App for Cloudflare® Pro 1.9.2

[realmranshuman]

Already have the API enabled with all the necessary permissions, and can use all of the features too. Just that the "Cache pages for guests" option can't be enabled. The switch doesn't toggle at all. Tried different browsers too (Chrome, Edge, and Firefox), and Incognito mode as well.

One thing... The website has 200K+ posts, and over 800 pages. The server response time even without caching is under 300 ms. Other than Redis object caching, no other caching mechanism is configured. The server is powerful and well configured enough to not cause resource issues.

What do I do, and how do I fix the issue of "Cache pages for guests" option can't be enabled?

 

[digitalpoint]

I see what's going on. Apparently it's the one place that has some leftover jQuery code (the latest version had a JavaScript rewrite to remove all jQuery code). Should have a fix shortly (will be pushed out to wordpress.org).

 

[digitalpoint]

The fix has been pushed to wordpress.org, so if you update to the 1.9.3.1 version, it should be sorted.

Sorry about that. 😬

 

[realmranshuman]

Thank you! That was extremely quick. I will definitely recommend your plugin over "Super Page Cache". Add disk cache, a connection to Object Cache, and Cache Warmup feature, and this would be quite literally a perfect plugin.

I will check if I can contribute to new features as well.

 

[digitalpoint]

Honestly, I'm not sure a disk cache would be particularly useful. At that point you just are having a cache for a cache (an extra layer and extra things to go wrong).

I absolutely agree that all sites should have an object cache, although there are great ones out there already that are simple drop-ins /wp-content/object-cache.php is the only file you actually need for them (it's a special file that WordPress will use if it exists... no actual plugin needed). Plugins are simply generating that file is all. Tons out there already for Redis, Memcached, etc. that work fine with nothing really that can be improved (they either work or they don't). With this being a Cloudflare-focused plugin, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to start bolting on non-Cloudflare related functionality with object cache (I suppose one could use a Cloudflare Key-Value Pairs to do it, but then you are moving your object cache into the cloud and away from your origin server, which really is only going to slow it down).

I've done other work with sites that had cache warmup systems, and honestly, they end up slowing down a site 99% of the time. A very small number of sites could benefit from them, but those are the sites that are doing insane amount of traffic (like thousands of page requests per second). The process of warming up a cache proactively tends to slow a site down unless it's part of the 1% crazy amount of traffic sites. Additionally, Cloudflare's cache mechanism is already serving cached content while it's also fetching a new version for the *next* request. It actually works better than a traditional cache warming system. Definitely make sure you have the Smart Tiered Caching Topology enabled... that's going to be a bigger benefit than a cache warming system. Basically that allows a cache update to be pushed to multiple Cloudflare data centers at once.

 

[realmranshuman]

Fair enough, focusing on only Cloudflare-related settings.

I manage many WordPress websites with insane amount of traffic. I suggest the disk cache feature because, even with edge caching on Cloudflare (Guest Caching), the hit ratio is approximately 70%. 30% of requests still hit the origin server, regardless of caching aggressiveness or website type. Those hits are slow... three out of ten times, on average/median.

Since your plugin leverages Cloudflare, many enterprise WordPress users will opt for your paid plugin version (because it offers the most features).

I have tested your plugin on a few websites with many unit tests (different kind of tests), and although it plays nice with wp-rocket, and litespeed cache for disk cache, it doesn't play well with other disk cache plugins on very big WordPress websites (I consider any WordPress website with over 200K posts/pages big).

Having your own disk cache plugin (separate), or adding disk cache to "App For CF" should solve the incompatibility issues.

Your plugin's premium features (offloading to r2), access, firewall management appeal to Enterprise clients. So disk cache will be helpful if you could do it (or if you would accept code contribution to the plugin).

My Enterprise Clients are hesitant to try your plugin out as it is fairly new, and has very few installs at the moment. But that's the only reason.

Thank you for a great plugin.

 

[digitalpoint]

Fair enough, focusing on only Cloudflare-related settings.

I manage many WordPress websites with insane amount of traffic. I suggest the disk cache feature because, even with edge caching on Cloudflare (Guest Caching), the hit ratio is approximately 70%. 30% of requests still hit the origin server, regardless of caching aggressiveness or website type. Those hits are slow... three out of ten times, on average/median.

Since your plugin leverages Cloudflare, many enterprise WordPress users will opt for your paid plugin version (because it offers the most features).

I have tested your plugin on a few websites with many unit tests (different kind of tests), and although it plays nice with wp-rocket, and litespeed cache for disk cache, it doesn't play well with other disk cache plugins on very big WordPress websites (I consider any WordPress website with over 200K posts/pages big).

Having your own disk cache plugin (separate), or adding disk cache to "App For CF" should solve the incompatibility issues.

Ya, I guess it's not *completely* out of the question, but just not sure if it's worthwhile to add disk caching when it seems like there's a zillion of them out there already that seem to work fine. I definitely would be interested in figuring out why any existing disk caching systems aren't playing nice/compatible and get that straightened out as a higher priority though.

In my mind it probably would be better to have a memory cache (Redis or Memcached) for pages rather than a true disk cache anyway, that way you can scale beyond a single server. For example, I run a cluster of servers that all serve the same content, but the filesystem isn't writeable because you don't want them to get out of sync (also not a terrible idea to disallow file writing by the web server "user", just in case a site gets hacked/breached somehow). Say a very large site had 10 web servers... generating a cache for a page 10x (once for each server) starts defeating the purpose of having very large clusters of web servers.

Your plugin's premium features (offloading to r2), access, firewall management appeal to Enterprise clients. So disk cache will be helpful if you could do it (or if you would accept code contribution to the plugin).

Ya... although it still might make more sense to have a disk (or memory) caching plugin as it's own thing rather than stick it in a Cloudflare-specific plugin.

My Enterprise Clients are hesitant to try your plugin out as it is fairly new, and has very few installs at the moment. But that's the only reason.

Thank you for a great plugin.

The WordPress version is new, but WordPress isn't the first platform this plugin is on. It was first a XenForo addon (now I just keep feature parity), but it's been there for a little over 3 years and is actually one of the most popular addons for that platform/framework:

[DigitalPoint] App for Cloudflare®

Features Everything is available from within XenForo (you do not need to go to Cloudflare for things) via the Cloudflare API. This allows you give admins permission to do certain things (for example block IP addresses within Cloudflare without...

xenforo.com

It came to WordPress kind of as a software engineering challenge... specifically I wanted to see if I could abstract all the stuff that was platform-specific, so the underlying code base could be shared (completely unchanged) between platforms. That was a success, so now I can write for one platform and deploy on both.

...just saying it's not *exactly* new, just new(ish) to WordPress.