Ability to turn js files into minimised versions for production sites

[Robert Lyon]

Currently in mahara most css and javascript files are not compressed/minimised - this is great if you are editing them as a designer / programmer but means it is slower for sites to load.

It would be good if there could be a system that miniaturizes css / js files for production sites,
ie when $cfg->productionmode = true

I'm not sure how this will work - possibly an admin page with options on what to minimise (that can also be accessed via commandline for deployment scripts to access if needed) in conjunction with a mod_rewrite rule so that the correct files are accessed.

Or maybe some other way of doing it - it would be good to find out what others do for this kind of thing.

[Leo Xiong (leoxiong)]

A solution would be to setup mod_pagespeed for Apache. Not only does it minify Javascript and CSS, it also performs *many* other page optimizations. It’s licensed under Apache License 2.0. I've had great experience with it in the past.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Checked https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses and Apache license 2.0 is compatible with GPL 3+. Would that feature then also work with nginx?

[Leo Xiong (leoxiong)]

Yup, it supports Apache and nginx. There is an unofficial port for IIS but costs for commercial use.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Would this item still be needed when we move to Bootstrap as that is SASS?

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

So if we always use SASS we'll be fine for CSS, but would still need to look into minimizing the Javascript.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

I think minification itself is sort of overrated. It does improve performance, but not by a whole lot, like 5%.

So if it's easy to do, sure, we may as well (as long as we also include an option to de-minify for dev purposes).

Something else we could do that might improve performance more, would be to reduce the total number of file requests needed for each page, by concatenating some of the CSS stylesheets together. Likewise for Javascript files.