Proposal For Caching Plugins on WordPress

I wrote in my bad English some notes about caching on WordPress.

After those considerations, since caching plugins should interact with other plugin that manipulate the blog content, it should be a good idea to have a common way to let those plugins to stop the cache. Many other interactions can exists between plugins and caching systems, but at least the one below should be implemented.

My proposal is to have a global variable called $cache_stop set to false by default and declared by caching plugins on its main plugin file (the one initially loaded by WordPress. If some other plugin set that variable to “true”, the cache system must not save the page in cache.

So, if the content of the page is searched by Apache (due to rewrite rules) or advanced-cache.php file, nothing will be found and the content always generated by WordPress.

A second proposal is about the filtering of the cache collected buffer before it is stored on disk. The buffer is a string containing the page HTML, so the standard WordPress filter structure can be used. Why not name that filter hook “cache_buffer”?

External plugins can write a code like that:

function my_cache_buffer_filter($buffer) {
return $buffer . ‘<!– I was here –>;
}
add_filter(‘cache_buffer’, ‘my_cache_buffer_filter’);

So even changing the cache system external plugins works without having them to intercept every hook of every cache plugin.

Lite Cache is implementing this two proposal.