One of the plugins I used to recommend was cbnet Ping Optimizer – that is no longer the case. It is not because it is a bad plugin or because it hogs resources, it is just that this plugin’s functionality is no incorporated into WordPress!
First of all, what does ‘ping‘ mean. According to Wikipedia, ping is described as the following:
In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. The technology was first introduced by Dave Winer to Weblogs.com in October 2001 Today, most blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.
Say what?!?!?
OK – here is what it means in regular terms that everyone can understand. A Ping is just a notification that something is new or has been updated. It is like a happy author screaming out loud, “MY POST IS FINISHED!!! CHECK IT OUT!!!” Instead of screaming it out in some unacceptable fashion, WordPress will automatically send out the notification to search engines or other sites that want to know when new ‘stuff’ is on your site.
Think about it… You write, and it automatically gets broadcast all over the place!
And that is what cbnet Ping Optimizer did – it sent out all the notifications you wanted.
Sounds like a good thing – why should I get rid of it?
It still is a good thing to automatically ping your goods. In fact, it is so good that WordPress will not do this for you – there is no need to have a plugin to do this!
The documentation in the newest version of the plugin says it best. The claims of the plugin are in italics and the explanations are in regular text.
It should be obvious that most of that just isn’t true anymore.
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Think how many times you click on “Save and Continue Editing” or “Save” button. Your blog will ping unnecessarily that many times you click on those buttons.
As you see above, this isn’t true. Saving a draft post does not fire the
publish_postaction; therefore, no pings are triggered. -
When you create a new post, your blog will ping and notify all the ping services that it has been updated.
WordPress core functionality does this already.
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When you edit an existing post, it won’t send any unnecessary ping to ping services and saves your blog from getting banned by such services.
As you see above, WordPress intelligently fires pings when a post is edited, by keeping track of previous successful pings and not re-pinging them.
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When you post a future post by editing the time stamp, it will ping only when your post appears in future. It won’t unnecessarily ping many times when you schedule posts as WordPress does by default.
As you see above, scheduling a post fires the
future_postaction, and not thepublish_postaction. Thus, until a scheduled post actually transitions topublish, thereby firing thepublish_postaction, no pings are triggered.
So, none of this Plugin’s functionality is needed. You can safely deactivate and uninstall it, with the understanding of why the core WordPress handling of pings works just fine.
I have deactivated this plugin on my sites and even went the next step to deleted it completely.
Well your explanations seems quite logical, fairly well explained and understood too. But another logical question is if ping optimizer are not a necessary plugin, than why are they making these ? and why so many bloggers are still using it ? There’s got to be a reason right ?
I’m using one as of now ! but your post got me thinking ?
I was using them as well, Ben. Prior versions of WordPress did not do this as well as it is doing now; using the plugins made it more effective, “in the good old days” 🙂
If you take a look at the documentation provided by the developer, he even says that his plugin is doing nothing now. He has ripped the guys out of it and it is just a shell for folks so they can read the README file!
I hope this helps explain it!
Question then, should we still copy and paste the list of those that were in you Post about the plug in back in 2011? Or does wordpress actually do that as well?
It is no longer needed, however, if you have it there, it cannot help. One thing you can do, karyn, is check the log that cbnet Ping creates – are all the sites still valid? Do they all go through? If not, you definitely want to delete them.
Personally, I deleted the plugin.
I don’t have the plugin as I read your post on it not being needed, but on the post where you first suggested it you said “if you do not want to add the plug in…
If you are still reading this and you remember one of of the things I mentioned was that this plug in is NOT required, let me tell you why! While still in your dashboard, check out Settings / Writing area. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a section, Update Services. All the entries we put in the cbnet Ping Optimizer are also listed here. If you don’t want to install the plugin, you can simply paste in the list above into this area and the same thing will occur –
So Do I need to still paste these?
sorry if it’s confusing.