Tutorials & articles written by Bård Farstad

Website performance is one of the major factors that contribute to a good user experience. A slow website drives visitors away, while a responsive website encourages visitors to explore and contribute.

Squid is an Open Source proxy application that can also be used as a reverse proxy. The difference between a proxy and a reverse proxy is that a proxy delivers content from multiple webservers to one user, while a reverse proxy delivers content from one webserver to multiple users. For example, a normal proxy might be used to provide a degree of anonymity to a user or to access servers that would otherwise be blocked; the proxy would access many other servers on the user's behalf. On the other hand, one of the reasons for using a reverse proxy is to speed up the delivery of content to all visitors of a particular server. This article shows how to use Squid with eZ Publish to improve the performance of your website.

This article explains how to tune a MySQL database for use with eZ Publish. MySQL is a database engine used by eZ Publish to store content. While other databases are supported by eZ Publish (such as PostgreSQL and Oracle), for performance reasons we recommend MySQL

To get optimal performance from your eZ Publish installation, you need to have the hardware infrastructure that can support your site's level of activity. Different sites and site usage patterns require different hardware configurations. In this article we look at the most common hardware configurations for eZ Publish deployments, ranging from single servers to clustered environments.

This article explains the eZ publish 3.8 clustering architecture. It also discusses problems with clustering in previous eZ publish versions, shows how these issues have been resolved in version 3.8, and gives you an idea of the results you can expect from clustering.

eZ Publish uses templates (consisting of HTML and eZ Publish-specific code) to configure the graphical elements of the user interface. In this article, we show you how to work with eZ Publish templates through the example of creating a frontpage for a news portal.

The eZ Components is designed to simplify building applications with PHP 5.1. For example, they can make a developer's life easier when it comes to image manipulation. With eZ Components, you can analyse and scale images, also apply visual effects and other manipulations to them. The examples are based on the eZ Components rc1 release.

The sample code of this article is available for download.

eZ Publish is a toolbox ready to be tweaked, tuned and configured. To make the most of eZ Publish you should use a development environment to boost your efficiency. In this article we take a look at some of the available tools for easing your eZ Publish site development.

Whenever you read about design and HTML these days, you see references to so-called table-less CSS layout. This article covers how to use the power of CSS to theme eZ Publish 3.5. Here, we'll walk through every step required to create a new theme using CSS.

This article shows how you can set up eZ Publish in a clustered environment. Using the techniques outlined in this article you can get eZ Publish running in a load-balanced and failover environment ensuring higher uptime and better performance.

Every company and organization needs to communicate internally, and an intranet is a valuable tool in this continuous process. This article shows how you can configure eZ Publish to share information, and to restrict information over your intranet. It also shows how you can replace your existing network file system with an accessible virtual WebDav-enabled versioned file system.