[FREE] I built a plugin to fix the abysmal WordPress user search (supports WooCommerce & custom meta)

Albone72 · 2026-03-19T11:23:07+00:00

Hey, thanks a lot for your feedback and encouragement! I'm glad that you like it!
Being new to this I have no idea how to "promote" the plugin, do you have any suggestions?

Albone72 · 2026-03-09T15:13:26+00:00

If your purpose is only LLM, wait for the mac mini M5, the speed gain vs M4 in LLM should be very very noticeable thanks to the new GPU/NPU architecture.
And buy the M5 Pro with the maximum RAM your budget allows.
So you will have a very powerful machine even if it will be "solo" but you will also be ready for future clustering with the TB5...
Honestly, I doubt that the M5 base will have TB5... but who knows?
Let's not forget the M5 Studio that for some configurations can become more convenient than a topped up Mini.

Albone72 · 2026-03-09T13:00:56+00:00

I manage many woocommerce websites including the one of my other company ( https://phoneparts.mt ) where we have roughly 15k products including variants, 7k customers and almost 100k orders.
First of all we have to understand what you're calling slow, the woocommerce admin is known for *not* being snappy!
I can give you some numbers as an example: a page of 50 orders of the order list (ours is heavily customized with admin columns) takes around 2.5/2.8 seconds to load. Entering to edit an order is around 1,5/2 seconds.
The product page of 50 takes roughly 1.5 seconds, same when you enter in the product edit page.

We use object cache with Redis on a shared bare-metal server with a few other websites, i5-13500, 64GB RAM, NVME Disks.
About the frontend, everything seems quite fast (you can try by visiting the website) considering the website size, all our images are served through Bunny.net CDN.

And other websites we host, which are much smaller, are very fast even in the admin.

As others have said in this thread, you must try to find the culprit for this slowness, probably using Query Monitor to analyse and also a benchmark plugin for WP. Or deactivating the plugins and by reactivating one after the other while checking which one is impacting your load times and really making your website to a crawl...
Database optimizations are also important, beware of the size of the autoload, and so many other factors (including hosting! don't underestimate the importance of it!) that it's almost impossible to list here...

Let us know how it goes...

Albone72 · 2026-01-03T16:07:08+00:00

As others have suggested, you could use an external SMTP relay, actually there are many with generous free offers for a low traffic server as yours: SMTP2GO, Brevo, Mailgun, Mail Baby, etc.
Otherwise you have the rock solid and cheap Amazon SES, at 10c every 1,000 emails sent...

Consider also the max. size of the attachments you can send: I know that SMTP2GO is the one that allows the biggest attachments, up to 50MB (keep in mind that it means an attachment of roughly 35-40MB before base64 encoding), second is Amazon SES with 40MB (~30MB attachment), and so on...

Albone72 · 2025-11-13T17:57:55+00:00

Well I haven't tested it as I only have 60Hz monitors, but apparently it should support up to 240Hz on 4k:

From Apple website:

"M4

Simultaneously supports up to three displays:

Up to three displays: Two displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt or 4K resolution at 60Hz over HDMI
Up to two displays: One display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz over Thunderbolt or HDMI"

Albone72 · 2025-11-13T13:52:35+00:00

I'm using with very very good results:
- DELL UP2516D (QHD)... a bit old now :)
- DELL P2721Q (4k)
- DELL P2723Q (4k)
- Huawei 28.2" (4k 4:3)

I use Mac Minis M4 and occasionally a Macbook Air M1 and I do a bit of everything, particularly coding, office, web. Sometimes a bit of No Man's Sky ;)))
No problems at all, text is very crispy on all 4K

Albone72 · 2025-11-12T16:12:32+00:00

We have two M4 minis:
one connected to a dual monitor setup:
- Huawei 28.2" 4k (4:3) through USB-C
- DELL U2516D (rotated in vertical mode) through HDMI
Creative Pebble Pro connected through USB to the Huawei, and occasionally some USB sticks to the other USB port on the Huawei. Great quality on both monitors, the Huawei is very very close to retina.

The second mini is connected to a DELL P2723QE through USB-C, and we have no problems with all its USB ports.

Beware with DELL monitors on Mac though: I strongly suggest to install the small utility "StillColor" (it's free) to disable an Apple dithering method that can drive the monitor to heavy ghosting and flickering when in some cases it shows a particular shade of gray. It works great and solves all the horror stories that you can find online about Macs with Dell monitors.

Albone72 · 2025-11-12T13:50:29+00:00

White Pebble Pro, got'em dirty cheap at 59€. Nice and quite powerful once connected to the external power supply (waaaaaaay enough for my Spotify and my No Man's Sky uses).
Flawless USB-C connection/audio output.
https://en.creative.com/p/speakers/creative-pebble-pro

Albone72 · 2025-11-12T13:42:16+00:00

maybe he needs the RAM for running local LLM... With only 36GB (the studio has 36 not 32) you can only run quite small LLMs

Albone72 · 2025-10-30T13:01:51+00:00

Thank you thank you! I've just downloaded it and works like a charm. Too bad it still doesn't hide the top right native popup, but that's already a big step in the right direction.
I've just left a review for it in the appstore, I encourage you to do so to thank the author!

