This article is deprecated! Any technical information refers to software versions that are now obsolete. Please visit the DIYthemes Blog for current updates, or check out the old Thesis Blog for a treasure trove of website marketing insights.
After our last article about optimizing WordPress category pages for search engines, tons of savvy Thesis users began adding unique headlines and content to their category pages.
However, in the process, they unearthed a display bug on the edit category page of the WordPress admin interface.
What’s that? A bug?!? Not in this house, mister.
To squash this, I whipped up Thesis 1.8.1, and I couldn’t resist adding a performance improvement as well.
Stylesheets Now Easier to Cache
In the past, Thesis added cache-busting query strings to the end of CSS links in your document <head>. The purpose of these query strings was to ensure that your visitors would always see the most up-to-date version of your CSS. On the surface, this sounds good, but there are two problems with “busting the cache” in this manner.
First, disrupting the browser’s normal CSS caching behavior is only desirable if you’ve been actively changing your design. Most of the time, this is not the case, and clearly, it makes no sense to serve cache-busting query strings when they aren’t necessary.
The second problem with cache-busting is that, well—it busts the cache (or in this case, makes your CSS much more difficult to cache than it should be).
Speed and optimization are the central tenets upon which Thesis is built, and being cache-friendly is a big part of the performance equation. For this reason, I decided to remove the cache-busting behavior from stylesheet links in your document <head>.
If you’ve never heard of caching or are looking to implement it on your site, check out our article on improving website speed and performance.
