W3 Total Cache Rotating Tweets = Not updating tweets?

I just reinstalled the plugin from this link:
https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/rotatingtweets.zip

I don’t see neither of these.
The plugin works but can not refresh independently from W3TC.
I could email you the address if you want to check it yourself.

Anyway – there is a great chance this whole thing to be beyond my level of expertise (maybe the host? it’s dreamhost). I was hoping that someone else has had a similar problem like me or at least someone who would test the new versions you made.

I highly appreciate your efforts to solve this issue and help me, Martin, thank you!

As I said earlier – the tweets I want to display on the website are not so dynamic so I can just shorten the caching periods, until eventually you find a solution. In case you do – please post a message in this thread, so that I could be notified.

We’re nearly there!

The one you want is the Development version on this page – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/rotatingtweets/developers/

The direct link is https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/rotatingtweets.zip

This is the same link as I just posted, isn’t it?
Have you made any changes?

So it is! It used to be different.

Please email me the address. Have you set WP_DEBUG to true? If it is working (or if W3TC debug is working) there should be some HTML comments before or after the tweets which give some diagnostics.

Are there any pages excluded from caching?

As a PS, it is definitely working for me.

I will email you all W3TC settings exported by the plugin so that you can import them.
The pass is my username.

Aha! All the comments on your site are being removed by minifying the HTML…

And from what I can tell from the settings, browser compression of the HTML means that W3 Total Cache isn’t able to spot the replacement code.

What happens if you switch off HTML compression?

If that still doesn’t work, you’ll need to switch off HTML minify in order to read the diagnostics.

Martin

PS: the latest development version of the plug-in attempts to overwrite the Minify settings for its error message.

Unfortunately it looks like there’s no way to send through debug messages as comments if HTML minify is switched on – so they would need to go through as plain text and appear on the front page – which is probably too intrusive (although I could limit to this to the situation where the user is an admin).

So as far as I understand you suggest to switch off Minify in order to see the debug messages of RT – is that correct? I will do that later today. Maybe you could make a log file for such messages and that log file can be accessed from the RT settings control panel?

I hadn’t thought of that. Not sure it isn’t a sledgehammer to crack a nut – since it’s a relatively unusual use case!

A third option is to put in some JavaScript that puts a message to the console.log I guess.

I disabled Minify – the RT debug says:
<!-- Rotating Tweets W3TC Fragment Caching: Start Diagnostics --><!-- Browser Compression needs to be disabled on the W3 Total Cache Browser Cache settings page --><!-- Rotating Tweets W3TC Fragment Caching: End Diagnostics -->
You can see it on the site, in the HTML.

Seems to be working!

As far as I understand it, the way W3 Total Cache works for fragment caching is that it writes finished files to the cache – and then serves up the file directly without regenerating them from the database if a browser asks for them.

The fragment cache works by looking at the file that’s about to be served up and seeing if the mfunc code is there. If it is, then it inserts the up to date information – in this case the Rotating Tweets.

If the file in the cache is gzipped up (i.e. if the option to ‘Enable HTTP (gzip) compression’ is ticked) then the file in the cache looks like gobbledegook to W3 Total Cache and it doesn’t know where to put the Tweets.

So to get the mfunc functionality working, you will need to switch off HTTP compression. Browser caching will also delay the time it takes before people see new tweets, so you may want to switch that off too.

That is a lot of caching to be switched off – Minify, GZIP, Browser Caching. Switching all that off renders W3TC almost useless. You have to keep in mind that caching helps in many different ways – it eases the load on the host and on the infrastructure as a whole and speeds up loading times for the visitors. Are you sure there is no other way to tell W3TC to load RT directly? There are some settings for exceptions in W3TC – maybe experiment in that direction?

I think you can switch Minify and Browser Caching back on – although the latter means you will wait longer for new Tweets to show if people revisit the page. (Browser caching doesn’t speed up loading the first time, only the reload time for repeat visitors).

Switching off Minify is just needed to show the error messages. If you’ve done what’s needed to get RT and W3TC working together nicely, then you can switch it back on again.

Gzipping HTML is the one that breaks fragment caching (a W3TC problem, not a Rotating Tweets problem) and the way W3TC is designed, nothing can be done about it apart from switching it off. Although given the size of your HTML (4.7KB) vs. your images (170KB) or javascript (260KB) switching it off won’t make a massive amount of difference.

Martin