Open Source Immune System

I recently listened to an interview with Tom Dale, one of the developers who helped create Ember. He was comparing Angular, which is maintained primarily by developers at Google, and Ember, which has a smaller and more diverse group of contributors behind it.

I thought this remark was interesting and also applies to the WordPress world:

“I think of open source project as an organism. An organism has an immune system and the best thing you can do for the immune system of your project is to diversify as fast as your can.

This includes valuing contributors who are not just code writers. It includes valuing people who write documentation, valuing people who work on infrastructure, valuing people who run events and organize meet-ups in the real world.”

Tom Dale

From TalkShopShow Episode #147.

Using Mandrill for WordPress Email

WordPress sends e-mail notifications for a number of different reasons. New user registration, password resets, and comment notifications are the common defaults.

Plugins also tap into the e-mail system too, especially for extensions that add contact forms, e-commerce or subscription functionality.

logout-mandrill

If e-mail is integral to your WordPress site, you might want to consider using Mandrill (a service by the folks behind MailChimp) rather than the default WordPress mail system. If your server doesn’t allow mail scripts or have a mail server, this might even be essential (and an alternative to running it through SMTP using a plugin like this). Continue reading

Measuring Site Speed

Fast load times are incredibly important for website users. Unfortunately, it’s an overlooked feature on most WordPress sites.

Themes and plugins aren’t necessarily optimized for performance, and it can be difficult to determine how plugin and design choices affect the overall page speed.

But, if we start to measure it, we can start to optimize for it. When I do site performance audits for clients I primarily use two tools to evaluate page speed. The browser developer tools (Chrome) and the “Site Speed” report in Google Analytics.

Pingdom also offers a nice visual waterfall of page speed timings (similar to the “Network” tab in most browser developer tools), and Google Insights can give good general suggestions. Continue reading