Take control of WordPress before functions.php

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  1. You get as much control as any other plugin. if you need some code to be executed before any other you can’t just include it in the theme and you will need the user to manually install it. Those files are reffered to “dropin plugins” and that is the best documentation I could find http://wpengineer.com/2500/wordpress-dropins/ (shame on the codex for not having that info)

  2. NO! leave caching to people that invested time to understand how to do caching properly and focus your efforts on design.