On his blog, Stoyan Stefanov takes a look at using on of the most popular pieces of PHP forum software out there - phpBB - and optimizing the front-end.
During this short workshop there will be no changes to the phpBB code, we'll create a new template instead, so that in case something bad happens, your board will continue to work normally. As an example, I'll use the bgcanada.com/phpBB2, the board I volunteer to administrate.
The tutorial is broken up into sections:
- The plan
- New subdomains
- Creating a new template
- Moving CSS to an external file, merging
- Copying files to the new subdomains
- Serving gzipped content
- Turning ETags off
- Expires header
- Sysadmin summary
It looks like a lot of steps, but each section is relatively short and written well so as not to have more information than needed. In the end you'll have a simple template that uses Yahoo's 14 optimization rules to make things work that much faster.
