Asynchronous WordPress

Eric Mann on July 31, 2014

When John Bloch and I (Eric Mann) started working with TechCrunch last year on their site redesign, one of the main goals was to improve site performance. Among the various tools we built to help meet that metric was a library called WP Async Task: an abstract library meant to give structure to asynchronous background tasks.

Thanks to WP Async Task, we can offload time-consuming requests (like Twitter interactions) from the main WordPress thread. Editors can publish posts as usual while expensive tasks run in the background rather than holding up the publication process.

In June, the TechCrunch team presented on “Non-Blocking WordPress,” explaining some of the approaches we took. Attendees were interested in learning more about WP Async Task and particularly interested in whether the code was available anywhere.

Being big believers in the power of open-source and giving back to the community, we’re thrilled to say that TechCrunch has decided to open-source the library and make it available on GitHub. Check out the library and look at the documentation on how to use the library in your own code.