New "Base" homepage; WordPress Dashboard

June 27, 2005 / Filed under: Web Development

WordPress "Dashboard"

I’ve hastily developed a new Base section for this site, which "borrows" the idea from the "Dashboard" in WordPress.

The idea is to simply show the most recent updates from many different sites – not just a single site.

For example, the Wordpress developers all have personal blogs, outside of wordpress.org, which are all monitored on the Dashboard of the Wordpress admin panel. For those who use Wordpress for one reason or another, you’ll know what the Dashboard is.

It’s very useful to be able to see the most recent activity from many different sites – all on a single page.

This is similar to RSS, which can monitor any number of sites in a succinct format, and at a single location.

The point is not to emulate RSS, though – although I believe the intent is almost identical.

My "Base"

My Base section simply queries for the latest content, on any number of databases.

You’ll probably notice the page is slow to load, and that’s because there are currently 13 queries being run at load time. This is enormous, and it’s unsettling to me.

I am trying to find a better way to grab all the latest content...

Since most of the content is stored in separate tables, on separate databases, there is really no way to optimize the queries.

The only thing I can think of doing is storing the same information in a new, central table – and just grabbing the content from that single table.

This seems to be ideal, but now I have to make sure that updates at every realm also get inserted into the central table.

That’s what I’d have to do. But I want to go to lunch now. Eh.

Comments/Mentions

# Jennifer Grucza at 6/29/2005 10:04 am cst

I'd cache the content in-memory, maybe refreshing or clearing the cache every so often. Assuming there's a way to hold objects across requests in PHP, which I would hope there would be.