The final stage in speeding up my blog was to add some serious caching to the front of it. This may even have been overkill, because it was already pretty swift under nginx/php-fpm, but cutting out the database connections would speed it up even more.
I had a quick go with the W3 Total Cache WordPress plug-in, but it seems rather biased to running Apache (which I’m not) and I experienced some strange errors that I failed to immediately fix. Rather than wrestle with it, or try other WordPress caches, I decided to get to grips with Varnish. This is something I’d been meaning to do for ages, and of course it isn’t limited to WordPress – Varnish is a fabulous caching solution for whatever site you’re building.
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As part of my “speeding up my blog” series, I planned to write a nice, informative post about upgrading to WordPress 3, deploying your theme to a CDN, and getting it all running under nginx. Unfortunately WordPress irritated me so much in the process, that this has turned into more of rant. Sorry in advance.
I have a like/hate relationship with WordPress. That is to say that it does a lot, it has a great admin area and there’s a large community producing themes and plug-ins. However, I am a PHP developer of many years, and every time I come into direct contact with the core WordPress code-base I end up being sick in my mouth.
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I just installed the WPTouch WordPress plugin which gives iPhone and Android visitors a tailored mobile UI.
It’ s great, here’s a pic of the iPhone interface (courtesy of @pepijndevos)
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« part 1 « part 2
Part 3 – Hacking the library
Code libraries essentially provide abstraction. Abstraction is good. But anyone who regularly uses third party code in their work has at some point hit the knowledge wall; that point where the abstracted nature of the library leaves you helpless in resolving an apparent problem. You have limited choices – Wait for a patch, hit the forums, or hack it yourself. The latter is probably the worst thing to do, but deadlines are deadlines. Read more…