Website Optimization
This morning I was having a discussion with a fellow EE developer about website speed optimization. I was mentioning various methods for speeding up a website. One tool that I find useful is the Google Chrome Resources Graphing tool. With it you can tell where latency and download speeds are slower than could be. I find that the problem with most sites is not ExpressionEngine but more than likely excessive calls for JavaScript and CSS files and even more so for images.
For JavaScript and CSS files we have used GZip compression. It really helps and is pretty straightforward to use. For an example try this blog entry
A big area that can benefit from some boosts in speed is in the area of images. Many of us use Sprites and other tricks to speed up download times. But one tool that I have found that is just awesome at cutting the size of image files is ImageOptim. I just downloaded the images folder for this site (cause like an idiot I never do these sorts of things to my own websites) and the original size was 19MB. After running all of the images through ImageOptim the total folder size was 12MB which is something like a 35-40% decrease in file size. Looking through the report that ImageOptim gives I see there are a number of files (some on the Home Page) that saved 70-80%! That is crazy. Using Chrome again I saw a 30% decrease in pageload times. Very nice!
These are things that can be done to all sites. It is only after this type of stuff is done that you should look into things like caching templates in EE and possible server side caching. And by all means if you know of some other tricks please leave a comment to let me know. Would love to hear some of the mechanisms that you are using to speed up page load times.
Learning Things the Hard Way - Upgrading from 1.7 to 2
This is just a quick blog post to relay some info I just learned. I am in the process of upgrading Show-ee from 1.6.8 to 1.7 and then to 2.1.4b. As part of that site we used to use FieldFrame from Pixel & Tonic. Specifically we were using the CheckBox Group fields for the checkboxes that tell what add-ons a developer used. Well as part of the process I upgraded from 1.6.8 to 1.7 but neglected to upgrade all of the add-ons before moving to 2.1.4.
Creating Installable Templates for ExpressionEngine 2
This is the second installment in our Creating installable templates tutorials for ExpressionEngine. In this post we are going to talk about the actual package that needs to be delivered to the end user and all of the associated files. Plus we even have a bonus of some useful code for you.
Removing Index.php from the URLs of Expression Engine websites
For a long time now I have struggled with removing index.php from my EE websites. I have used a mix bag of the include/exclude method and add-ons that deal with making the include/exclude method easier.
Creating your own installable templates for ExpressionEngine 2
A year ago I was perusing the user guide and wiki over on ExpressionEngine’s website for any information regarding creating your own installable templates. At that time there were none. At I just did a quick search for some of the files involved like theme_preference.php and default_content.php and the information available is still minimal.
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