Reduce HTTP requests with Minify4Joomla

BETA release

Attention: this kind of mod is intended for developer or Joomla site with high number of visitors and facing performances issues.

A small HOWTO, a more comprehensive documentation can be found in my WIKI. A new forum board has also been started for support, bugs and your comments.

Install

The component com_minify like any Joomla component

Check proper installation

1. Use the menu entry "Check/System", at least the file cache at components/com_minify/cache has to be writable by apache/PHP!
2. Activate the URL Builder under "settings"
3. Drag and Drop the Bookmarklet tool in your Firefox Bookmark Toolbar

Read more: Reduce HTTP requests with Minify4Joomla

More performances for Joomla! with com_minify

Announcement of com_minify

I am developing a new component com_minify that will greatly reduce the number of http requests

it Combines, minifies, and caches JavaScript and CSS files on demand to speed up page loads.

from yahoo performance developer
80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

One way to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page's design. But is there a way to build pages with richer content while also achieving fast response times? Here are some techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests, while still supporting rich page designs.

Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single style sheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and style sheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.

I was developing this week end this component (name com_combine) but decide it would be better to use a proven engine, and I found one:
http://code.google.com/p/minify/

Minify is a PHP5 app that can combine multiple CSS or JavaScript files, compress their contents (i.e. removal of unnecessary whitespace/comments), and serve the results with HTTP encoding (gzip/deflate) and headers that allow optimal client-side caching. This helps you follow several of Yahoo!'s Rules for High Performance Web Sites.

The list of features is huge

• Combines and minifies multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single download
• Uses an enhanced port of Douglas Crockford's JSMin library and custom classes to minify CSS and HTML
• Caches server-side to avoid doing unnecessary work
• Responds with an HTTP 304 (Not Modified) response when the browser has an up-to-date cache copy
• Most modules are lazy-loaded as needed (304 responses use minimal code)
• Automatically rewrites relative URIs in combined CSS files to point to valid locations
• With caching enabled, Minify is capable of handling hundreds of requests per second on a moderately powerful server.
• Content-Encoding: deflate/gzip, based on request headers. Caching allows it so serve deflated files faster than Apache's mod_deflate option!
• Test cases for most components
• Easy integration of 3rd-party minifiers
• Separate utility classes for HTTP encoding and cache control

On top of that you'll get the ease of

• Installation and removal like any Joomla! component
• A real back end administration panel, multilingual,
• Version check to always keep up to date,
• Some security measure inherited from Joomla! framework and best practices.
• GPL v3 license for com_minify,
• BSD license for the engine minify

Download it later this week HERE