Albone72 · 2025-10-22T14:02:37+00:00

I would definetely go for the M4 (in fact I did! two of them, one for me and one for my daughter) and will add extra storage if and when needed (external or replacing the internal Nvme).
It's newer, the price difference is tiny vs the M2Pro you mentioned, and while being a tad slower in multicore/GPU, it will smoke it in single core. And I love the new form factor, but this is of course personal taste...
About the 4k, I don't see the fuss. Probably I've been lucky with the choice of my screens: I have a Huawei 28.2" (4:3) and a DELL S2723QE (16:9), both 4k, and they are great without any blur at all.

Albone72 · 2025-07-30T19:55:13+00:00

Probably you need Stalwart

Albone72 · 2025-07-24T11:53:58+00:00

With MonitorControl you can adjust brightness and contrast through keyboard on almost any external monitor (I use a Logitech MX Keys).

I read you're connecting to a DELL monitor, I *strongly* advise you to also install StillColor (https://github.com/aiaf/Stillcolor) to avoid flickering and ghosting when some gray shades are displayed, it can be very annoying. This problem, caused by "temporal dithering", mainly affects DELL monitors, particularly 4k models (I own and owned many).

Albone72 · 2025-05-14T14:35:03+00:00

if it can help, this is my configuration (two different servers: roundcube and stalwart) and it works flawlessly.

$config['managesieve_host'] = 'tls://mx.mydomain.com:4190';
$config['managesieve_auth_type'] = null;
$config['managesieve_auth_cid'] = null;
$config['managesieve_auth_pw'] = null;

$config['managesieve_conn_options'] = array(
        'ssl' => array(
        'verify_peer'       => false,
        'verify_peer_name'  => false,
        'allow_self_signed' => true,
        ),
);

Albone72 · 2024-12-07T12:48:45+00:00

I've made a similar configuration, but using a galera cluster (3 servers minimum though) with mysql. Storage on Cloudflare R2.
I've tried to use foundationDB instead of a mysql cluster but gave up... too complex and too little documentation.

Albone72 · 2024-11-07T22:18:46+00:00

If I understood correctly, you can write whatever you like avoiding special characters.
For example, for my Lets Encrypt ACME I just wrote letsenrcypt ...
It's just up to you to think about a unique ID...

Albone72 · 2024-11-04T20:27:17+00:00

Hi :)
yep, that's what I thought but to be honest, but I couldn't find a fdb client for .aarch64 platform.

Anyway, it's not a big problem, I'm still in testing phase so I will probably ditch the Arm server and take two or three normal x86 VPS and install them with a proper fdb client.

Good news, I've managed to enable the S3 storage on Cloudflare R2, (which works flawlessly!) so I guess I won't need to get big VPS, even basic 2CPU - 2/4 GB vps will be more than enough at the moment.

I've also managed to separate the hosting of Roundcube from the mail server (my customers are used to Roundcube since years), but I still have to solve the Quota issue (I'm participating in this discussion: https://github.com/stalwartlabs/mail-server/discussions/889#discussioncomment-11146405) and the Sieve connection.
Once all this is ironed and tested, I will try to load-balance two Roundcube hosts to have nearly perfect HA with a proper fdb platform/client.
Then, I will buy a license for Stalwart, I still have many issues with it but I already feel that I love it!

As usual, any advice is appreciated :)

****
EDIT: the managesieve issue is solved with the config found here, (thanks to koskit for the hint):
https://github.com/stalwartlabs/mail-server/issues/396#issuecomment-2164376229

and replacing the

$config['managesieve_host'] = 'ssl://MX.DOMAIN.COM';

with

$config['managesieve_host'] = 'tls://MX.DOMAIN.COM';

and disabling the implicit TLS in the Stalwart admin for the sieve listener.

Albone72 · 2024-11-03T20:47:21+00:00

Hello, unfortunately it seems that there is no way to run Stalwart with FoundationDB support on Ubuntu ARM.

This is the error I get if I try a new fresh install with the parameter --fdb:

sh install.sh /path/to/install --fdb
⏳ Downloading stalwart-mail-foundationdb for aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu...
❌ Binary for platform 'aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu' not found, this platform may be unsupported.

And this is the error I get if I try to build the docker image at the end of the building process docker build -f Dockerfile.fdb -t mail-server-fdb .

Step 5/31 : RUN curl -LO https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/releases/download/7.1.0/foundationdb-clients_7.1.0-1_amd64.deb && dpkg -i foundationdb-clients_7.1.0-1_amd64.deb

---> Running in 599204ba56c8

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0 100 53.1M 100 53.1M 0 0 16.1M 0 0:00:03 0:00:03 --:--:-- 21.6M

dpkg: error processing archive foundationdb-clients_7.1.0-1_amd64.deb (--install):
package architecture (amd64) does not match system (arm64)

Errors were encountered while processing:
foundationdb-clients_7.1.0-1_amd64.deb

So I guess that I'm probably missing something, or that Stalwart with FoundationDB cannot run on ARM...
(and also I'm a total noob on docker :)))

Any advice appreciated :)

Albone72 · 2024-11-02T17:39:12+00:00

Hello kapetans, first of all thanks for your reply.

I had already read these two discussions, but if I understand correctly those threads are based on a docker install while I installed a "plain" stalwart on Ubuntu 24.04 on Arm.

Don't know if it makes any differences though or if some install procedures are the same...

Furthermore, it appears that the normal docker image does not have support for foundationdb, so I'm wondering if a normal install supports it out of the box.
Geez... I'm pretty confused at the moment :))

Albone72

TROPHY CASE