How to prevent the white 'flash' on page load?

What is the best way to AJAXize existing wordpress templates to prevent having to load a whole new page?

• the method should allow for replacement of just the page content (text images etc) and not the entire template all over again.

• Answer:

  I'll need a bit more info -- what exactly are you trying to accomplish here (the end goal)? e.g. Why would you want to replace a page's content without a reload? ---------------------- OK. That helps. AJAX comment plugins are plentiful if you want to avoid page reloads there. If you want to swap everything you're looking at a real headache in that WordPress themes are not designed to be rendered client side. But if you really wanted to do it, and every page basically uses the exact same template... you'd want to look into a plugin like JSON API (or similar): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/ WIth that you could get all the new post data via AJAX, and then write a (theme specific) rendering function that would swap all the DOM element's content to render the new post within the old one. You'll also want to use HTML pushState() to modify the browser history and URL to not break usability there (e.g. bookmarking, back button). http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html And then you have the sidebars to deal with -- if they are site wide and never change per post/page, you can leave it, otherwise you may need to write an AJAX call to return that as a big HTML fragment and do a wholesale swap of the content each sidebar. Again this would be theme specific as different sidebars can be registered by themes. And the menu... which would need class updates for current page ancestor, parent, etc. And the footer, if that changes at all based on the page shown. If you're head is hurting by now (mine is) you can see that you're basically rewriting the browser in JavaScript and the parts of the page you're not replacing are actually pretty insignificant as far bas bandwidth and load time are concerned (some sites like blogs may be mostly static except for post content, but not WP as a CMS ones). Between caching (server side), using a CDN, and the browser's internal cache (client side) I'm not sure if it's quite worth all this work to save transmitting a few bytes of HTML over the wire for a page load (comments do make sense to do via AJAX though). This would break in older browsers (e.g. they'll have to fallback to the traditional page request as they don't support the history API, or you'd have to use those nasty hashbang URLS which are widely considered a usability nightmare). Gist It can be done, but site speed is mostly solvable in other ways (caching, CDN, server performance optimization). AJAX comments are a solved problem. Facebook is a web application tuned specifically for this purpose (and is really more analogous to AJAX comments). Getting WP to behave similarly (outside a very narrow scope) is a very difficult task (at present). Good luck, please post your results if you're able to pull it off!