AJAXWp to Give a Punch to Your Blog

Filed in archive AJAX on August 2, 2006

Entrepreneur and technologist Gianni Milanesi has come up with a lightweight JavaScript enhancement which adds AJAX functionality to WordPress blogs. The benefits are immense in the form of faster load times, increased responsiveness of the user interface and the blog also gets a cooler look. One could download the script at giannim.com/blog/index.php?page_id=13/.

The installation of the script requires moving three files to the Wordpress installation directory and pasting the coding into the header.php file of the current blog theme. It degrades in a graceful manner and leaves the blog functional even for users who have Javascript disabled. One unique thing about this script is that it supports bookmarking and has a built in browser history management so that users could navigate through the blog using the back and forward buttons of the browser.

The script operates transparently by parsing the (X)HTML of the blog, and adding onclick event handlers to all links that point to internal blog pages. When a user clicks on a link AjaxWp traps the event and, instead of letting the browser navigate to the target page, requests the target page with AJAX. The requested page is then parsed by the AjaxWp engine, filtering out redundant markup (like the header and footer), and inserted in the designated area of the blog.

It works in two modes: quick, minimal configuration and faster deployment and optimized, greater performance and optimization. Guidelines regarding installation are available at the project's website.