Members of the TayloeGray team went to Raleigh today and Andrew presented at a conference on the Wordpress publishing framework. Wordpress is one of the open0source frameworks, that we use to build client sites. The conference includes three tracks of Wordpress content and plenty of networking.

Andrew spoke about improving the performance of Wordpress based sites using the built in tools.

Here is the abstract:

“Speed Up Your Site Using Transient API for Caching”

Transient API is a great way to cache sidebar items and other fragments (HTML sections) of your site that don’t need to be created on every page load.

With a simple change to your template, you can dramatically reduce the load on your database and still have a dynamic site.

The presentation will include a basic overview of the transient API and how to use it in your template. Examples will include caching the tag cloud, most commented posts, and other side bar items.

To download the slides, transient API presentation

Nathan and Andrew have been out in San Diego for the past three days at the annual conference for Miva Merhant.  Miva is our eCommerce platform of choice and  they announced a great new set of features and new security enhancements. This will allow Miva to be PA-DSS compliant in time for the July 2010 mandate from most major credit card processors that all eCommerce solutions meet new, stricter compliance rules.  Miva will be one of one a few eCommerce systems, at this price point, that will meet this new mandate.  The jury is still out on when the major processors, such as Authorize.net, will actually enforce the new rules, but this has been coming down the pipe for over three years, so it should be soon.

One part of the new requirements is that eCommerce stores must now use three servers, each protected wth specific firewalls and encryption to serve the website, host the database and to house the encryption keys.   TayloeGray is working with our hosting providers to build a system that will ensure that our eCommerce solutions meet this mandate.

The new version of Miva also has a bunch of new features to make running an online store easier.  There have been improvements to the templating system, order processing, inventory tracking, shopping cart, returns and more.    The new version had eight rounds of beta testing to ensure both PA-DSS compliance and reliability.  It should be shipping (downloading, really) in the middle of March.

Also, Wordpress made some announcements about the 3.0 version of their software this week.    It looks like the 3.0 version will include many of the social networking features of Wordpress multiuser (MU) as well as new features to make it a better content management system.  You can read that announcement here.  WP 3.0 looks like it is going to be a big improvement to an already awesome platform.  TayloeGray builds all kinds of Wordpress based websites. Two good examples:  www.hip2save.com, gets 4 million page views per month.  UNCWEC.org is the first UNCW program website, not designed by UNCW itself to be linked to from UNCW.edu and promoted in an official UNCW press release.  UNCW officials say that is a big deal!

One last thing, is you have not checked out our new Facebook application and page for Hanover Center Shopping Mall, in Wilmington, NC, please do.  Fans of the page get access to coupons and deals.  It has some cool technology under the hood to make it work.  More on that later.