cSprites
What is it?
cSprites is a unique Wordpress plugin that allows you to speed up your page loading time by reducing the number of requests for images and compressing the file size of those images.
How does it work?
It works by first scanning your content for <img> tags, it then combines all of your images into a single large image called a sprite. The plugin then creates special CSS classes to display your images and replaces all of your <img> with new ones containing the updated CSS classes, next it inserts a new CSS file into your page <head> tag. Now when your page loads, rather than making many requests for multiple image files, it will make one request for the new sprite.
Requirements
cSprites requires PHP5, it will not work on any lower versions. It also requires GD library to be installed along with the ability to open urls.
To Do
The next step in development is to benchmark the cSprites core and see where I can trim the fat. Hopefully there is plenty of fat to trim.
Known Issues and Bugs
I think there is a lot of potential for the plugin and it is still under constant development. Currently there are a few known issues, that may be address in future versions:
- Currently cSprites will not distinguish between PNG8 and PNG24 and will always sprite PNG images with PNG24. If anyone knows a way to differentiate these THAT WORKS using PHP let me know
- cSprites cannot handle dynamically generated images, these include images that end in something like thumbnail.php?thumb=http://asdf.com/myimage.jpg. I am hoping to include this in a future version but still not sure.
cSprites needs to be much faster. Running cSprites can be heavy on the processor because of all the image manipulation. Therefore the caching mechanism should run very efficiently and I need to go back into the code base and see where I can tweak to improve performance. If any developers wanna see if they can hunt down any bottlenecks, I would be appreciative.Added a much better caching mechanism.
Related Articles
- Sprite Optimization
- cSprites Demo
- cSprites – A Dynamic CSS Sprite Generator in PHP5
- Transparent GIFs with PHP and GD
- Packing Lightmaps
- A List Apart – CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death
- CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them
41 Responses to “cSprites”
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Hi,
I’m using the combo Hyper-Cache and DB-Cache, is it possible to use csprites in combination with both them?
any news on the ability for theme images, aka backgrounds and bullets to be included by the plugin?
background images are a totally different issue indeed, due to the problem of background images being repeatable, scrollable and others it is very difficult to integrate them into a sprite without creating it by hand. the underlying framework does have the ability to integrate background images, but sadly it will probably never be able to automate this.
Hi Adrian,
Any plans to update CSprities to fix the incompatibility between the plugin and caching plugins?
Hi,
Love the concept of the plugin.
For me, the first entry’s main picture of a post on the homepage is repeated over a few times, and the rest of the posts images display normally?
Could you help me?
Let me know what info you need and I will get it back to you ASAP.
Thanks,
Darryn
can you send me a link so I can see an example?
Really great plugin. I think it’s helping a little in my constant battle to make my site quicker.
Is there any way to get it to include images in sidebars or outside the loop, because I think that’s where the real hold up is on my site.
Kind regards, Miklas.
Hello, I’m trying to use this pluggin since I have too many pictures in my sidebar but it seems to work only for the main posts… is there something I can do to enable this in my sidebar? Thanks!