New Template: Dark Matter

[TheMarco]

elStoph I get 404's on lots of files on your site. Images, scripts and CSS don't load.

[ElStoph]

dear marco,

I'll rebuild the page and try again. some templates work perfektly well some just don't.

C.

[ElStoph]

dear marco,

seems I put a wrong path in when installing pixelpost. works perfekty now!
Thank you soo much! Great work!


C.

[gocarlo]

The photos aren't loading. Any idea why this would be happening?

Other templates work fine. Can't see the main image or the thumbnails.

dm_support is in the addons folder and the darkmatter folder is in the templates folder. I turned on Page by Page archive.

I'm running v1.7.1 of PixelPost and v1.0.1 of DarkMatter.

[jaywilliams+]

Don't use spaces in your image filename.

As long as you do that, you should be fine.

[pengrus]

This template IS PERFECT.

Marco,

I did find that it takes about 4 times longer than the regular SIMPLE template. On T1, the Simple Template would take 2 seconds to load, and darkmatter would take as long as 9 seconds to load. Any plan to improve the loading speed?

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/s...yze/index.html

As a result, my overseas relatives says they are having problem loading the pages.

Thanks for your kind help.

[TheMarco]

Dark Matter is significantly more complex than the SIMPLE template. I'm however doing everything I can to speed up performance.

- All JS libraries and CSS framework file are loaded off Yahoo's CDN (Content Delivery Network) which is as fast as it gets.
- All local JS and CSS is compressed / minimized.

What I'm currently working on is:

- Sprites for CSS background images to lower the amount of images loaded
- Full caching for the thumbnail carousel

Back to the SIMPLE template: As said, Dark Matter is a lot more complex. It has a fairly hefty chunk of Javascript for all the extra features and in order for that to work, YUI framework files need to be loaded. It also puts some more pressure on Pixelpost itself as it has added database functionality.

Though a single page load may be a bit slower you'll WIN speed as well because commenting is done through AJAX (at least in Dark Matter Pro) and the thumbnail browser uses AJAX as well which minimizes loading time when browsing thumbnails as there's no full page refresh but just a little chunk of HTML that updates. You can do a whole lot on Dark Matter without leaving the initial page you loaded.

As you can see I'm applying all possible best practices in the field of speed tuning. It will however always be slower than SIMPLE... for the simple reason that it does a whole lot more

[pengrus]

Thanks for the explanation Marco. Glad to know that you are conscious of the loading as well.

[TheMarco]

I tried something else in order to speed things up.

1: I pre-load the previous and next large image in the background.
2: I pre-load all thumbnails in the background for the carousel to look smoother.
3: added some (fairly dumb) caching to the carousel. It only has about 40% effectivity at the moment but at least some of the AJAX requests are now fully cached.

This is all running on my site.

Can you guys try it out and let me know if you think it feels faster when browsing around?

It feels way faster to me but I'd like to hear some more opinions.

[pengrus]

Yes, just from remote memory, it feels much faster with the current version. Look forward to the next upgrade.

Thank you!