I attended WordCamp 2013 (Victoria, BC) this past weekend, my first time at the event. As a WordPress enthusiast, I was looking forward to meeting some like-minded folks, to network, and learn some techie stuff about WordPress.
I really enjoyed the Experts Panel which was a solid un-moderated hour of Q & A. I have an interest in how to build out WordPress network sites that can handle a lot of concurrent read and write traffic. There is a lot of information online about clustering WP, setting up caching servers, database performance tuning, webserver tuning, etc. At the panel I learned that:
- high-volume sites are often hosted using nginx, instead of Apache (does that turn LAMP into LNMP?)
- there is the scalingwp.wordpress.com web site
- object-caching can be performed with memcached and APC
- there is some debate about fastcgi mode WP
- among the core WP developers, Mark Jaquith has online info about scaling WP, even on a budget.
- another core WP developer of note to research scaling WP is Pete Mall
- there are consulting agents out there that can provide scaling skills, who have been there and done that
- HTTPS configuration in WP is not necessarily a slam-dunk. You may have to resort to hacking plugins, as the whole framework is not necessarily united on how to provide HTTPS links
- lots of talk about HyperDB for database scaling
I also enjoyed a session by John Overall on 10+1 essential plugins for WordPress. That is where I learned about the LoginRadius plugin for social identity integration – a neat Canadian SaaS startup! John posted the slide show on the Meetup site I think….
Ben put up a blog post with his notes from the session here.