Suggestions for improvements

Hi there

Thanks very much for the plugin, it seems to improve performance quite a bit for a site I’ve recently started supporting.

I’ve got some suggestions for improvements based on this being my first use of your plugin.

1) The checkbox named ‘Toggle all caching types on or off at once’ is very confusing as to what it does on first usage:

– ‘toggle all caching types’ implies that you are switching the caching options to the *opposite* to what they’re currently set at. This confusion is particularly a problem if you have a small screen and you don’t get the visual feedback of seeing all the checkboxes go all ‘off’ or ‘on’ when you click the checkbox.

– the operation of it is unintuitive as is IMHO, and the addition of it to the UI causes more time lost due to confusion over it’s function than time it saves for clicking a few checkboxes. How often does someone need to turn all options on at once (particularly as a number of them need configuration first anyway)? The most useful thing such a checkbox could do IMO is ‘Disable all caching’ temporarily, and when finished debugging a problem, you could use it to ‘re-enable all caching’. That’s what I expected it to do anyway (I suppose instead I could simply deactivate the whole plugin temporarily instead, but doesn’t that lose plugin settings and have other issues with it?).

– for the current function it provides, it should be named something like ‘Select all caching types’ – thus implying that checking an unchecked checkbox would ‘select all’, and unchecking it would ‘unselect all’. Currently the naming is confusing because it has both a ‘postive’ and a ‘negative’ in the name, as well as the term ‘toggle’, all of which means to swap it to the opposite setting (which is arguably the opposite of what it does).

I really think you need to do one of either remove the checkbox, rename it, or change it’s function to disabling/re-enabling all configured caching options.

2) Please provide more instructions/documentation for the textboxes on the ‘Page Cache’ tab, particularly regarding the difference between the boxes ‘Never cache the following pages’ and ‘Cache exception list’, as well as how these fields should be filled in – particularly regarding how to set directories to be ‘never cached’. The default setting for these textboxes imply that each item to be excluded should be on a separate line (if this essential though it should be in the help text), and for example if I want to exclude a directory named /checkout/, what do I need to put, and in which box? Currently, because of no documentation anywhere I can find for the correct way to use this box (and after seeing various different suggestions in these forums for how to populate them), I have all of the following entries in the ‘never cache the following pages’ box in the hope that at least one of them will be right:

checkout
checkout/
checkout/*
/checkout
/checkout/
/checkout/*

Which one(s) are correct?

Keep up the great work, I just think that the features could be made a bit clearer, and hopefully these comments will help make the plugin better overall and easier for future users to use.

And please take my comments with a grain of salt too ??

Thanks very much again

Cheers
Matt

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/