I’m Hal Stern, and I’m going to be talking about how WordPress parses URLs and turns them into SQL statements. Why do you care? SQL performance can greatly color user-perceived site performance. Understanding how WordPress generates a database query lets you modify those queries to organize and present content in many shapes that don’t look or feel like a blog (which is a good thing). The talk is aimed at beginning developers, or anyone who wants to understand more about what happens before the Loop gets started.
I’m in the early Sunday morning slot, so I’ll be using an indoor voice and moving slowly.
Talk summary: How are the URLs typed (or clicked on) by your loyal and fun-loving WordPress reader community used to select content for display? There’s a tremendous amount of URL parsing that happens before the WordPress Loop is handed content, taking those URLs and turning them into SQL applied to the underlying MySQL databases. This talk takes apart the URL parsing, SQL generation and page template selection processes, showing how categories, tags and other content slugs are used to actually find the content they describe. I’ll highlight some hooks to modify the default parsing and SQL generation behavior and take a careful walk through the various MySQL tables that are used. No prior knowledge of SQL is required, although you’ll probably leave being able to use “INNER JOIN” in a sentence.
