How do I serve fully cached full HTML on cloudfront

Yes, you can serve HTML through CloudFront as long as you don’t mind every user getting the same content until the cache expires. It completely depends how your caches are being stored. I can’t imagine a CDN that would not support this. They might not advertise it since many web sites are dynamic and can’t … Read more

Performance concerns: index.php vs taxonomy-$taxonomy.php

TL;DR Template: Performance not so much, semantics however, use hierarchy! TL;DR Query String: Use provided hooks, never edit directly. The Template File Apart from performance, first look at semantics. If you direct your browser to a taxonomy archive, WordPress will look for the following files (straight from the Codex): taxonomy-{taxonomy}-{term}.php – If the taxonomy were … Read more

Taxonomy vs Post Status

Probably post_status but this answer is probably irrelevant in your case. You have your own application with its own usage pattern of the DB therefor the assumptions used when designing wordpress DB for use by core might not fit you. Maybe you will need to add another index to the posts table, maybe create optimized … Read more