I recently posted about how I switched out PHP-FPM (PHP’s FastCGI pool) for HHVM. Today I’ll be talking more about the install process on the server, and using it to set up WordPress.
What is HHVM?
This is usually what happens in a (successful) startup[footnote]Twitter is (in)famous for its use of Ruby on Rails, which eventually had to be re-written in Scala, a language that runs on the JVM.[/footnote]:
The link is in Japanese; I’ve (roughly) translated the steps required to achieve the same result below:
Open the Sublime Text keymap file. This is at ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages/Default/Default (OSX).sublime-keymap -- Sublime Text 3 didn’t let me edit the file in-place, so I had to use a different text editor.
Second, which may (or may not) be so obvious. I’m running this site on NGINX ( blog post), but I’ve switched out PHP-FPM for Facebook’s HHVM. Based on my preliminary benchmarks, response time is around twice as fast, and throughput has increased ten-fold. I will write a more comprehensive post about using HHVM in the near future.
The ease of making a WordPress theme is both a blessing and a curse. It allows people to get started with programming relatively easy – most hosting providers have PHP / MySQL, and the majority have a WordPress quick-install. However, this easiness comes with a dangerous pitfall – it’s easy to do the wrong thing. The classic example of this is query_posts (hint: never use it).
Today, I’ll talk about wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style. If you have ever made a plugin that requires additional stylesheets or scripts in the front-end, you know exactly what this is (and why it’s important).
Rails Turbolinks is pretty cool, right? I thought it would be pretty cool to use it on WordPress, too.
There are probably a lot of bugs, and it probably doesn’t work well with JavaScript-heavy sites. I’ve included the jQuery compatibility layer, but it’s still not perfect. Use at your own risk.
To install, just search the WordPress plugin repository for “turbolinks”
Although there are quite a few features in this release, I want to talk about what I feel is the most important feature: automatic updates.
It’s a fairly simple - when a new version of WordPress is released, your installation will be updated (almost) immediately. As of 3.7, these automatic updates are limited to minor maintenance releases to make sure they won’t break your theme or plugin.
I’ve been playing around with Vagrant recently. It really is a great tool for setting up development environments quickly and cleanly - no more local MySQL databases with 100 separate databases!
There are a few ways to solve this problem that many WordPress developers have:
Regularly clean your databases up and delete old ones.
Use a common WordPress install, switching themes.
Use Vagrant.
I’m going to be talking about the last option, Vagrant, in this blog post. I’ll list out a few reasons why Vagrant was attractive to me in the first place:
