This is the first release-version of my remake of the Elite theme. It is based on the SandBox theme and will not work without that installed. Hope you like it!
Download it here: newelite
Theme optimization tips
May 6, 2008 – 5:02 pm
Found this great post on Pro Blog Design. If you are not changing themes often, this is a great tip.. to delete dynamic tags from you theme, to improve server load.
Some day I will do a speedtest on this 
Speedtest 5: Contact Forms
May 5, 2008 – 4:04 pm
This time I decided to check out the different contact forms plugins for WordPress. Some of them are just simple contact forms where you have no options for customization, and others lets you build your own forms from scratch.
The plugins where you could build your own forms all came with a default form, with the exception of FormBuilder. Before I could test this plugin I created a simple contact me form. cformsII lets you turn on/off ajax feature on the forms, but I couldn’t detect any difference in loadtime either way.
The tests where all done on a fresh install of WordPress, using Firefox and Firebug.
The plugins I decided to test are:
- WP_ContactMe 1.0.1 by DCoda Ltf
- WP-ContactForm 1.5 by Ryan Duff and Peter Westwood
- SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) 1.1.3 by Eric Martin
- FormBuilder 0.57 by TruthMedia Internet Group
- Contact Form 7 1.7.7 by Takayuki Miyoshi
- cformsII 8.4 by Oliver Seidel
| Plugin | WP_ContactMe | WP-ContactForm | SMCF | FormBuilder | Contact Form 7 | cformsII |
| JS | No | No | jquery | prototype | Yes, 3 | Yes |
| Custom forms | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Insert method | ||||||
| Avg. loadtime | 1.24s | 1.34s | 2.39s | 2.8s | 3.17s | 2.65s |
Note! The SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) required me change my theme, so I decided to drop it from the test, as all others are “Plug-and-play”.
UPDATE! After checking the installation instructions for SMCF it seems you can indeed insert this form without altering any themes. You just have to create a post or a page, and enter a link with a certain class. This link will then open the contact form. The average loadtime of SMCF can therefor be a bit inaccurate since it was taken on different day than the rest. But as you can see, it is the fastest of the javascript-using plugins 
Conclusion
If you just want a simple form for your readers to contact you, you are better off with either WP_ContactMe or WP-ContactForm. But if you want to be able to customize your own forms, cformsII is the “fastest” of them.
Speedtest 4: Are you feeling social today?
April 28, 2008 – 3:16 pm
This time I have decided to speedtest social plugins.. you know, the ones that lists small icons for you to bookmark your post or page on different social websites.
I quickly found out that there are quite alot of these plugins. Most of them just inserts a list of icons at the bottom of your post or page. There are also some that comes as a widget, and some that is linked to an external site, such as ShareThis. But it is the ones that inserts icons on your page or post that I’m testing today. Read More
Speed up your postview using paginated comments
If you have a post with a lot of comments, surely it must be some speed gain from just showing, say ten at the time? To test this I installed the Paginated Comments plugin by James Maurer and created a test post with 12 comments. I configured the plugin to show only 10 comments (this is in fact the default setting), and started testing.
I first timed the loading of the post with the plugin turned off. The average loadtime was 1.18s. I then timed it with the plugin turned on, and after clicking the show all link, thus showing all 12 comments. This time the average loadtime was 1.2s. Not much difference, but a slight increase in loadtime as was expected.
Now I timed the page with only 10 comments showing, and this time the average loadtime was 1.09s. I also timed the page with only the 2 remaining comments showing and got an average loadtime of 1.03s.
So it seems you can indeed decrease the loadtime of the post by limiting the comments.
Note that this test was done on a fresh install of WordPress, and the 12 comments used were just short ones. I would love for someone to do a similar test on a post with ALOT of (long) comments. If you do, let me know!