Thanks to Google, you can now quickly spin up an Elasticsearch instance for a few dollars a month. Couple that with WordPress plugins like ElasticPress & ES_WP_Query and you can get some pretty nice performance boosts in places where folks don’t normally bother to optimize.
The crew at interconnect/it makes some quality stuff, so I’m pretty excited to try this out.
In reality we’re taking the same problem of providing too many options and migrating them from the Dashboard to the WordPress Theme Customizer.
Bummer.
Tom McFarlin nails it once again.
Speaking of JavaScript, here’s a Node.js-based client for the JSON REST API that’ll eventually make its way into WordPress core.
Unless something totally crazy happens, WordPress is going to be written in PHP for the foreseeable future. However, the more that core turns into an API endpoint for all the JavaScript that’s being added to it, the less beholden the project has to be to PHP.
So maybe you should think about buying a JavaScript book or something.
Or don’t. It’s your fucking livelihood.
It’s nice that someone is working on an alternative to the Akismet anti-spam plugin monopoly.
With that being said, I saw a server load quadruple [from 4 to 16] in under 3 minutes after enabling the plugin on a friend’s site. It was right in the middle of being mercilessly hammered by spammers, but I don’t see how that should matter. Especially when their whole angle involves making a user’s browser solve a math problem.
Maybe they still have a little more work to do.
This is tempting. Extremely tempting.
Perhaps I should dedicate some time to playing with this over the long holiday weekend.
It’s nice to see that the PHP team isn’t taking HHVM lying down. We have to wait for PHP 5.7 to get PHPNG and it’s 20% performance increase though.
If you’re the type who runs his/her own server, there are test build instructions. So maybe you don’t have to wait. But I wouldn’t use this in production. Not yet, anyway.
Required reading from Nacin for any aspiring WordPress core contributor.
Debug Bar Slow Actions is an extension for the popular Debug Bar plugin. It adds a new panel with a list of the top 100 slowest actions (and filters) during the current page request.
Konstantin has done a great job with this. If you do any amount of site troubleshooting & optimizing, this is worth an install.