Last Friday, I did a webcast as a part of the PHP TEK Webcast series. The webcast was on Caching for WordPress. We had a good turnout, and there were lots of questions about the best plugins to use for WordPress caching.

Anyone who has worked with WordPress knows that it’s greatest strength is also one of it’s greatest weaknesses: it’s architecture. The same architecture that makes it easy to include literally hundreds of plugins also makes it slow, resource-intensive and bulky. Unlike Drupal, WordPress doesn’t have a built-in caching mechanism. What is a developer to do?

Last July, I wrote about the registry pattern and some of its advantages. These advantages include the ability to access objects across different areas of your application, and the storage of objects for later retrieval.

I talk a lot about how having a spec is a critical component of software development. But how do you know that your spec is good, and that it has been developed enough? Simply put, how do you distinguish between a good spec and a spec that is lacking?

Were I writing this as an article for a newspaper, the subhead would be “Design Patterns Don’t Cause Application Slowness.” The point of this piece isn’t to defend Active Record per se; it’s to discuss the fact that design patterns aren’t to blame for your application’s problems, and more to the point, design patterns aren’t [...]