Heads up: Autoptimize minor release

Autoptimize 2.0 was a pretty successful release, if only because there were no major defects that forced me to quickly follow up with a bugfix release. That, off course, does not mean there were no issues at all or that no further improvements were possible. Hence Autoptimize 2.0.1 will be released within the next 2 weeks (or so), with the following changes:

  • Autoptimize now also tries to purge WP Engine cache when AO’s cache is cleared
  • Bail for AMP pages (which are pretty optimized anyway) to avoid issues with “inline & defer” and with AO adding attributes to link-tags that are not allowed in AMP HTML
  • Better support for renamed wp-content directories
  • Improvements to the page cache purging mechanism
  • Multiple fixes for late-injected CSS/ JS (changes in those files not being picked up, fonts or background images not beind CDN’ed, …)
  • Re-enable functionality to move non-aggregated JS  if “also aggregate inline JS” is active
  • Misc. other fixes & improvements, go read the commit-log on GitHub if you’re that curious

If you want to test this release out, you can download the beta from wordpress.org. Do ping me here if you think you’ve stumbled across a bug or simply to confirm all works just fine (esp. the WP Engine cache purge is a hard one to test for me, as I’m not hosted there)  🙂

Music from Our Tube; Condor Gruppe covering Moondog

Bird’s Lament I” is one of the best known compositions of Moondog, a legendary American composer, musician, poet, busker and Viking roaming the streets of New York. A couple of nights ago I heard Condor Gruppe‘s cover of “Bird’s Lament I” on the radio, which adds a nice Afrobeat feel to the composition;

Hyper Cache hooking up with Autoptimize

satollo.netStefano Lissa, the developer of Hyper Cache, just released a version which hooks into Autoptimize (the autoptimize_action_cachepurged action) to automatically purge the page-cache if Autoptimize’s cache gets cleared. Thanks Stefano, it’s no coincidence Hyper Cache is one of my favorite page-caching plugins!
The Gator Cache-developer is also working on a new version which will do the same by the way.

Autoptimize Power-Up sneak peek; Noptimize

In case you’re wondering if those Autoptimize Power-Ups are still coming and if so how they’ll look like and what they’ll do;
AO powerup sneak peak: noptimize
So some quick pointers;

  • Power-Ups will be installed as separate plugins and will obviously require some sort of registration, payment and license key activation (still to be developed, will either be EDD or Freemius-based)
  • Once installed, they will appear as tabs on Autoptimize’s settings page (no clutter in your menu’s!)
  • You can actually see 2 Power-Up-tabs in this screenshot;
    1. the active one is “Noptimize” and will allow you to configure which URL’s shouldn’t be optimized (either entirely or just CSS or JS).
    2. The inactive tab is for “SpeedUp” which … speeds up the creation of uncached autoptimized files immensely.
  • Other Power-Ups that are on the table are
    1. Critical CSS” to enable you to define “above the fold CSS” for different types of pages (posts, pages, homepage, archives, …)
    2. Whitelist” which lets you specify what JS or CSS to optimize (“known good”), making sure unknown code is never autoptimized
    3. HTTP/2” which will have logic to take the most advantage of what HTTP/2 has to offer, although (part of) this might go into AO proper.

Next steps for me; register my “secondary activity as independent” (as I still have an official day-time job), get in touch with an accountant, decide on EDD vs Freemius, set up shop on optimizingmatters.com (probably including bbpress for support) and determine pricing (thinking a Euro/month actually for each PowerUp, what do you think?).
Exiting times ahead …