launchinteractive

Hi kevincloinger. What version of PHP does your host have? I suspect thats the problem.

Hi Josh, not currently, but I’m working on it.

Hi dinolatoga, It looks like photon.js is using reserved words as function names in the code (short and long). I’ve submitted a pull request for this to be fixed in photon.js. I’m also looking into updating the plugin to allow ignoring minification for certain files.

Hi Steven, we should be able to add ignore files. I’ll have a tinker and see what I can come up with.

Hi Virgodesign. We have looked into this and had trouble trying to implement it. The main issue is that the plugin can’t check the modified date of the remote files without a delay. We have decided this kind of change doesn’t solve the problem that merge minify is trying to solve.

In your case creating a php script that pulls the javascript and css files into your theme might be the best solution if you want them merged & minified.

Hi Virgodesign. External files aren’t cached by design. The reasoning behind this is for when you have external javascript files that are on a CDN or some sort of dynamic service (eg. Google Analytics).

What sort of files do you wish to cache? Why not just copy them to your theme?

Hi phanger, What theme were you using? Is it a custom theme or a purchased theme?

Hi Flyhead. We could potentially fix the issue. Can you give me more information about the issue?

BTW. Version 1.1 has just been released which has a fallback when exec not available.

Version 1.1 should resolve this now as it should now compress with Minify when closure not possible.

Do you know if java is available? Java is required to do the minification. Maybe we need to set the full path to java.

On a plus note.. merging the files worked!

We are basing the filenames on the inner files. We are hashing it so they don’t become a massive filenames.

The names of the CSS and JS is in this format:

enqueued handles – last modified date .css/js

The modified date ensures the latest file gets output when something has changed in that group of handles. This happens when a change is manually made to the theme files or if say a plugin is updated.

When you got the 404 errors was that with a pre 1.0 version of the plugin?
We were removing the un-minified files once the minified files were created. We found that on rare occasions it was possible to load a page and wordpress would output the path to the unminified file then in the background the minification would take place and remove the minified file before the browser had downloaded the file. This might of been what happened to you?

I think it would be pretty crazy if Google does read from cache. Websites change all the time and they would get 404’s all over the place.

Ahh I see now. Currently with MMR when a new CSS or JS file is generated the old file is removed. To minimize 404 errors I could update the plugin to remove the old files after a few days. What do you think?

Thats interesting. As the filename changes when the CSS or JS changes then Google should be pulling the latest each time. I’d be surprised if this isn’t the case.

Also, we are thinking about saving the last accessed date of a resource so that it will be easy to see stale files in the admin and potentially automatically delete them.

We’ve got some other sites that don’t support exec too. We are investigating some alternatives that we might roll in as replacements or fallbacks. Thanks for the review!