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I just wondered if anyone had used Zend Guard/Ion Cube to encode a Wordpress application - I've made a custom WP CMS and was thinking of placing this onto an external server outside of my control.

I was wondering how this would effect things like:

  • General speed of the site
  • Would this need dedicated hosting? Any issues with shared hosting
  • Any unique/special server requirements?
  • The ability to update the wordpress core while still keeping it all encoded

Does anyone have any experience doing this with either Zend Guard or similar services, if so what issues did you encounter along the way, also how easy would this be for 'localhost' development?

Zabs
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  • Would it not be better to keep the WP core unencoded? Aside from the software license that compels you to make it freely available, there is no advantage to encoding something that can be gotten freely from the web. Just encode your bit. – halfer Aug 18 '12 at 18:08
  • I don't mind just encoding my bit, I just wasn't sure if it was a case of encoding none or all of it scenario. – Zabs Aug 18 '12 at 22:09
  • I think you can encode as much as you like. Aside from the points I made earlier, sometimes obfuscation can cause problems, so you should encode as little as possible. – halfer Aug 18 '12 at 22:36
  • Obfuscation done well doesn't cause problems except for anybody but would-be theives. It actually works better if you obfuscate as much as you can; climbing through mountains of insane code is lots scarier than climbing through a tiny pile. – Ira Baxter Aug 18 '12 at 23:46

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I can talk about ioncube:

You can easily encode just portion of your code like even single script. It will not affect the whole system as long as it is not encoded the way that disallows including non-encoded (or alien in general) files (but this feature is off by default).

As for performance boost - it depends mostly on script file size - the bigger the gain is more noticeable

As for hostings - user just needs ioncube loader. Most hostings incl. shared ones offer it by default or can enable on request. others, like VPS users etc can install it by hand and loader is free of charge.

Marcin Orlowski
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