I’ve had the opportunity to work with W3 Total Cache (W3TC) on WPVibe and various other WordPress projects. I’ve found it to be the most flexible and without question, the most robust and effective caching plugin for WordPress. I’ve also been fortunate enough to meet with the creator of W3TC, Frederick Townes, and get some pointers along the way.

Frederick Townes, CTO Mashable

Frederick Townes is the CTO of the most popular social media news site on the internet Mashable.com. Along with his efforts at Mashable, he also founded W3 MARKUP and is the current CEO of W3 EDGE.

Frederick recently took time out from his busy schedule to talk with me. He gave me a great look into his take on various killer topics:

Dre Armeda – You’re the CTO at Mashable, CEO at W3 EDGE, Founded W3 MARKUP. That’s a pretty tall order, how you do balance your day-to-day?

Frederick Townes – Days are long. :) In general the skill set I need to manage my various teams and supporting casts are similar. So basically the research I do at W3 EDGE is used to move mashable.com forward and contribute to the projects as needed from a server, user experience design or WordPress performance standpoint. In general, orienting my world around WordPress and being a server junkie / web application performance fanatic makes everything blend together a bit.

Mashable has grown tremendously and shows to the capabilities of building the WordPress platform. What are some of the major customizations that have led to successful growth and scalability?

Mashable.com

Most of the plugins we use always needed some level of customization, even when we work with the original plugin authors. Writing plugins that scale and lend themselves to complex hosting paradigms is not something anyone has really produced a guide for, no tips in the codex either. So we’ve found that fragment caching has been among the tricks that I can disclose. The principle there is that whether the plugin is related posts, popular posts, most commented or even some custom queries for special lists etc in your functions.php file, caching is your best friend. Rarely is there any component of a site that needs to be generated every page view. If you use fragment caching, then the “Welcome User” messages and other personalization functionalities of sites today are much easier to deliver – performance wise.

Design, development, search / social / conversion optimization, the list goes on. You’re involved in some very large scale and popular web projects. What is the one project that really stands out to you as one of your major accomplishments?

Although I have some other projects that I will be announcing soon. I think my years at mashable.com are the most significant. Pete and I have battled countless user experience and server performance issues as we grew. The thing that kept everything interesting is that, as soon as I finished preparing the next infrastructure optimization, there was more traffic to force me to push the envelope again. So again, mashable is among my crowning achievements as a “project.” Two other projects that were particularly fun to work on in the past were interfaces for Yahoo! micro-sites and the blogs smashingmagazine.com and yoast.com; all of them were very unique projects in their timing, scope and goals. All of those guys are amazing to work with and pillars in the community.

When was your first interaction with WordPress and what were your thoughts at first look?

I first looked at WordPress when I switched w3-edge.com from a server side includes based site to a WordPress theme around version 2.0 or so. Prior to that point I’d only kicked tires and so forth. So my first theme was migrating our agency site to WP and at that point I finally felt that WP was a product we could use as a CMS to deliver projects to clients.

In your eyes, how has WordPress progressed over time?

From a WordPress consultant perspective, I think WordPress has taken most of the steps that I wanted. My primary concern is always ease-of-use for the clients and that also means ease of maintenance, quality support in the open source community and the presence of other skilled consultants in the space. All of those elements exist and the product continues to add value as a publishing tool, so I can stand behind that. Such a high quality product is also motivational – making it a wise investment for me to contribute to the project in my own way. Also seeing the various uses for WordPress beyond the typical blog format is of particular interest, demonstrating the flexibility of the framework.

W3 MARKUP offers services around WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. There are significant differences between these platforms and some perceived areas each perform well in. Are you starting to see an overlap as they mature and where do you see gaps these days between these very different solutions?

I’m not seeing any real overlaps, so much as I’m seeing paths diverge. More and more developers are turning to WordPress to deploy applications and Drupal and Joomla are not less popular per se, I just see the focus being more on publishing and less on functionality as the web evolves. In other words, you see more sites with easy to deploy widgets and plugins/modules/extensions making the need to work with frameworks like Drupal or Joomla, less desirable unless those platforms have the offerings you want already baked in, making them a better fit for the same reason.

I also think that that two other factors have shaken up the CMS race as well. Specifically Magento’s foothold as to the go to shopping cart and BuddyPress/bbPress’ growing awareness have taken away from Joomla and Drupal quite a bit.

In your experience with WordPress, what would be a major feature you would love to see added to core?

I think forms and galleries are a major failing of WP and I’d love to see both of those better handled sooner than later.

