This one had me pulling my hair out for a few days. 

I was developing a client site in WordPress.  This site had 500 products and I chose to use Pages (instead of Posts) for the products, mostly because it allowed for a better URL structure, especially because there were product categories and sub-categories.  The URLs would look nice — www.site.com/category/sub-category/product-name/

Spoiler!
No time to read the entire post?  Just update your permalinks to /%year%/%postname%/ and that will fix the issue.  If your site is running too slowly to edit the permalinks, edit the database directly.  I use phpMyAdmin.  Search the wp_options table field name for %LIKE% = permalink and edit the value to /%year%/%postname%/

All was going well in development until we hit around 400 pages.  Then the site started running reaaaaaallllly slowly, and even timing out with a PHP fatal error like this:

Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /wp-includes/rewrite.php on line 835

WTF!  Could this be a plugin issue?  Or something wrong in our custom coded theme?  I didn’t think so… but what else could it be?  Surely WordPress can handle a website with thousands of pages, right?

My first thought was “there must be something wrong with the server.”  We did have a separate sub-domain for the site dev.site.com so that was a variable worth looking into.  Also, I had just started using a new VPS from Host Gator running Fast CGI (I usually run PHP as an Apache module) so that could also be the cause.  Fun, I get to figure this out! [sarcasm]

No luck with tweaking the server settings, although Host Gator support does get an A for effort.  And I even updated the php.ini memory_limit from 64M to 128M thinking that this could be the root of the issue.  Nuts.

Turns out that good ol’ permalinks is the cause of this problem.  For those that don’t know, permalinks allow you to customize the URL for your WordPress site.  Very useful for search engine optimization (SEO).  In classic obscure fashion that us web developers have grown used to (thanks to IE6 debugging and for the truly old skool, Netscape Navigator 4 hacking), the solution is to add something other than /%postname%/ to the start of your site’s permalinks.

I’ve found that both of the following work equally well:

• /%year%/%postname%/
• /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

Not only will this bring your many-paged-Wordpress-website back to life, it will not affect your Pages URLs.  In this case, the permalink structure only applies to your Posts.  Yay!!!

Hopefully this breakdown will save a few hairs on your head.  I wish I had found out about it earlier   Many thanks to the following which helped me out:

• www.google.com
• http://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-many-pages-custom-permalinks-fatal-error
• http://wordpress.org/support/topic/permalinks-doesnt-scale
• http://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/ – great technical explanation here!

This video demonstrates automatically importing WordPress to your Facebook Page, the same principles apply for automatically posting to your personal Faceebook Wall, as well as automatically posting from other blogging platforms such as Blogger, Blogspot, Moveable Type, TypePad, Open Diary, Live Journal, Xanga, Dead Journal, MySpace, Tumblr and other blogging websites.

Update: Following the steps in this video tutorial will link each post on your Facebook Wall to the Notes section of your Facebook account.  Admittedly, this is not ideal.  The ideal solution would link to the actual post on your blog.  To accomplish this and link each post back to the originating blog, I recommend using the Wordbooker plugin for WordPress.

Video Transcript:

How to Automatically Import WordPress Blog to Facebook Page

A really neat feature of Facebook allows you to import your blog directly onto your Facebook wall. This is a great way to save yourself all the effort of having to do that manually and plus being able to take advantage of Facebook and the huge user base that they have. So I’m gonna show you how to do that in this video tutorial.

And a couple of things we need to clarify. First off, is typically when you log in to Facebook you log in as yourself, and then this tutorial is showing you how to do that for a Facebook page not your Facebook personal account. So one of the neat things Facebook has recently added is your ability to browse Facebook as a page. So you click on this thing and then we’ll just go to one of these pages that I manage. Right here, you just click switch. And now I am essentially browsing Facebook as this page, Yoga.

So the next thing is the Notes application, you have to use the Notes application in order to import your blog feed. So first you find out if we have the Notes application installed. You add it, you go to apps, and when you see it right here, Notes, click edit settings and in this case it is available which means I haven’t added it yet so I click add. It’s now been added. We also wanna check the additional permissions and make sure that this box is checked because it will import your blog feed to your Notes and then publish it to your Wall. So click okay to save that.

Go back to our page and now you’ll see Notes is down here. So you think you could just click on Notes and there will be some link around here that says import my blog feed but it doesn’t, you actually have to go in search for Notes, it is really obscure and then you will see down here on the left, edit import settings, click that. It will bring you to this page where you can import a blog and so what you do is you like to get the blog feed, the full URL and copy and paste it right here and then that’s how you tell Facebook to import a blog.

So here’s my blog. And then I have the blog feed which for WordPress is just the word “feed” after wherever your blog is installed. And in my case, this brings up this Google reader but this is what we are looking for, this URL, so you just copy that, go back here, paste it. Be sure you mark that check box and then click start importing. It usually takes maybe about 20 or 30 seconds. What it’s doing is verifying that blog feed as a valid feed and then it’s starting to do the import. So let’s wait while it’s loading. And once Facebook has connected to your blog feed you will see all your recent blog post showing here on your Wall.

So that’s how you do it. Be sure when you’re done you don’t forget to switch back to your user so you can go back to browsing Facebook as yourself and not your page.

Edit a page on your website:

Create a new blog post on your website/blog:

Managing the photo gallery slideshow: