While FeinCMS in its raw form is perfectly capable of serving out a medium sized site, more complicated setups quickly lead to death by database load. As the complexity of your pages grows, so do the number of database queries needed to build page content on each and every request.
It is therefore a good idea to keep an eye open for excessive database queries and to try to avoid them.
FeinCMS comes bundled with the “ct_tracker” extension that will reduce the number of database queries needed by keeping some bookkeeping information duplicated in the base type.
Caching rendered page fragments is probably the most efficient way of reducing database accesses in your FeinCMS site. An important consideration in the design of your site’s templates is which areas of your pages depend on which variables. FeinCMS supplies a number of helper methods and variables, ready to be used in your templates.
Here’s an (incomplete) list of variables to use in {% cache %} blocks [1]:
- feincms_page.cache_key – a string describing the current page.
Depending on the extensions loaded, this varies with the page, the page’s modification date, its language, etc. This is always a safe bet to use on page specific fragments.
- LANGUAGE_CODE – even if two requests are asking for the same page,
the html code rendered might differ in translated elements in the navigation or elsewhere. If the fragment varies on language, include LANGUAGE_CODE in the cache specifier.
- request.user.id – different users might be allowed to see different
views of the site. Add request.user.id to the cache specifier if this is the case.
| [1] | Please see the django documentation for detailed description of the {% cache %} template tag. |