I made my own upload service for my website that is separate from WP, but uses WP to provide low level db functions and user verification. To do that, I include wp-load.php in my main script (Uploadify) but doing that seems to fill the server’s memory with unnecessary components. Thanks to that, I’m seeing an error in my script that seems to point to a installed WP plugin.
How can I load only the core WP components and ignore plugins? Is this even possible?
Disabling plugins entirely means you loose many advantages.
There are distributions of wordpress that go further and rip out posts and links etc, but they’ll always lag behind WordPress core and tend not to survive as long.
Here are some things that could be done
Short Init
Putting this in your wp-config.php:
define( 'SHORTINIT', TRUE );
Or defining it somewhere before you load in wordpress, should reduce the loading process and pull it back to minimal core functions.
Secondary lightweight installs
Setup a second wordpress installation, with only the plugins and themes you want (if any). Then configure the wp-config.php to use the same wp-content directory and database values.
Backpress
WordPress, the original BBpress and glotpress amongst others are built around the BackPress library. You could use this instead of WordPress to do your work though numerous APIs and features may be missing or in need of re-implementation/porting
Option tables
I would also bear in mind that WordPress loads the entire options table into memory to cut down on queries, if you’re saving any large values in there it’ll impact on performance.
Exiting early
You could also try hooking into earlier functions in the WordPress load process and exiting the PHP process before WordPress is finished, but I can’t advise on how safe that would be.
Selectively loading plugins
There is also this article on selectively loading plugins, but it does require hacks to the wordpress core files
