Hello bcworkz,
Thank you for your valuable feedback.
Regarding your comment: “A custom PHP page could take the request…“. What I was planning on doing is storing in my plugin’s directory a file called, say for example, processForm.php which would live there separately from the file of the plugin ‘handler‘ code that is invoked by the shortcode. That handler is where the form is generated for presenting to the user. The action field of the <form> line in that handler would be sending one to processForm.php upon submission of the form.
As it happens for what I need done in that processForm.php, no WP functions are required.
Let me confirm, though, that I understand you correctly. I assume that under my scenario processForm.php would still come within the framework of WP, thereby making me incur the WP overheads anyway, because of it being also on the WP server, right?
By the way, supposing that I keep it all within WP without applying any AJAX, but have something like memcache or varnish going. Isn’t that supposed to help alleviate the demand on the server?
