WordPress 2.5 adds tons of new features, but some disappeared as well. One of them is gzip compression that you could enable/disable from the control panel. On the other hand 2.5 introduced “a few” new features, among them a secret key for “salting password” and the possibility to increase memory allocated to PHP.

I’ve just finished tweaking my new WordPress 2.5 installation and thought I’d share a few pointers with the rest of you.

The secret key

Released with Version 2.5, this new, optional entry, called SECRET_KEY, causes better encryption of user passwords in the database. The secret key is a unique phrase.

define('SECRET_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); // Change this to a unique phrase.

More allocated memory

Also released with Version 2.5, the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT option allows you to specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP. This setting may be necessary in the event you receive a message such as “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted”.

By default WP is allocating (trying to - depends on host) 32MB, you can increase this amount by adding e.g.

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64MB');

in the wp-settings.php file in your WP root directory.

Activate Cache

Similar to above you can activate page caching;

define('WP_CACHE', true);

If the WP_CACHE setting is set to true, the WP developers states that it will include the wp-content/advanced-cache.php script, when executing wp-settings.php. I for one does not see how this is done as I’m missing the included file, so if you know how this works please let me know!

GZip Compression

I believe a bug/malfunction in respect to the visual editor caused the removal of the gzip feature from the latest version. However a plugin is available that will re-enable this feature and save precious bandwidth. It simply takes advantage of PHP’s ob_gzhandler function.

I’d love to hear about more tweaks and rabbits, please feel free to share!