Mr. Townes, This goes out to you

I don’t know why, this plugin never made it to v 1.0. To me this is a sign, that it is incomplete. Yes it’s free…however a business man knows, that free = buko bucks especially for a plugin as popular as w3.

Now my complaint… I believe this plugin has pms. Meaning, one moment functionality is beautiful, the next either the site design and layout is destroyed, or an important functionality stops functioning.

EG. Let’s talk cloudfront via push. The plugin claims sucess, however, I am being billed nothing and charts on amazon, register, nothing.

2. Cloudfront pull, creation success. Test failure. Even after waiting for propegation of the distro to the edges arond the world.

3. Switch to S3 bucket, use the randomly generated uri, and bucket name, and upload just fine. My cnames are also configured in my dns, as well as amazon cloudfront dns and/or s3 bucket. Either way, whether I create cnames on the amazon side or not, i can create a cname in my own dns and point it to my storage bucket uri or, cloudfront uri backed by the storage bucket.

4. I was hesitant to install the plugin again, because of the “pms” issues…that’s what we will call them. However, in order to accomplish, not just for me, but for the ms I’m about to open, I use your plugin simply for an easy way to connect with s3 and/or cloudfront.

5. Stop overwriting my changes to any configuration! If i want my x forwarded header to say powered by blah.com and NGINX, then that’s what I want. If I specificaly request that advertisements are not made in my code, then I expect, that these html comments are not inserted.

6. You have thousands of others, that have no issue. I care, because I want my site optimized for me, myself, and I, and to bring me money. If we had an arrangement, and you were an affiliate, then it would be different.

7. I run 8 servers and the numbers are growing. I am running your plugin on one. The one that I need scaled and moving quick. I have redis, nginx, hhvm, memcache, memcached enhanced, memcached server, and apc powered by redis. This machine, was built by me, and therefore, it’s powered by my company. I can write the same code, that you can into the backend of my configuration, without an issue, and don’t need a plugin. However, for my endusers, who want it, as an administrator of a multi-site it is my duty, to provide them with what they desire.

8. I do not want to give away the secrets of success, however the majority of the plugins functionality, can be written in nginx.conf and for apache users, htaccess.

9. I am on a rant, because you want to charge people extra for transient caching however, anyone that peers into the backend, with any send, will already have written it in, or see, if they use the plugin, and look, that it is built in. NOT COOL.

10. Now to be nice, you have written an extraordinary plugin. You have done a great job. You even made it smart enough to recognize a server running NGINX. Other devs, are idiots. They want to write plugins and followup with .htaccess files, however fail to realize, that these files do nothing because they do not even check, whether or not a server is running apache. Yes apache was nice for a while, however, we all know, that apache, unless they do something drastic, is reaching the end of it’s life. Sometimes plugins do not need write permissions or don’t even need an htaccess file. They do it, for one reason, self-promotion. Furthermore, someone running an apache server sure as hell doesn’t need 10, 000 htaccess files. That in and of itself, is a problem with performance. Even WordPress want’s to write htaccess files by default.

So I commend you on that. At least your plugin is dynamic to the core and can write syntax recognized by NGINX and/or apache.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/