related posts
Here is the problem with using Wp Cache and YARPP together
Immediately after using WP Cache and YARPP together, I spotted a problem. Its pretty inevitable. Say you make a post about a topic x, the related posts in this post will come up well, but the new post won’t show up in old posts that have been cached. This is a quick post just pointing out the problem, I don’t think there is a solution to this. Using WP Cache speeds up the wordpress blog but plugins don’t run I guess.
Well there is a solution, but its not really that easy. Clear the cache, disable WP Cache, make a program or a macro to browse through your entire blog and again activate WP Cache and cache the blog. If you do this from time to time them the websites related posts will be perfect. Keep the match threshold high for a better match result. By two to three posts I will search for a program that will browse through your entire website or I will make one like that.
WP Cache and YARPP working fine together
Just installed Wp Cache as Mitcho (the maker of YARPP) told me in a blog. Both WP Cache and Yarpp are working fine together.
YARPP does fulltext searches every time a page load takes place. Adding WP Cache will reduce that as the pages are cached. Although I am not sure if there will be real time display of the related posts. This means that a change might not appear in other posts if a post related to it is added but I have not confirmed this yet. I will do that after posting this.
Many people now are concerned that the page load time and server load will increase. I have not observed any thing like that happeing now but Fulltext Searches in MySQL tables every time a page loads can put some additional server load, although the maker of the plugin claims that this is not true.
There was a similar plugin in a forum software called vBulletin, it was called as “Similar Threads”. vBulletin is a stable and a famous forum software and after installing this plugin, people started facing some errors. But that was definetly NOT the case with YARPP, for standard human eye, like mine, every thing looked normal and page load time was approximately the same, although I didn’t check the actual time, my spidey sense told me that the page load time was same 
.
I have also asked the maker of this plugin when he will be releasing the next version of his plugin. There are some bug fixes that are coming up in it. This is the good thing about open source, that when someone finds a bug, he can also give the solution. I didn’t find any yet, but I wil glad to help if I find one. Many times it has happened that a fatal problem has been averted due to open source nature of a software. But some times open source also affects other companies.
Replacing the related posts plugin in Wordpress
Hey,
I am using a related posts plugin which works only using tags. It is good and has worked well but it does not show the excerpt of a post and that is pretty important for the visitors because they’ll get to see a small insight on the post. So I saw a new plugin called as Yet another related posts plugin. There are a lot of features in it but the major thing that I liked was the Match Threshold feature. You can set how strict the matching patter should be. Higher the match threshold more accurate the relativity factor will be, but less posts might be shown.
I tried this plugin on my video website and the match was pretty good. The default match threshold was 5 which was a bit too high for my site, so I reduced the match threshold to two and accurate results were being shown.
A fellow blogger pointed out some possible errors like overload to the CPU but it was all fine. The script is compatible with the latest version of wordpress, that is wordpress 2.6 (as on August 1st 2008). Wordpress 2.7 is being developed now, so we should wait and watch if it works with that.
Coming back to Yet another related posts plugin, it has features like disabling specific categories that are being included and you can set the importance given to the title and body of the post.
Support is also being given, so if someone finds a security hole in it, it can be immediately fixed. Wordpress 2.3 is an example of failed security, there were so many blogs that were affected. I use a software which can update Wordpress, so as soon as the patch was released, I updated it.
Related posts is good for both SEO and for your visitors to browse.
Take Care, Have Fun
KP