Category: Blogging

The Most Important Tables When Rebuilding WordPress Database after a Recent Restore

Luke Johnson

If your domain host happens to crash and they go ahead and restore MySQL data that is a few days old, which database tables are likely to be most important to incrementally rebuilding your WordPress data?

Here’s what I discovered recently when I had to do that – these are the key tables for posts, media, comments, categories and tags:

wpu8_commentmeta.sql
wpu8_comments.sql
wpu8_postmeta.sql
wpu8_posts.sql
wpu8_terms.sql
wpu8_term_relationships.sql
wpu8_term_taxonomy

I found it quite easy to use the ARI Adminer plugin from WordPress for this. You could also use phpmyadmin or mySQL Workbench or similar:

Note to self: Remember to keep regular backups of your entire database (export via phpmyadmin or similar) and your content (FTP the /public_html/wp-content/uploads/ folder, or ZIP it via cPanel and then download)

Adding Lightbox Style Image Zoom to a WordPress.com Site

Luke Johnson

Guess what? WordPress.com is different to WordPress.org. WordPress.org is self hosted and you can do things like install plugins. WordPress.com is hosted by, uh, WordPress and you can’t install plugins. But the com version is very easy to set up and use and everything kinda just works.

But have you ever tried to get a Lightbox style ‘click to zoom‘ effect in WordPress.com? Its not immediately obvious, so after figuring it out I wanted to share it.

Firstly, go to your admin dashboard and tick the “Display all your gallery pictures in a cool mosaic” option.

wp1.png

Then, go to a post that has a plain image and start Editing it:

wp2.png

Position your cursor above the old image, then click Add Media.
Important: select Multiple Images here and you will get a Continue button:

wp3.png

In the next screen, click Edit and then use the X to remove any superfluous images, so you can just have one image in the ‘gallery’ if you like:

wp4.png

Set your Layout to Tiled Mosaic and Link to Attachment Page:

wp5.png

After inserting this gallery, you will see that there is a new Gallery object above the old image:

wp6.png

Now, you can delete the old image:

wp7.png

And Update the post:

wp8.png

Now, when you go to the post and click on the image, it will ‘zoom‘ to the image like this:

wp9.png

Here is a live WordPress.com page with the Carousel ‘lightbox‘ enabled:
Rooms to Polycurves – dynamoworks

And here is a link to some documentation:
Galleries and Slideshows — Support — WordPress.com