Illustrated tutorial on how to fix many plug ins that W3 TC breaks

@dfumagalli

I followed your instructions. Will those settings remain even after a W3 update ?

If so, from now on nggallery won’t be affected by a W3 update ?

Big thanx. Great job !

Generally, they stick at least from a major W3 TC release to the next.
Every time you want to upgrade (including minors) you should back up the configuration first. Then upgrade, see if you get your site royally broken (I mean, beyond just losing some visual effects. I mean errors 500 and that kind of bad) then you downgrade and wait for 1-2 W3 TC minors, i.e. 9.3.1 – 9.3.2 and then try again.

Also, since you went the “manual minification way”, every time you install a plug in you should check the minification wizard shown in my tutorial. It’s quite frequent for new installed plug ins to come with their own CSS and Javascript, those are to be added to the existing minification list for a better website YSlow and SEO optimization.

On the other side, upgrading certain plug ins like NextGen you may get W3 TC warnings about it being unable to find certain files.
You’ll see red warnings at the top of the WP admin window about this.
In this case, the plug in authors moved / renamed / removed certain javascript / CSS from their newest release yet W3 TC is still instructed to minify those files.
You’ll have to go to W3 TC minify list and manually remove the files it complains the lack of.

If so, from now on nggallery won’t be affected by a W3 update ?

NextGen as you probably know has been passed over from a developer to a software house and the latter are heavily changing it.

Until that process is stabilized enough, NextGen will need to be checked at each upgrade even if no W3 TC update comes out in the mean time.

I.e. in the last update, NextGen lost 3 javascript files. Depending on your W3 TC configuration this may mean you have to remove those files from the minification list (else you get some red errors in the admin dashboard). It may get 2-3 new javascript files in the next update, and once again, you’ll have to see to add those in W3 TC, despite W3 TC did not get upgraded itself.