Plugin Author
ulfben
(@ulfben)
The standard behaviour for WordPress’ archives or link/page/category/whatever-listings, is to simply generate them at view time. Eg. whenever a visitor loads your page, the list of years, months and post-titles would be re-created in its entirety and then delivered to the client.
WP-dTree effectively replaces WordPress’ default lists with more compact, dynamic trees. If caching is off WP-dTree would generate the lists every time a visitor loads your page. There is a fair amount of logic needed to build some of the views available in WP-dTree and so, to save your server from burning up, the plugin defaults to using a cache.
The cache is simple, really;
- whenever you publish new content, or change settings in WordPress or WP-dTree, the cache is invalidated.
- when a user visits the site, if the cache is invalid (= old), generate a fresh tree (and save it to cache)
- otherwise, return the tree straight from cache.
Ergo: WP-dTree only perform work the first time someone loads the page, after you’ve updated content or settings. For the vast, vast, vast majority of pageloads, it’s just grabbing a string from the database.
To answer your questions;
– does WP-dTree assume you’re using another cache? No. It is oblivious to any site-wide caching (incl. compression and well-behaved script minifiers/combiners/optimizers). Feel free to use any caching solution you want, WP-dTree will work as intended.
– why the page stall at the WP-dTree? The markup for WP-dTree is actually a lot more compact than WordPress default output would be – something like 40%-plus less data is transfered to build the same view, simply because WordPress default uses HTML markup where I use JavaScript. The downside is that the JavaScript must be run before anything is rendered for the user, and this is in the hand of the browser and computer in question. For most machines and most workloads (eg. dTree content) it shouldn’t be a noticeable delay.
Lastly, you seem to have a problem with your theme. A lot of footer-content (especially scripts and plugin output) is output outside, after, the footer. Check your usage of wp_footer().
