

TechCrunch Open Sources Its WordPress Async Task Library - minimaxir
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/wp-async-task-our-new-open-source-library/

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cheald
At Mashable, we did something similar, except we just used Sidekiq. We'd built
a lot of functionality in Ruby, which included ActiveRecord classes for
Wordpress tables (which makes working with Wordpress's table hierarchy
actually sane, and it's _insanely_ useful to be able to get to your DB as
objects in a console), so we could interact with Wordpress directly. Actually
queueing Sidekiq jobs is pretty trivial - you just need to be able to talk to
Redis.

Our frontend doesn't actually use Wordpress any more, which was vastly eased
by this approach; being able to decouple the backend and frontend made it
surprisingly easy to obviate the front-end portions of the product.

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taylorbuley
The comments section isn't open, so I'll ask the authors a question here in
case they see it: WordPress has had async tasks for a very long time in the
form of single scheduled WordPress cron items. How is that approach
insufficient for tasks such as rebuilding items like Crunchbase "cards"?

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joshfraser
They're talking about the frontend being blocked, not the backend.

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taylorbuley
Typically my design approach for this is to use cron items to pre-compute
components so that they don't have to be computed (nor templated, ideally) at
runtime.

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Gigablah
This is an amusing amount of press over what is essentially a PHP application
making a POST request to itself.

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wdewind
Wow, async tasks on top of WP? You are truly heroes, in a sick and twisted
kind of way. Nice work.

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dreamfactory2
Is this any different to cache-warming? What kind of percentage of page loads
are affected?

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benologist
This is a poor solution for having a page slowed down by dozens of 3rd party
ads/trackers/etc.

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alexkhadiwala
We don't love that the ads team requires so many placements and that AOL
requires so many trackers, but we worked to speed things up where we could

