Automatic merging and versioning of CSS/JS files with PHP

Over at Ed Elliot’s the man himself came up with a cool PHP script that allows you to create a single cached include automatically from all the JavaScripts or CSS files you want to include. Check out Automatic merging and versioning of CSS/JS files with PHP.

For those who wonder why the hey you’d want to do this: working on high traffic sites means you learn a lot about how to make pages perform and as Nate Koechley explained at @media 2006 every http request sent from page results in another DNS lookup and generally slows down the perceived loading time of the page. Furthermore, scripts loaded in the head of the document get loaded first and add to the whole page loading time as browsers start rendering after all the dependencies in the head were loaded.

Using Ed’s script actually means you can have the maintenance benefit of different includes without having to worry about the performance problems.