Today we are going to introduce you a small tool which we owe our long-time users. It comes as a small WordPress plugin which just cleans the wp_options table from some old data – used in legacy versions of CSS Hero, which is not necessary anymore.
Let’s see why you’d need to run such a tool, providing some background.
If you’re not that technically savvy, and just want to know what you should do – skip reading the following box and go to the Recommended pre-flight check section.
Technical Note
While you are using CSS Hero and click the saving button, trivially, some data has to go somewhere.
During the years, CSS Hero has changed the way it phisically “interacts” with your site, eg how the plugin behaves with WordPress and with your server / LAMP architecture, especially regarding the way the plugin is saving this data.
Initially, CSS Hero (from version 1 until version 2.02) was heavily relying on the wp options API which seemed the most natural way to handle data – as it made perfectly sense at the time.
From version 2.1 on, we’ve mostly abandoned the options API, and embraced using our own API, that relies on a single, separate, database table (csshero) where we can store more efficiently all your history steps, without cluttering heavily the wp_options table.
Version 3.0 uses the same approach above but uses another table name, csshero3
So this tool cleans the wp_options table from your old data – used in legacy versions of CSS Hero.
Recommended pre-flight check:
- If you are running a CSS Hero version prior to 2.1 – do nothing and don’t use this tool
- If you are running v2.3 or later, including of course v 3.0, go on reading
- If you are a new user of CSS Hero, had it since very few months – do nothing and don’t use this tool
- If you are a long time CSS Hero user, install and run this small plugin. You will be able to download it from your dashboard of course.
Upon installing and activating the plugin, a simple message will recap the activity, telling you if some options have to be deleted, and doing the work for you.
After that, you can safely shutdown and delete this utility.