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PHP masters show us the best principles to follow for high-grade PHP programming.

I’m currently engaged in the process of trying boost the performance of this website as some of the page weights and loading times are horrific (God, how I miss mod_perl). These are the steps I’ve taken so far:

• Turned on mod_deflate and am now serving my XHTML, CSS and JavaScript as GZIP’d files.
• Uninstalled various non-essential WordPress plugins.
• Installed and configured WP Super Cache but, as yet, it doesn’t seem to be actually doing anything (the administration page tells me that nothing has been cached). I’m sure I’m doing something wrong here!
• My MySQL database has been tweaked considerably during the past couple of days and I am fairly happy with the performance there now.
• I will have to make an effort to reduce page weights by reducing image file-sizes (currently the heaviest content I am delivering by far).
• I’m investigating PHP accelerators and need to learn which of them play nicely with WordPress.

Obviously I’ll document things here as I progress.

Performing a search-and-replace through a table is easy with MySQL when you know how.
update table_name set table_field = replace(table_field,'replace_that','with_this');
So, for example, let’s say you have a table called “posts” with a data stored in a field called “content” and you want to replace all instances of the word “dog” with “cat”, then your SQL would look like this:
update posts set content = replace(content,'dog','cat');
How cool is that?