Fragment Cache

There are a lot of great caching plugins out there, but this one solves a very particular need that none of the rest are doing. It allows you to cache particular sections of your page, using a technique known as "fragment caching", which is readily available in other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. The key benefit here: you can cache content for logged-in users! This is the main limitation of most other caching plugins, which is where the need for this solution came about.

Author:Dave Kaplan (profile at wordpress.org)
WordPress version required:3.0.1
WordPress version tested:3.6.1
Plugin version:0.6.0
Added to WordPress repository:21-08-2013
Last updated:04-12-2013
Warning! This plugin has not been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
Rating, %:100
Rated by:5
Plugin URI:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
Total downloads:1 552
Active installs:30+
plugin download
Click to start download

There are a lot of great caching plugins out there, but this one solves a very particular need that none of the rest are doing. It allows you to cache particular sections of your page, using a technique known as "fragment caching", which is readily available in other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. The key benefit here: you can cache content for logged-in users! This is the main limitation of most other caching plugins, which is where the need for this solution came about. There are a couple of reasons this works:

  • You will only be caching certain sections of the page. Some sections of the page may be the same whether you're logged in or out, so you can cache those universally.
  • You can use a flag to determine whether you'd like to cache the content for logged-in users or anonymous users (the default). Note, just like any caching solution, this will never work for customized content that is particular to each user! But, if your page has a section that displays one version of the content for all logged-in users, and one version for anonymous users, then you can fragment cache that section of your page.

Note: Enabling this plugin does not automatically do anything for you -- you will still have to edit your templates in order to take advantage. So this is not as much of a plug-n-play solution as some of the other cache plugins, this is more of an advanced plugin for people who know some basic PHP and how to edit their template code.