Speeding up Dokuwiki

I'm a big fan of Dokuwiki.

• its simple
• has a great ecosystem of plugins
• has great performance

But some time ago I decided there was room for improvement so I wrote a very simple framework (itself implemented as a Dokuwiki plugin). I've just uploaded this at Github.

Specifically this allows for:

• Much faster page loading using PJAX
• Pure javascript/CSS extensions - no PHP required
• Prevents Javascript injection by page editors

The PJAX page loading requires small changes to the template to exclude all but the page specific content (i.e. navigation elements and the rendered markup) when a PJAX request is made. Instead you just return a well-formed HTML fragment when the request is flagged as coming from PJAX. There is an example template here. While the template this is based on is already rather complex, the actual changes to this, or any existing template, are only a few lines of code - see the diff in the README.

This saves me around 450 milliseconds per page in loading time:

The savings come from not having to parse the CSS and Javascript on the browser. The serverside content generation time is not noticeably affected.

But even if you are not using Dokuwiki you can get the same benefits using PJAX on your CMS of choice.

A strict Content Security Policy provides great protection against XSS attacks. But the question then arises how to get run-time generated data routed to the right bit of code. Jokuwiki solves by this embedding JSON in data-* attributes including the entry point for execution.