Wanted to share my latest Roots stack build

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Hey all, just wanted to share my latest build on the Roots stack.

Here’s an entrant only section - https://touchtunesbreakoutband.com/diy-toolkit/

This was my first site using the full Roots stack and while there was a slight learning curve, particularly in Trellis, I’ll definitely be using Roots for Wordpress builds here on out. The site has 4 phases, we’re currently in phase 2. The phases are adjusted via theme options, the theme template files use conditional values which check the phase - the site layout is adjusted depending on the phase.

The real challenge was creating 4 different themes all rolled into one. The second challenge was handling traffic as the site streams MP3s so I leveraged WP Offload S3 and W3 total cache. Site build took about 2 months, most of the time was devoted to the Likes system as well the audio player which is based off SoundManager2. I also had to build a script which transferred all 300 entries from an excel spreadsheet to Wordpress posts - there was a lot of trial and error here but a good learning experience.

The site is seeing about 100k views a month so traffic is very healthy, I monitor the server with New Relic but haven’t run into any serious problems.Anyways I just wanted to share what’s currently being deployed with the Roots stack and thank the devs who devote a ton of time to making Wordpress bearable.

edit: The site’s been moved to phase 3 - phase 2 demo is available here -> http://phase2demo.touchtunesbreakoutband.com/ (URL gore…)

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Looks great Alex, and everything loads super quick. Definitely a site to be proud of.

The site phases sound like a unique challenge.
There are many plugins for mapping and importing spreadsheet data, hope you didn’t have to reinvent the wheel there.

Have you turned on micro-caching in Trellis?

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Definitely recommend this route as opposed to using a plugin such as W3 Total Cache. Been very impressed with the Trellis micro-caching on the sites I’ve used it on, including https://roots.io/ (which previously used Batcache, and then W3 Total Cache before that).

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I’ll definitely check out micro caching. Is this the documentation? https://roots.io/trellis/docs/fastcgi-caching/

The issue I was running into with caching is the grid view of the bands on the home page needs to be random on each refresh. A lot of caching plugins were caching the random query so I needed flexibility on which queries to cache.

I’m really interesting in putting varnish in front of a site but haven’t had time to explore that just yet.

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Yes, page caching would stop it from being random on every refresh. Varnish is full page caching as well so that wouldn’t benefit you.

Edit: I should probably clarify, I think some of these full-page caching solutions do have the ability to not cache “sections”, but the added work to do that is generally substantial. Each has it’s own way of doing things.