[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

Thanks @Bowe
Re-setting up the Forum installation did the trick. I was hesitant to try it because I didn’t want to make thing worse.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

That looks really good – have you tried it yet? Any conflicts?

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

Thanks.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

Whatever you do is going to need some re-working after a while. bbpress is getting rebuilt from the ground up, including it’s integration with buddypress.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

Just switched that off. Musta it it by mistake in the cloudflare dashboard. Thanks @mercime

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

Ok guys, I’ve implemented some changes and some of your suggestions. I think it’s getting a bit better. We also just added in a a facebook wall type feature where logged-in users can post. Here’s a screenshot of what members see:

http://housingstorm.com/files/2011/04/4-3-2011-8-15-59-PM.png

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

@pcwriter,

Thanks for that. white-space:normal; helps with my x-axis fields and it works perfectly.

Now, however, I am trying to limit the height of my “about me” field. I’m using max-height:400px; but white-space causes the browsers to ignore the limit. What I really want is: white-space:normal; max-height: 400px; overflow-y:auto; but firefox is the only one that shows it properly. The others all revert to scroll bars, even safari.

Ugh.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

Nice call on the map. Moved it up.

I’m not sure hot to avoid scroll bars IF we are going to automatically show the profile info in the right sidebar. I’ve got overflow:auto; in my css and can’t figure out another way to prevent long profile field links from bleeding over into the main content. Firefox nicely applied a word-wrap and split links to two lines, but the other browsers bled over. Anyone know the css for text-wrapping that would work?

I see what you mean about the blog sidebar. For us, that sidebar is consistent throughout the site and shows YOUR info. Arguments each way for sure.

Thanks!

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

@mercime
Thanks a ton for the feedback, as always. I added a few more pixels to the middle – it’s a tough balance!

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

@pisanojm

What configuration of sites do you have with MaxCDN? I’ve heard there are some problems with multi-site blog farms where sub-blog uploads aren’t cached correctly.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

Bowe, have you looked at Cloudflare? Curious what your take would be…

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

@bowe
Do you know if there is any way to use MaxCDN without W3TC?

I use multiple databases and therefore can’t use W3TC…

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

It’s not directly a Buddypress issue. It’s a plugin and hack issue. Where most standard wordpress blogs may only have the need for a few plugins, complex Buddypress communities have lots of plugins.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

“This page has 33 external Javascript scripts. Try combining them into one.
This page has 21 external stylesheets. Try combining them into one.”

This is my problem and I’m guessing the problem that a lot of us are having. Cloudflare will load the CSS and JS, but there are still so many that it slows sites down.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

The plugins seem to be the poison here. Many include their own separate CSS and JS files. Combining seems impractical because of upgrades, but a script to load plugin files from separate domains would be awesome.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

@imjscn No, I haven’t tried that. Does it help?

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 6 months ago]

If this helps anyone…I have a multisite blog farm with buddypress and have a solution that seems to work pretty well. I can’ use W3TC because I have multiple databases.

I use memcached and batcache which speeds up the main site and all sub-blogs tremendously for non-logged in users. Batcache only applies to visitors – which protects nicely against traffic and load spikes from Digg, etc. I have a browser where I have never actually logged-in to my site that I use to test and pages routinely load in under 1 second.

But, for members, batcache doesn’t help. I’m using widget cache and gravatar caching plugins, as well as Cloudflare as a CDN. This combination works well and my page load times are tolerable but not great. PageSpeed generally from 75-85 and YSlow from 66-76 (though YSlow doens’t recognize Cloudflare yet so I think they are docking points unnecessarily).

The biggest drag on my load times – and I think for all of us BP users – is the time it takes to load all of the separate JS and CSS scripts. Of got about 30 of each. Tis the price we pay for using child themes and lots of plugins. And minifying doesn’t work, it just makes the site go screwey.

I would love to see expert advice or a tutorial for how to enable parallel loading of CSS and JS from different domains. Or, maybe there is a way to copy all of the JS files into one file. Or, a way to pick-and-choose which JS files to load in the footer (I can’t simply put them all there because some functions break).

Hope this is helpful.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

Makes sense. Sounds like we’re another 6-12 months off then. Ugh.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

I’m guessing it’s a W3TC issue with Cloudflare. I’m not using W3TC and have no problems with joining groups, etc.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

@pisanojm
I’ve been testing group joining and haven’t seen any problems. But, nothing ever actually is this simple…let us know if you find anything.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

CDN

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

I did install the plugin, but am afraid to hit the “Database Optimize” button because we use multiple databases.

And yes, there is a way to block specific bots and ip addresses

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

Try cloudflare

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/third-party-components-plugins/forum/topic/is-anyone-using-cloudflare/

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

I set up cloudflare and have to say that I am pretty impressed so far. It took a couple of extra days because I use an SSL, but set up was pretty darn simple.

In terms of speed, Page Speed has improved greatly. My pages used to range from a 64-70 and now I’m seeing 76-88.

YSlow is sporadic – sometimes a better grade, sometimes not. Supposedly, YSlow does not yet categorize Cloudflare as a CDN, but they are in the process of changing that in an upcoming release. So, YSlow may be incorrectly punishing you for not using a CDN when you actually are.

I can say my site feels faster.

As far as details, my Cloudfare dashboard reports that it has “saved” about 40% of bandwidth and about 75% of my total requests. And just in the last 6 hours, it has protected my site from 77 unique threats. (on low security settings).

The minify settings didn’t work for me, but other than that, I didn’t have any problems.

For what it is worth, I don’t use W3TC (because we have multiple databases) and Cloudflare only works on the main domain, not sub-domains. For us, that is fine because we use batcache to protect against traffic spikes. Our only real need was to speed up the main domain, which cloudflare seems to be doing nicely.

[@gregfielding Participant 15 years, 7 months ago]

Been looking into rackspace Cloud Sites. Unfortunately, they don’t support wildcards & subdomains.