Advanced Settings 3 vs Custom PHP Settings

Advanced Settings is a powerful WordPress plugin that provides settings you would expect to find in the WordPress core. It is lightweight, performant and offers a modern, fast and user-friendly interface. 🚀 PERFORMANCE Advanced Settings 3 is optimized for extreme performance. It even loads only necessary PHP. → details in FAQ 🪶 LIGHTWEIGHT Advanced Settings 3 is lightweight (only about 0.5 MB) and discreet (no dashboard hijacking). → details in FAQ 🔒 SECURITY Advanced Settings 3 has been independently reviewed for security vulnerabilities via Patchstack. → details in FAQ ✳️ INFO ABOUT THE 2 BAD RATINGS Bad ratings occurred in 2017 because users used outdated PHP versions, but can’t happen again. → details in FAQ — FEATURES 🩷 FEATURE REQUESTS ARE WELCOME Advanced Settings 3 was developed to help as many users as possible. If you’d like to see a feature added to this plugin, please let us know. Don’t worry, we’ll keep the plugin fast and lean; this is a high priority for us. We’ll only implement features that don’t conflict with this. Admin Area Hide the top admin bar for all users in the frontend Hide WordPress update message in dashboard Hide the welcome panel in the dashboard Hide the default widgets in the dashboard 💥 new Customize the admin area branding 💥 new Frontend Remove PHP version from HTTP headers 💥 new Add security HTTP headers 💥 new Automatically add FavIcon (when favicon.ico, favicon.png or favicon.svg exists in template folder) Add Facebook Open Graph meta tags Remove shortlink meta tag Remove RSD (Weblog Client Link) meta tag Remove WordPress generator meta tag Automatically add description meta tag using blog description and post excerpt (SEO) Disable author pages Remove wptexturize filter Disable auto embed of external content 💥 new Limit excerpt length Add “Read more” link after excerpt Remove trackbacks and pingbacks from comment count Protect email addresses from spam bots Compress HTML code Remove HTML comments (except conditional IE comments) Disable emoji image replacement Editing Disable posts auto saving Limit post revisions 💥 new Allow SVG uploads for admins 💥 new Downsize images on upload to max size Set JPEG quality Add thumbnail support Automatically generate post thumbnail (from first image in post) System Hide default WordPress favicon Disable comment system Disable XML-RPC 💥 new Disable public REST API 💥 new Prevent installation of new default WordPress themes during core updates Disable email notifications for core updates Disable email notifications for plugin updates Disable email notifications for theme updates Create custom post types 💥 renewed Developer Display SQL queries and page load time Configuration Show/hide deprecated features Show/hide experimental features Configure tracking consent for feature usage statistics Configure visibility of user guide Contribute on github: github.com/eHtmlu/advanced-settings

This plugin can be used to customize php settings for you WordPress installation. The plugin will modify either the .htaccess file or .user.ini file in order to change the current php settings directly from within the settings page. Since the configuration file needs to be modified this file must be writable for this plugin to work as expected. Apache module When PHP is running as an Apache module the .htaccess file will be used to set customized settings; make sure so that this file exists and is writable by the webserver. CGI/Fast-CGI If instead PHP is running in CGI/Fast-CGI mode then a custom INI file will be used. The name of this file depends on the value of user_ini.filename in the php configuration, by default it is .user.ini. You can check the name of you custom INI file in the PHP Information table. The custom INI file should be placed under the root folder and most be writable by the webserver. Notice that there is also a User INI file cache TTL value in the information table, this value tells how long the custom INI file will be cached before it gets reloaded. For instance, if this value is set to 300 then any changes to your custom INI file will not be reflected for up to 5 minutes. The name for this setting in the php configuration is user_ini.cache_ttl. One important thing is to make sure that your .user.ini file is blocked by your webserver. If you are running NGINX this can be done by adding: location ~ /\.user\.ini { deny all; } to your server configuration. The same thing using Apache is done by adding the following to the configuration if not already done: order allow,deny deny from all Available Settings The settings table will display all non-system php settings that can be customized by the plugin. All modified settings will be displayed in red in this table. Some settings might be displayed in red because they are changed somewhere else, perhaps through a customized php.ini file, by WordPress itself, a plugin or in some other way. For instance if you have enabled WP_DEBUG in your wp-config.php file the error_reporting setting will turn red. If you have questions or perhaps some idea on things that should be added you can also try slack. Multiple Configurations The premium version adds support for creating multiple named configurations which all can hold their own custom PHP settings. You will then be able to easily switch between the different configurations entries applying them to you configuration file. Environment Variables In the premium version, when running PHP as an apache module and using an .htaccess file for configuration, you are able to add custom environment variables. These will be accessible by using the super global $_SERVER array. In order for this to work you will need to have the mod_env module enabled in your apache setup. Resources A complete list of settings that can be modified can be found here: List of php.ini directives Notice that directives marked as PHP_INI_SYSTEM can not be modified. Warning Make sure you know how a value should be configured and what different settings do before changing anything. This is important since some settings might render your page inaccessible, depending on what value you are using. A good example of this is the variables_order configuration: Sets the order of the EGPCS (Environment, Get, Post, Cookie, and Server) variable parsing. For example, if variables_order is set to “SP” then PHP will create the superglobals $_SERVER and $_POST, but not create $_ENV, $_GET, and $_COOKIE. Setting to “” means no superglobals will be set. If this value would be configured to EPCS then no $_GET superglobal would be set which would make your page inaccessible. Another example is setting the post_max_size to a very low value so that no form data is sent to the server, which in turn would result in that form data is never saved. If you by mistake changed some value and your site is now inaccessible you could simply manually remove everything from between the plugin markers in your .htaccess file: # BEGIN CUSTOM PHP SETTINGS PRO php_value variables_order EPCS <-- Remove # END CUSTOM PHP SETTINGS PRO If you are running PHP in CGI/Fast-CGI mode then instead remove everything between the plugins markers in your .user.ini file: ; BEGIN CUSTOM PHP SETTINGS php_value variables_order EPCS <-- Remove ; END CUSTOM PHP SETTINGS Support If you run into any trouble, don’t hesitate to add a new topic under the support section: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/custom-php-settings/ You can also try contacting me on slack.