Comments on: Simple steps to a faster WordPress Dashboard

By: Lori

Lori — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 07:43:51 +0000

Thanks for the tip, Juan. Looks a bit geeky for me, though (i.e., like it would take way too much time for me to learn to use). My BF made me a quick'n'dirty app that converts the naughty code to html entities, and I can then easily just highlight the few bits I want with css. But for serious geeks, that plugin looks pretty cool.

By: Juan

Juan — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:40:22 +0000

Yep, sorry, I misread the contest date. (Yeah, I need a vacation fast)

By: Juan

Juan — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:11:40 +0000

Great!:D Now that you’re all geeked up, and if you want to experiment some more, try using this GeSHi plugin for WordPress:

http://www.thedevproject.com/projects/wordpress-geshi-plugin/

It’s just a code syntax hightlight that make’s it more readable

By the way, who won the banana pic contest? I’m dying to know

By: Lori

Lori — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:15:06 +0000

Thanks for the tip, Kristof. I definitely don’t identify as a “geek” at all, but on the other hand I’m sure not afraid to dive in and experiment with code and figure stuff out. I considered using // comments to block the php thingies as well, but didn’t see the need because the simple html comments worked fine. So maybe it is some rendering dealie…I can’t explain the massive speed increase either, all I know is that it works!

Maybe I’ll experiment with it and revise the tute — who knows, maybe it would make it even faster

[edit: experimentation done. No noticeable difference in speed with the php commented out, but I went ahead and added to the tute as well, just cuz it makes sense. Thanks, K!]

By: Kristof

Kristof — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 16:13:09 +0000

I’ve got no good idea why your dashboard sped up after these changes. As far as I can see from reading this snippet, you only commented out the rendered HTML, keeping it from rendering in your browser, but the PHP snippet still fetches the remote data, i.e, http://planet.wordpress.org/feed and proceeds to render 20 items from that feed. On the other hand, it’s really been ages since I coded anything useful in PHP and I’ve never actually tried to HTML comment PHP stuff …

To make sure that the PHP code doesn’t get executed, I usually isolate the code I don’t want and move it to a function I like to name “obsoleteSomethingSomething” and leave a comment saying where I relocated the code.

//moved code for … to function obsoleteDefaultRssFeeds()

…

function obsoleteDefaultRssFeeds()
{
// Your obsolete code here
}

I usually stuff all the old code in that function to prevent it from being executed although it’s still being parsed. Moving it to “obsolete” functions prevents me from going through the hassle of having to comment the script and the html code separately. You should be able to do that very nicely in WP too.

I would make a nicer example but I’m not sure if I can use code tags in the comments.

Anyway: I’m really impressed and intrigued to see you in ubergeek mode …