At the Pods Foundation, we don't just make Pods, we use Pods. In this talk we'll cover how the Pods Team uses Pods to create great WordPress sites. Learn different strategies for how we tweak and optimize Pods for the best performance. In addition, you'll learn the best practices for local development and deployment to live sites. Pods has so many options, there is no right way. Find out which ways we like to use Pods. There will be plenty of time for QA during this talk.

1. Tweaks, Optimizations &
Workflow - Oh, My
Scott Kingsley Clark, @scottkclark
& Phil Lewis, @pglewis13
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

2. What do databases do well?
● General set operations; dealing with large numbers of
rows efficiently
● sorting on integer indexes
● filtering (WHERE clauses)
● joining tables
● aggregating (sums, averages)
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

3. What do databases not do well?
● repeated calls to the engine
● sorting, filtering and joining on unindexed fields (and
somewhat with text fields)
● synchronization
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

4. Writes are More Expensive Than Reads
● Set default values, integrity rules, other housekeeping
● all involved index columns must be updated as records
are inserted
● As the indexes grow so does the time needed to update
each successive record
● Not generally a day-to-day issue but comes into play with
large imports
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

5. Optimizing Your Site
● Object caching: Memcached / APC (W3TC supports it)
● Anonymous cache: CloudFlare (W3TC supports it)
● Serving files: MaxCDN (W3TC supports it)
● Hosting: SiteGround / WPEngine / etc
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

6. Optimizing Your Workflow
● Git version control
● Git-flow Branching
● Production vs Staging vs Local
● Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV)
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

7. Optimizing Your Workflow: Git
● It’s easy to roll back when things don’t work
● Committing often and on specific parts of a project
makes it easy to track what changed and when, and
possibly just ‘roll back’ individual commits instead of
restoring all the way back to an older date
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

8. Optimizing Your Workflow: Git-flow
● master (production)
● develop (staging)
● hotfix/fix-xyz
● feature/add-abc
● ZOMG YOU NEED
THIS!
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git
-branching-model/
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

9. Optimizing Your Workflow: CloudFlare
● http://www.cloudflare.com/
● Anonymous page cache for your site, and it’s up whether
your site is slow or down
● Speed up assets and automatically minify JS / CSS and
optimize images
● Rocket Loader will off-load your external JS until other
assets like CSS load
● IPv6 / SPDY support even if your hosting doesn’t have it
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

10. Optimizing Your Workflow: MaxCDN
● http://www.maxcdn.com/
● Files can be off-loaded to another server which serves
them up faster and spread across the world through a
Content Delivery Network
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014

11. Optimizing Your Workflow: Hosting
● SiteGround - http://www.siteground.com/
● WPEngine - http://wpengine.com/
● They offer Memcaching, Page Caching, and built-in Git for
your site itself
● SiteGround has WP-CLI, cPanel, and lots of control
● WPEngine has Detailed Caching (really cool!)
Tweaks, Optimizations & Workflow - Oh, My! // Scott Kingsley Clark & Phil Lewis // PodsCamp 2014