On the Delicious Brains site there's a new tutorial posted for the WordPress users out there sharing a case study of the performance impact of WP Offload S3 on the average page load time.

One of the great things about working at Delicious Brains is working on products that I use and love outside of work. I was a WP Migrate DB Pro customer well before joining the team and still use it daily on personal sites and side projects. However, I’ve not often had the need to use our other plugin, WP Offload S3 to offload site media files to Amazon S3.

The post starts with some of the background on why the author chose the WP Offload plugin in the first place and what features it provided. The tutorial then walks you through the installation process and how to have assets served up by Cloudfront correctly. It also includes some things you should consider when figuring out if this setup is for you. It then wraps up with some benchmarks of the results post-implementation, seeing a decrease of almost a second off of the previous page load time.

On the Delicious Brains site there's a tutorial posted by Ashley showing you how to set up full page caching with personalized dynamic content instead of the usual package caching of static content every user should see. The post is focused on improving the performance of a WordPress-based site.

We’ve talked a lot about WordPress performance here at Delicious Brains and the importance of page caching. However, implementing a page cache on highly dynamic sites or sites which display personalized content isn’t always easy. Previously, we’ve covered Microcaching for dynamic content, but that still doesn’t help when personalized content is involved.

In this article we’re going to tackle that issue. We’re going to use Easy Digital Downloads and the Themedd theme to build a fictitious online store. This will present us with a few problem areas that mean we can’t perform page caching out-of-the-box.

The tutorial starts by outlining the issues that come up with traditional caching tools and dynamic content. It then gets into the changes required to make it work with the Simple Cache plugin. It shows the code involved in splitting the caching functionality by generic, static page caches and how to inject the dynamic content cache back into the page when a user-specific resource is requested.

On the Laravel News site today they've posted about an effort that's been started to help create simple and community-driven man pages (documentation, manual pages) for command-line tools.

The TLDR pages (too long; didn’t read) is a command-line project that aims to simplify man pages with useful, terse examples of commands. This CLI tool gives me even less reason to memorize the tar and curl flags.

The way the TLDR command works after you’ve installed it is by passing it a command for which you’d like to learn practical uses without combing the full manual.

The article shows how to install this tldr package via npm and make it global on your system to be able to use it anywhere. There are also options for other languages if Node.js isn't your thing. You can find out more about the tool and what features it offers over on the project homepage. They also link to the repository if you'd like to contribute back to the documentation.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted the third part of their "Dynamic Page Templates in WordPress" tutorial series today. In this latest article author David Gwyer finishes off the series using all that they've shared from part one and part two to create two examples.

In the first two parts of this tutorial series, we covered what dynamic page templates were and why they were needed. We also looked at the code required to implement them.

In this third and final tutorial in the series, I'll be creating two examples of fully working dynamic page templates you can use in your own projects. These were specifically chosen to be easily extendable to suit your own needs, and are intended as inspiration for any other type of dynamic page templates you can think of.

He then walks you through the creation of the two page templates: a Simple Contact Form and a Blog Post Archive. The first allows you to dynamically control the form elements for a UI interface (rather than code) and the second uses dynamic data to display the list of previous blog posts. The tutorial then finishes with a look at how, since WordPress 4.7, you can use dynamic page templates with any kind of post, not just pages.

Matthias Noback has continued his series looking at using Sculpin to create static pages for "in-project documentation" with this second post focusing more on the creation of "virtual pages". These pages allow the insertion of dynamic content into pages pulled from other sources (in this case, from the source of the project).

Previously we looked at how to use the static site generator Sculpin to generate in-project documentation. When Sculpin builds the HTML files and assets it looks at what files are in the source/ directory and processes them based on certain rules (e.g. "parse Markdown files", "format HTML files with Twig", etc.). The purpose for my "living documentation" project is to also dynamically generate documentation based on PHP and configuration files from the main project.

[...] The Sculpin documentation mentions several ways to generate dynamic content for a static site, as opposed to the standard way of adding static Markdown or HTML files. [...] So, I dug into the source code of Sculpin to find out what would be a reasonable extension point. It turned out that the best way to approach this was to create a custom data source (which is currently not documented).

He then walks you through the creation of a custom data source with "dataSourceId" and "refresh" methods the tool uses to pull in the dynamic data. He shows how to set up the script to be called at any time and have the same effect (Sculpin does this when the "server" is running) and defining the service in your Sculpin configuration.

TutsPlus.com has started off a new series of posts for the WordPress users out there showing you how to build a "welcome page" for your WordPress site and product.

