Web site performance is an expansive topic. Like just about any aspect of Web development, a career can be made out of becoming knowledgeable on performance. A career can even be made out of becoming a Drupal performance expert (David Strauss is doing just that). I find for single-server sites there are 4 must-dos for performance. These are the biggest bang-for-the-buck performance improving techniques.

There are many template engines freely available for php, so many in fact that it can be overwhelming figuring out which one to use. During my journey of trying to find a template engine that I liked, I found a lot of debate about the usefulness of template engines that use their own template languages. After researching this for a while, I decided the best course of action would be to write my own that was template language free.