On the SitePoint PHP blog author Bruno Skvorc continues his series about using the Grav flat-file CMS to create fast, simple sites. In his previous post he talked about the use of various "must have plugins". In this latest post he focuses more on some "tweaks" you can make to prepare your site for higher load.

We previously looked at some essential Grav plugins with which to round off the installation of a personal blog. In this post, we’ll take a look at some additional, advanced plugins, rounding it all off with an installation of Varnish for supercaching, taking performance to a whole new level.

His list of "tweaks" (and other plugins) that are recommended for a more robust site are:

• The "Related Pages" plugin
• An "assets" plugin for custom JS and CSS without extending the theme
• Simple search handling
• Comments on the content with the JsComments plugin
• Image Optimization and CDNs
• Caching with Varnish

All but the last item on the list are plugins you can drop in and configure pretty easily. Varnish requires a little extra setup, however, as it's an external service/software that needs to be running in front of your web server to do its job.

Igor Wiedler has shared some of his thoughts on his site today about the "heaviness" of things that call themselves "microframeworks" and why it may not be about the amount of code involved at all.

Quite often silex has been described as heavy or bloated. It's time to put this myth to rest. [...] Micro-framework What an excellent buzzword! Let's face it, this is an overloaded and mostly nebulous term. I don't think it's possible to clearly define what it means. [...] But the real answer lies in what silex doesn't do.

He suggests that the "micro" in "microframework" is more about it providing a limited amount of features (bare-bones) versus a more full-featured, possibly full stack framework. He talks about the dependencies that Silex currently has and provides some statistics about it and these packages it depends on. He also briefly mentions the minimal interface the framework provides, citing the few components you'll probably touch in your work with it.