Title: [Plugin: W3 Total Cache] 3 features requests
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# [Plugin: W3 Total Cache] 3 features requests

 *  [talgalili](https://wordpress.org/support/users/talgalili/)
 * (@talgalili)
 * [16 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-3-features-requests/)
 * