[pLog-general] Meeting with Blog China's CTO and Blog Project Manager

[Oscar Renalias]

This is all good news... thanks for the efforts :)

> I just got contact with BlogChina's CTO - Donald Yu , and their Blog Project
> Manager - JianXiang
> 
> They told me they are very happy can have some contact with pLog Team ...:D
> 
> The following is the meeting minutes about tonight MSN meeting:
> 
> 1. Their blog hosting service is over 60,000 blogs right now .... NOT 20,000
> bloggers (Their service just start 3 month, there targe is over 1M bloggers)

Amazing! Is there any way we can use these figures to market ourselves?

> 2. They like pLog, because
> 
>   - Great MVC framework, easy to follow and maintain
> 
>   - DB Struture is good
> 
> 3. They don't like pLog, because
> 
>   - Bad perfomance!! They do the following to improve the performance
> 
>     )) Add Indexs to pLog Tables, They complains a lot of this :P

this is easy to add to wizard.php, when creating the tables or when updating
from 0.3.x to 1.0.

The only problem is that we actually lack the infrastructure and the time to
perform extensive load tests and stress test the code... (or I least, I lack it
myself, don't know if anybody would be willing to help in that area) I know
performance has to improve but I have never had the time to run any real tests
and get some cold figures so that I can get an idea of what and where to improve
(even more, if needed)

>     )) Separate the plog_article table to two, plog_article and
> plog_article_text to increas search perfomance

I'm not an expert DBA, will it really help?

>     )) Add smarty cache and apache cache to increase the page load and
> descrease server loading

The smarty cache has been added and it works wonderfully.

The HTTP cache has also been implemented via HTTP conditional requests and HTTP
302 responses, for those clients that support it (IE and firefox do it very
well, Safari behaves strangely and I've got no clue about Opera, Koqueror, etc)
The only thing to keep in mind is that HTTP cache doesn't make any sense without
Smarty cache... But together they both work great.

>     )) .... Actually, they re-write most of the codes .... 

Any example?

> 4. They host the blog on one server (DB+AP) and apache cache in another
> server (2 machines)
> 
> Okay, The most important is =====>  I already told them I would like to host
> a online conference for pLog core team and BlogChina members, they are very
> happy about this idea. So .... Please let me know your time, and I can
> arrange the meeting!!

I am unfortunately very busy at the moment, but I believe we can try to find a
suitable time for everybody... My time zone is GMT+2 as far as I remember :-)
 
> I think we can discuss with them about 
> 
> 1. pLog 1.0 features

We can describe what we've added but I don't think we should add too many more
things at this late stage. There will always be time for that in an eventual 1.1
or 1.2 release.

> 2. pLog performance improvement discussion

Smarty cache and HTTP caching will make a huge difference. Of course you have to
keep in mind that things like plugins will *not* work with cached pages
(basically because the page is cached and plog's core won't generate it again
until there is a change triggered by events such as a new post, or an updated
post, or a new category, etc)

Other than, I'm willing to hear about suggestions on how to improve the database
performance. My knowledge doesn't get too far when it comes to that area...

> 3. others ----> any suggestions???

Yes: we need help coding. Or else we won't be able to release anything before
2nd quarter 2005... :(

Also another comment, is there any way you could ask them to fetch the latest
version of the code from the svn repository and give it a quick try? At least
they'll get an idea of what's coming!

Oscar