Comments on: A more efficient Movable Type with PHP

By: Sam Newman

Sam Newman — Fri, 07 May 2004 09:12:17 +0000

There is certainly no problem using PHP in MovableType. MT ignores PHP and leaves it untouched. I did have some problems getting all of my pages to find the sidebar.inc file – I had to add a new search path to include_path like so:

PHP_value include_path '.:/usr/local/php-4.3.4/lib/php:/path/to/my/sidebar.inc'

By: rob

rob — Fri, 07 May 2004 00:45:00 +0000

interesting, because when I tried to use PHP require in my index template a week or so ago, it created an error (which exactly, i cannot remember) (and yes it was being saved as a PHP file)

Guess i’ll try again – at least i know now that someone else has found success with it.

By: Sam Newman

Sam Newman — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 16:37:38 +0000

Nope – you see MT builds the sidebar once, and creates a sidebar.inc file. PHP does get invoked per page request to include sidebar.inc, but its farily good at that sort of thing. So on the one hand you have longer rebuild times and more polling of sites like bloglines (to the extent that the guy who runs del.icio.us said “Please stop!”), on the other hand you have much shorter rebuild times but with a slight hit on each page request.

I’d hope that Apache/PHP would be smart enough to know when it can cache the pages in question (if sidebar.inc hasn’t changed for example). If this caching is good, then it should be nearly as efficient as returning a ststic page.

By: Simon Brunning

Simon Brunning — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 15:35:33 +0000

Doesn’t this mean that work needs to be done every time anyone reads your pages, as opposed to every time you change them? Surely this is more work?

Depending, that is, on how often your pages get read. ;-)