It’s official: the cumbersome title of WordPress Fast Frontend has been put to rest, replaced with the elegant “LightPress”. I happily welcome this change, even if my suggested name didn’t make the cut. In fact, LightPress is so simple it makes you wonder: why hasn’t anyone used this name before?
The other news is that LightPress has defended it’s claim to speed. The test results show LightPress serving pages faster than TextPattern, and 3 times faster than WordPress 1.5.1.
I still haven’t made the switch yet. Why? Demand for my WordPress keywords plugin has far outstripped my expectations, and I’m having trouble finding time to finish the LightPress version! But the LightPress plugin will actually be the basis for the faster (and simpler) 2.0, so the change is coming soon.
Ludo announced the first beta for WPFF 1.0.0 a few weeks ago, and the second beta is now available. I finally found some free time to fix my test site and upgrade to the lastest & greatest.
The latest version is more polished since my last review and offers a few new features, including:
- Full search capabilities, complete with a custom template and a search term highlighter. Great job on this one, Ludo!
- Atom feeds and category-based feeds.
- Author pages.
- Basic comment formatting.
- Plus a bunch of small tweaks and bug fixes since the 0.99 betas.
I’ve just sent Ludo another small patch today that increases WPFF’s compatibility with WordPress. Hopefully the patch make it into the next beta, slated for release tomorrow. The changes are intended to allow you to use your existing .htaccess file generated by WordPress. I want to make sure that it’s easy to make the switch, so watch out for ports of popular WP plugins too.
I’ve just finished the beta version of the “PreFormatted” WordPress plugin. Basically, it stores posts & comments in their final, formatted form rather than processing them every time a page is loaded. It provides only a modest decrease in page rendering times, but that’s not it’s real purpose anyway.
WPFF lacks some of the nicer features of WordPress, including polished post formatting. But if the WordPress back-end pre-formats everything, then WPFF size and speed can be maintained without any extra cost! So this really is a WordPress plugin that makes WPFF look nicer. The bonus is that you can use it even if you don’t use WPFF…
I just switched on the new plugin today - this is the first post to use it. You can learn more on the new PreFormatted plugin page.
Just uploaded my first WordPress Fast Frontend plugin to the WPFF test site. It was a good learning experience and pretty simple to write. The plugin reproduces the category-based styles I have set up on my normal WP site which is a quick hack rather than a plugin. Once I port over my keywords/tags plugin then my WPFF site will be fully functional.
The new plugin architecture was somewhat tricky to figure out sans documentation, but very simple to write for once I grasped the basic structures. The default plugins are great to learn from and you only need to know a few hooks to get one to work. My stock WP plugin experience is limited to the backend, so I won’t comment on which is better (probably an “apples to oranges” comparison anyhow).
I still owe Ludo a response regarding the template system, but that will have to wait for another day…
Ludo released the refactored version of his WordPress Fast Frontend yesterday - you can download it here. I’ve been looking forward to this release since my review of the last version. I tried earlier versions on my test server, but never attempted the conversion of my actual site - until now.
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The first release candidate of the WordPress Fast Frontend has just been released and Ludo is already working on the next one. I loaded it up on my test server to try it out: less queries, faster loading. Is it a touch slower than the alpha? Possibly, but it might just be my imagination.
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Well it seems that I’m not the only one that thinks WordPress is a tad slow. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great package - this site uses the 1.3 alpha - but I’ve often wondered why the package is so big and page generation takes so long.
So far I’ve made a few tweaks to my own install to reduce the number of redundant queries. However, Ludo Magnacavallo has gone many steps further and created his own WordPress Fast Frontend - a lean ‘n’ mean stripped-down version that loads pages way faster than the vanilla release.
I like what he’s done, at least conceptually. I tried it out on my offline site and saw a 10x decrease in page load times. Granted it doesn’t have all of the WordPress bells and whistles, but I really don’t use those anyhow. My only complaint is that the code is really messy, but its only release 0.1 after all. Give it a try and let me know what you think.