WordPress: intranet and firewall

I am huge fan of WordPress blogging platform. Recently I introduced the tool in a enterprise environment.

WordPress is running behind a restricted network and has no connection to the Internet. While installing and finalizing the virtual machine which is used to host WordPress I encountered one problem with it.  Wordpress was slow!

I download  latest version of WordPress 2.7 and installed it on a Ubuntu JeOS 8.04 virtual machine appliance. The initial configuration went fine; but after I opened the admin area and the blog site it took ages before the pages were returned. WordPress was so slow within this Intranet environment that every action more than 30 seconds took.

Due to the fact virtual machine was sitting in a firewalled intranet environment the system could not connect to services sitting on the internet. 

See my worklog how I got WordPress working and pages are loaded in less than a second:

• Goto ../wordpress/wp-includes and open http.php
• Search for “ function request( $url, $args = array() ) {“
• Add “return;”  behind global. E..g “  return;global $wp_version;”

Well now I disabled all interactions to the Internet, but I don’t need them in this enviroment. For more information goto here.