normadize

I’ve never had issues with Xdebug as far as PHP debuggers go.

I optimized a few parts of qTranslate functions quite heavily and will post my patches soon.

In fact, I may even release a very small plugin that patches qTranslate on the fly, which people can just install and use together with qTranslate to make it faster. It’s part of a bigger plugin I am writing.

Stay tuned.

Actually, most of the above is not needed. In fact, the second if (is_array() ... is not even reached if $text is an array or object, which is Ok in most cases, see below. You could just as well remove it altogether.

The qtrans_postsFilter() function is hooked into ‘the_posts’ filter. This function is:

function qtrans_postsFilter($posts) {
	if(is_array($posts)) {
		foreach($posts as $post) {
			$post->post_content = qtrans_useCurrentLanguageIfNotFoundShowAvailable($post->post_content);
			$post = qtrans_useCurrentLanguageIfNotFoundUseDefaultLanguage($post);
		}
	}
	return $posts;
}

Note how it is passing each object $post in a loop to qtrans_useCurrentLanguageIfNotFoundUseDefaultLanguage($post) which in turn calls qtrans_use() on each of the object’s properties. Only the title and content (and maybe guid and pinged) properties require translation (none of the other 20+ do) and for those, qTranslate already hooks into ‘the_content’, ‘the_title’ etc filters. This function can be useful if you call get_posts() in your own code.

You could remove the ‘the_posts’ hook from qtranslate_hooks.php and if you need to call get_posts() in your own code and want the title and content translated, then you can either call qtrans_postsFilter(), which is very inefficient (and you may not want the default behaviour of not showing the default language for the content if the current language is unavailable), of just translate the title and content in a loop — you can have your own function for that.

Also, disabling and enabling the plugin is enabling the debug option in my case. It shouldn’t do that I presume.

Looking through the code, I’m cringing at the sight of stuff like this:

elseif(preg_match("#^<!--:-->$#ism", $block, $matches)) {
   $current_language = "";
   continue;
}

The above is a clear example of what I was talking about. Not only $matches is not used anywhere, so preg_match() shouldn’t have been asked to create and populate a new array, and not only are the s, m and i modifiers not needed, but the entire if clause could have been replaced with just:

elseif($block == '<!--:-->'))

There are too many unnecessary calls to preg_match() and preg_replace(), a lot of them shouldn’t even be case insensitive, or multi-line … strpos(), stripos(), str_replace(), str_ireplace() should be used when possible, or plain comparison like above.

Also, there are too many for/foreach loops triggering subsequent large number of calls to preg_match/preg_replace. It’s usually better, if possible, to try and call preg_* beforehand on the big string, rather than split the string and then call preg_* a lot of times.

It’s not actually necessary to seek translations for ALL the options in the wp_options table. Most of them are only used internally and do not require translation so the whole process of seeking a translation can be cut down.

Many WP installations have a huge wp_options table due to a large number of plugins — it doesn’t matter if they are disabled or not, their options are still there in the table. Most of them ‘forget’ their options in the table even if you uninstall them so if you had previously tried a large number of plugins in the past and uninstalled most of them, your website can get increasingly slow if qTranslate is enabled due to the code below. My wp_options table has 491 rows!

Commenting out the following block in qtranslate_core.php makes the website a hell of a lot faster for me:

/*
if(!defined('WP_ADMIN')) {
	$alloptions = wp_load_alloptions();
	foreach($alloptions as $option => $value) {
		add_filter('option_'.$option, 'qtrans_useCurrentLanguageIfNotFoundUseDefaultLanguage',0);
	}
}
*/

With this tweak, the page from the initial post loads in under 1.5 seconds now, down from 5.5 seconds!

In case you have options that need to be translated, then you can manually hook the qtranslate filter above only for those options, rather than hooking into all options, e.g. I would replace the above code with

$options = array('options','that','need','translation','here');
foreach ($options as $opt)
    add_filter('option_'.$option, 'qtrans_useCurrentLanguageIfNotFoundUseDefaultLanguage',0);

And you can add that into your functions.php.