I want to thank you for giving back to the WordPress community with your development of the W3 Total Cache plugin. We love it here on WPV and would love to learn more about what the future holds for the plugin.

Believe it or not the roadmap hasn’t changed since the beginning aside from priorities driven by the interests of the users obviously. Having said that v1.0 is 70% at the time of this writing. For a couple cool highlights coming before 1.0: Simplified minify configuration, a preview mode so that your changes are not applied until you want them to be, support for more CDN providers, support for more opcode caches and some very cool mobile options.

After 1.0, v1.1 will start the release of a number of add-ons for the core plugin, which will give every blog lots of the goodies that only major blogs seem to be able to implement.

Two words, choose one: Design or Development? Why?

Development today, is design. Seriously, not a cop out, but today’s sites are applications and applications are all about user experience. That trend really started with the proliferation of the JavaScript libraries and development frameworks in addition to the marriage of AJAX to develop richer user experiences. So as user experience and highly interactive applications became more and more in demand and necessary, some of the development paradigms shifted from figuring out how to plan your relational databases and scale your clusters, to determining how to lower the learning curve and wait times on your applications through the careful use of AJAX and manipulation of the interface. Both sides of the table, designers and developers are meeting in the middle in today’s sites and applications like never before. As for me, I enjoy engineering an interface the same way I engineer it’s implementation, I cannot choose or favor one.

I am a firm believer people listen through their eyes, if you can visually attract them, they will listen. What’s your take?

People are fickle. I think instant gratification and ease-of-use facilitate the learning process, so if you’re to drive time on site, adoption rates or conversion rates with your site or application; your focus has to be finding what is troublesome to the user and removing those obstacles. More often than not it’s making sure that who you are and what your site is about are clear to the user upon arrival. Once you have your brand and messaging clear, everything falls into place because inconsistencies become more obvious.

For companies and individuals getting started on WordPress, what are some words of wisdom you can offer to get them going in the right direction?

Worry less about what WordPress does and more about what your users want and how to properly engage them. Like the iPhone, WordPress is at a point where “there’s an app for that” when it comes to finding plugins that give you most of what you’re looking for. So similar to the previous question, engaging the user is easier than ever and with WordPress, you can easily publish, implement and deploy functionality into your blog, magazine or whatever you’re using WordPress for.

There is no one solution that fits every scenario. Can you offer your take on an effective strategy for monetizing a site?

There are lots of useful plugins out there that do things like allow you to place ad sense (or any ad) on posts of a certain age or referrer or manage affiliate links or ads. Additionally there are numerous ad networks out there like buysellads.com that are thought leaders and very helpful to publishers of all sizes. But I think as far as sustainability is concerned, product (i.e. books) or subscription-based models should be the target for sites that can work out a service or produce content that lends itself to that, i.e. shoemoney.com for example. Of course there’s the (traditional) use of a blog as work history / business card / case study list, which lends itself to the sale of professional services. It seems that the paradigms that exist are pretty straight forward these days – I don’t see any game changes forthcoming in 2010.

Ultimately people visit websites for content right? What’s your biggest tip to designers and developers to keep in mind when creating the next big blog?

One of the smartest trends started by Jason Santa Maria I think is to produce unique post layouts based on the content presented in the post. I think that ideas like this, in additional to producing useful content and demonstrating thought leadership are always going to be the foundation of successful careers and the blogs that showcase them. From there, my previous comments on monetization apply.

You stay pretty busy with some amazing projects, what does the future hold? Are there any upcoming projects you’d like to share with us? Any game changers?

I am baking up a couple game changers for various industries, however nothing I can disclose at this time. More on that next quarter. :)

In closing, do you have any tips for WPVibe as we continue to grow the site, be gentle. :)

I think the secret weapon for new sites is BuddyPress, there are many clever ways that BuddyPress + bbPress can be used to create some nice and crisp platforms for conversation and community development. And that’s the trick, being very focused and consistent so that the over time the brand is synonymous with the community and content that lives within. The ability for publishers to own their content and users (if you will) using BuddyPress is also going to become more critical as we move forward.

I think you guys have started off on the right foot, just continue to work on that roadmap and make it clear to your readers where that is and ask for a bit of help steering now and again – that will be a great compass for you. I think PollDaddy would be helpful there. :)

Feel the Vibe! Thanks a bunch Frederick, always a pleasure.

Do you have some questions for Frederick? Are you interested in learning more about W3 Total Cache or other ways to really get your WordPress site firing on all cylinders? Make sure to leave your comments, it’s always great to hear from you.