Actually, __autoload() is available in earlier versions of PHP (I’m pretty sure it was in 5.0). In 5.3.0 they added the ability to catch exceptions thrown from within it, but other than that use case you should be fine to use it.

Unfortunately, no. It will resume soon in the different way.

It is similar situation as with bbPress, a lot of things are needed all the time, and it needs to use a lot of memory by design. And since I don’t have a lot of experience with it, I don’t want to make a quick test only, so I will push it back a bit to get more time with it.

I’ll go ahead and note here that BuddyPress is a *much* larger plugin than any of the others being tested here. Pitting it against something small with a totally different purpose (Akismet, Members, etc…) isn’t going to be a fair comparison.

Many of the statements you make about performance and improvements are true. Just remember that it’s incredibly difficult to add completely new functionality at little to no performance cost, let alone 8 huge new features like BuddyPress provides.

Have mercy. 🙂

BuddyPress will be included in March tests.

Cool, look fwd to the February edition then 🙂

Thanks, I will include this on for next test.

Simple:Press (http://simple-press.com/) is another forum plugin that you perhaps can use as comparison to bbPress?

Yes, that is the problem, and considering that 5.3 is used on less than 10% of websites right now, we will be stuck with 5.2 for a long time. Hopefully some other solution can be used and bbPress improved. Anyway, I am great supporter of bbPress and I plan to release one more plugin for it soon, beside the one I already made for adding attachments (GD bbPress Attachments), and I am looking forward to improvements to come in the future.

Regarding using the magic __autoload(), sadly it’s part of PHP 5.3 and WordPress/bbPress/BuddyPress still need to support PHP 5.2. Open to seeing what improvements an autoload patch might give though, in preparation for the move to dropping PHP 5.2.

Thanks again for your help.

Thanks for the comment John. Yes, I know that bbPress is a bit of a problem in this regard, considering the way it should work. I am following bbPress 2.0 development for almost a year now and I think that it is a great plugin, despite using so much resources. Since I have used old bbPress 1.0 for a long while, I can say that bbPress 2.0 is better in every way, including memory usage (I still have old forum on localhost integrated with WordPress) considering how much more we have now with pluin version.

I get that plugins or theme need to be able to have access to bbPress all the time, but I think that most users are using bbPress through normal forum pages only. Some are using shortcodes to embed things, and maybe use widgets. But, I use bbPress 2.0 on this website, and I have no need for it anywhere but in the /forums/ section. And yet, it loads everywhere always. I will try to formulate in more details what sort of changes and code fragmentation can be used to make that optimized, and also maybe find some way to use PHP auto load methods. Big problem is that this will not be some quick to implement solution, but at least we can start with partial changes and improve over time.

Your findings actually aren’t that surprising. bbPress loads everything up to avoid third-party plugins hitting fatal errors from not having functions and template tags available to them, with the only caveat being admin functions and UI.

I’m more curious to see how bbPress 2.x fares using your testing methods against other forum plugins and the stand-alone bbPress 1.x branch too. bbPress 2.x relies heavily on the WordPress core actions, filters, and object cache.

It’d be the most helpful (to me and the bbPress project) to move your thoughts on optimizing bbPress specifically to this ticket to keep from fragmenting the conversation in too many places.

Thanks again for putting this together and I look forward to your thoughts and feedback.

Grade is review only of the code that is used to load plugin elements. I don’t get into the quality of the code, only loading.

So basically this is a code review?

Thanks Frank! FPW Post Instructions is really useful plugin, I already added it into development list for future projects.

As I said, values in the tables are not too relevant for the grade. Grade is based on actual code that plugin has to load own parts. GD Press Tools is a huge plugin, and if there was no loading optimization it would use twice as much memory. Plugins that score 1 or 2 are loading everything they have regardless of the actual need for things they load, and that is bad optimization, that is why they scored low.

My optimization tutorial lists all the reasons why optimization is necessary and how to achieve it. Any plugin to follow that article will without any doubt score high (4 or 5). I give here example of my another plugin GD Unit Converter. In the original measurement article from december it scored very low, and now I have applied my methods of optimization and it is a different thing now.

When I take “GD Press Tools Pro” and “Market Press Lite”, then they are no too far away from each other when you compare them by their values in your table. What makes the one have “Grade” 1 and the other one 5? Is the table missing information?

I think I provided enough explanation to both testing and grading in the article. I have not tested plugins usability or features, or general quality, that is not the goal here. Goal is to determine if the plugin is bad (or good) in resource usage. It has nothing to do with plugin categorization compared to other plugins in the test. Each plugin is evaluated individually.

Thanks for the comment Daniel. bbPress acts like WordPress: always load everything. WP needs to do that for obvious reasons, but bbPress doesn’t. And good idea for another forum plugin for comparison for next texs.

I just hope that all the plugin’s authors can see your test in a constructive way.

One negative surprise was bbPress, specially because it comes from the big bosses. Shouldn’t they be a good role model? Anyway, it would be nice if you could have another forum plugin in our list, just for the sake of comparison.

I have updated post with more on the grades. Grading will be changed over time, and if you have suggestions, please let me know. Grade will be always based on loading and resource usage, not the actual usability or features.