click on the open button on the bottom right, and a shell should pop up, along with a warning that looks like this (you can click OK to the warning)

• Now skip past the linux section

If you are running Linux or Unix start here -

• Open up a command line terminal
• ssh using your godaddy simple control panel username example -

ssh your-godaddy-control-panel-username@www.yourdomain.com

• If this is your first time connecting to this server, you will be prompted to accept an unkown ssh key into known_hosts, choose yes to accept

Both Windows, Linux and Unix Continue Here –

• Enter your the password you use to access your GoDaddy Simple Control Panel Interface
• You will be presented with what looks like a DOS window, this is called a secure shell terminal. Type in the username you use to access your Godaddy Simple Control Panel and then hit enter

• Now type in the password that you use to access your Simple Control Panel Interface and hit enter

• Congratulations, if you see the window below you are now shelled into your virtual dedicated server.

Change to the Root user

• Now that you are shelled into a Linux device you need to escalate your privileges to get administrator level access. In the Unix world this user is known as Root. You can change to this user, and get full system privileges by using the following command.

su – root

• You will be presented with a password prompt, enter in the same password that you have used to log into your Simple Control Panel Interface
• You are now root, be careful with what command you enter under this user, as you can do some damage if you are careless

Clean out your servers memory

• Most recent Redhat direvatives (including Centos) utilize a tool called yum to add and remove packages. This is also true with your linux servers at GoDaddy.
• you need to install a tool called memhog, it is part of a package called numactl that is normally used to assign specific process’s to specific cpu’s in a multi-core system. We will be using it today to fix GoDaddy’s memory hogging application

yum install numactl

• choose yes to all the prompts, and numactl will automatically be downloaded and installed on your server

Stop GoDaddy Simple Control Panel, and Tomcat, and tell them not to start automatically when your server restarts.

• Tomcat is a special type of webserver for Java based applications. Godaddy uses it to run their control panel interface. 99.99999 percent of users will not need to use Tomcat. If you do need to use Tomcat then you are a technical user and will know what to do.
• In Linux, server applications are called daemons. The are executed by init scripts. We will use these scripts to turn off these server applications
• Turn off the TurboPanel daemon ( this is the process that runs your simple control panel web interface

/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop

• Next we need to turn off Tomcat

/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop

• Now that we have these services turned off, we need to make sure that they don’t come back when we reboot the server. We can do this by using the chkconfig command.
• Stop the Simple Control Panel Interface from starting automatically by executing the following command

chkconfig turbopanel off

• Stop the Tomcat server from starting automatically by executing the following command

chkconfig tomcat55 off

Clean the mess GoDaddy made of your servers memory

• A couple steps back we installed numactl. The executable we wanted out of this package is memhog. Issue the following command to take your memory back. This command will overwrite 200 megabytes of your memory, allowing the rest of your applications to get access to that memory.

memhog 200m

• This will Clear out the memory that GoDaddy’s application took over, and allow the rest of your daemons to run fine.

Great, my server is running better now. But I want to use my Simple Control Panel Interface. How do I do that?

• Easy, all you need to do is temporarily start the turbopanel daemon. When you are done making changes, you can turn it off again

/etc/init.d/tomcat55 start

/etc/init.d/turbopanel start

• When you are done, don’t forget to turn it off

/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop

/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop

********************************

NOTE: if you cannot locate chckconfig, try adding /sbin, like:

/sbin/chkconfig turbopanel off (and)
/sbin/chkconfig tomcat55 off

I hope this solution would work for you too!

Source: Why GoDaddy Linux Virtual Dedicated Hosting Sucks & How to Fix It

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By default Flash content in a web page will appear on top of other elements on the page, including floating menus, inline popups etc. This can be pretty annoying if you have a flyout menu on your page and it goes behind the Flash video and this post shows how simple it is to fix. This works in all browsers inclding IE6+

The first screenshot below shows the default behaviour where the floating menu appears behind the Vimeo Flash video:

The second screenshot below shows the desired behavioiur where the floating menu appears on top of the video:

The following <param> should be added within the <object>:

<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />

And the following should be added into the <embed> tag:

wmode="transparent"

The end result will be something along these lines:

<object width="400" height="300">
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
  <param value="true" name="allowfullscreen" />
  <param value="always" name="allowscriptaccess" />
  <param name="movie" value="..." />
  <embed width="400" height="300" allowscriptaccess="always"
    allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    src="..." wmode="transparent">
  </embed>
</object>

Now floating content will appear above the video.

Source: ElectricToolbox.com

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So I’m setting it up for our company in a VPS hosting, and it requires the PHP installation to be compiled with MCRYPT package. Specifically, this is needed for the manual credit card processing module. And it seems that the Godaddy VPS support is NOT willing to support (ironic) so I had to deal with the challenge myself. I found this instructions from NotesBit.com on how to recompile PHP with MCRYPT support. Here are the steps I followed – it was actually easier than I thought:

1. Install libmcrypt (2.5.x or better) http://mcrypt.hellug.gr/lib/index.html

-download and uncompress: tar z -xvf xxx.tar.gz
-cd into libmcrypt dir and type: ./configure
-when configure is done type: make
-when make is done type: make install

2. Add the library dir to /etc/ld.so.conf

-edit /etc/ld.so.conf and add: /usr/local/lib
-save file and then type the command: ldconfig

3. Install mcrypt & mhash (enter these commands)

yum install mcrypt*
yum install mhash*

4. Enable support for php. requires php-mcrypt and php-mhash packages (enter these commands):

yum install php-mcrypt*
yum install php-mhash*

5. Restart Apache

/sbin/service httpd restart

The VPS we are using is from Godaddy. Latest Apache and PHP versions. Let me know if this works for you!

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