theme

Quick tip; disabling WordPress author pages

by

I helped build a WordPress-site for a not-for-profit and they asked me to disable the author pages. Although I’m sure there are multiple plugin-based solutions, I ended up simply adding an author.php to my (child) theme with this in it;

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: /");
?>

As author.php is used for all author pages (if available, else archive.php is used), every attempt to reach an author page will result in a permanent redirect being sent, effectively disabling the author archive. Keeping it simple stupid!

2012.FFWD; high performance Twenty Twelve child theme

by

Twenty Twelve is beautiful but slow, so I created 2012.FFWD. This Twenty Twelve child theme looks pretty much the same as the original, but comes with the following performance-boosting changes under the hood:

  • no webfont downloaded: loading fonts slow sites down, always. Fallback-fonts as defined in Twenty Twelve (Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif) are used instead.
  • minimized style.css: the amount of CSS is staggering, even minimized we’re still at 28KB!
  • minimized and inlined navigation.js: the overhead for doing a separate request for small javascript-files is bigger then the increase in filesize when inlining.

And these small changes indeed seem to have a pretty good impact on performance when comparing my previous test with Twenty Twelve with a new one for 2012.FFWD;

  • from 9 to 3 requests
  • from 142KB to 15KB downloaded size
  • loadtime from 2.457s to 0.937s

You can download the child theme here for now, but I might upload it to wordpress.org’s theme repository later.
Before applying 2012.FFWD on my own blog, I had to do some emergency bugfixing in Autoptimize. Autoptimize is the plugin I use to aggregate and minify JS and CSS (including data-uri magic on background images), but it is currently unmaintained. It messed Twenty Twelve (and hence 2012.FFWD) up severely when viewed in IE7 and IE8, aggregating html5.js into a javascript-file loaded at the bottom of the HTML and loading the IE-specific CSS before the aggregated generic CSS. If anyone is interested in my bugfixed version of Autoptimize (there’s some other fixes in there as well), drop me a line.