In the first two articles of this series, I wrote about what welcome pages are and how they are helping products improve user experience by connecting the dots, after which I wrote about the WordPress Transients API that I intend to use while building the welcome page.

Coding a welcome page for your WordPress plugin can be a tricky process. The entire concept revolves around redirecting users to a particular page via setting transients and finally deleting them. Let's start building the welcome page.

They walk you through the creation of a simple plugin that can be used to easily create (and re-create) these "welcome" pages (the final result is here for the impatient). The tutorial the starts off by defining the architecture of the plugin and the workflow that it will follow to generate the page. From there it gets into the code for the plugin itself and related supporting files including the "initializer" that activates the plugin, making it ready for use.

The QaFoo blog has a post to their blog introducing page objects and how they're useful in functional testing to help provide a "decoupling" from the actual frontend.

A while ago we wrote about writing acceptance tests (end-to-end tests) with Mink and PHPUnit. While this is a great set of tools for various applications such tests tend be susceptible to changes in the frontend. And the way they break is often hard to debug, too. Today I will introduce you to Page Objects which can solve some of these problems.

The basic idea behind a Page Object is that you get an object oriented representation of your website. The Page Objects maps the HTML (or JSON) to an object oriented structure you can interact with and assert on. This is more initial work then than writing tests with PHPUnit and Mink directly, but it can be worth the effort.

They use the Mnk testing tool to simulate a browser and some previously shared functionality to lay the foundation. From there they write up a first test using a "Login" page object and processing the username/password handling of the page. They show how to implement a custom page object with a bit of additional logic and put it to use in processing the request. They also include an update when, for example, a site is switched from Twig templates to a React.js component and how the Page object would need to be refactored for the update.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post showing you how to make use of the Google Analytics API in your Laravel application to find trending content in your site (most accessed pages).

Here on Laravel News, I wanted to generate a list of the most popular posts for the past seven days and display the results from most popular to least popular. To solve this problem I thought of two solutions. The first is to build my own tracking system so I could keep a count and then use it for ordering. However, that could generate a huge amount of data and it seemed like a solution that an analytics tracking service could handle.

As I was fumbling through the Google Analytics API I found a Laravel Analytics package by Spatie.be that allows you to easily retrieve data from your Google Analytics account and it seemed like the best way to solve this problem. Let’s look at how I used it to generate a list of popular posts here on Laravel News.

They then walk you through the installation (via Composer) and configuration of the library. This includes linking to more information about setting up the credentials for the connection. They then show how to use it to fetch the most popular pages and what the response looks like as a collection. Finally they show you how to create a wrapper class you can easily reuse anywhere in your application to fetch and display this "trending" information". The post ends showing you how to create a "View Composer" that only fires when the view is being rendered, not on every request.

In this post to his site Julien Pauli looks at the concept of "huge pages" and how it relates to some of the behind the scenes work done in PHP 7 to improve memory usage.

Memory paging is a way Operating Systems manage userland process memory. Each process memory access is virtual, and the OS together with the hardware MMU must translate that address into a physical address used to access the data in main memory (RAM).

Paging memory is dividing memory in chunks of fixed size, called pages. [...] Why use huge pages? The concept is easy. If we make the OS Kernel use bigger page sizes, that means that more data can be accessed into one single page. That also means that we'll suffer from less TLB miss, once the page translation is stored into the TLB, because one translation will now be valid for more data.

He briefly covers how some updated memory handling and opcode restructuring helps PHP 7 perform even better, especially when it comes to the OPCache handling. He talks about the changes made in the extension specifically to support the "huge pages" idea, complete with code examples (in C) of how this was accomplished.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted showing you how to set up a simple small business website using the BoltCMS tool. This recent article will walk you through the full installation, configuration and setup for a simple site including database interactions.

As the web continues to mature and the demand for the efficiency of content delivery increases, more and more slim and trim CMSs are coming into the fray. Developers (front-end and back-end) are branching away from the heavy-hitters like WordPress and Drupal, and into the likes of more streamlined, tailor-made solutions. Bolt CMS is one of these CMSs, and prides itself on being a dream for designers, developers, and content editors alike.

He starts with a brief overview of what the BoltCMS has to offer and some of the technology that powers it. He then goes through each of the steps to get the application up and running:

• Requirements, setup and installation
• Main configuration and theme set up
• Splitting up files into templates
• Introducing and creating content types
• Retrieving content from database records

Each step along the way includes the code, configuration changes or template updates you'll need to make to end up with a simple site allowing you to view a page of content and list/add related testimonials.