ICS calendar and Autoptimize

You’re on the right track. Any caching plugin is going to prevent calendar updates more frequent than the lifespan of the cache. Some caching plugins can break up the page content into multiple cached chunks to allow shortcode output to be cached for a different duration than the rest of the page. I’m not sure if/how that can be done with Autoptimize.

You’ll want to check Autoptimize’s documentation or open another support thread under their plugin page to see if you can get specifics on excluding shortcode output from caching. You may also just want to shorten the duration of the cache expiration for the page your calendar is on, if it supports that.

Hey b…b; I’m the developer of Autoptimize with a quick remark; Autoptimize does not cache pages or AJAX requests/ responses, so the fact the calendar does not update is unlikely due to AO. When purging Autoptimize’s cache however, most page caches (are) purge(d) as well, so it’s likely the issue is with page caching rather then with autoptimize.

If you want to be absolutely sure, you can always disable AO (or AO JS or AO CSS optimization) in the edit screen of the calendar page (assuming the “Enable configuration per post/ page?” option is on).

hope this helps,
frank

Hi @optimizingmatters, thanks for your input.

ICS Calendar does not use AJAX at all, although it does use some jQuery for interactivity within the page. But since all of the calendar processing happens in PHP as part of the initial response, it does appear to be subject to the activity of caching plugins.

My money is on Litespeed Cache, which you’re using if I’m not mistaking?

Good call… I’ve had others mention issues with Litespeed.

Their paid version include “ESI (Edge Side Includes) support” which may be worth investigating. For the free version there is no similar option. My best recommendation would be to change the cache lifespan of the page the calendar is on, or turn off caching on that page altogether, if that’s feasible.

Honestly, I’m somewhat skeptical of the benefits of caching plugins in general. Unless a site gets a very large amount of traffic or is on a significantly underpowered server, there’s more benefit to be gained from just using a well-structured theme and optimization tools like AO to minimize the amount of data being sent. Caching plugins are really only beneficial if the database is a major performance bottleneck. (My main business is in custom client site development, and I almost never use a caching plugin on any sites I build.)

I was able to get the calendar to update correctly.

I changed (2) settings:

(1) Autoptimize Settings -> JS, CSS & HTML -> Exclude scripts from Autoptimize: plugins/ics-calendar/
(2) LiteSpeed Settings -> Excludes Settings -> Do Not Cache URIs: /calendar/$

seems to be working now.

Glad to hear you were able to resolve it. These look like the right changes to make.

I’ll do some work to see why there are issues with the plugin’s CSS and JS files with Autoptimize… there shouldn’t be, if I’ve done my work correctly.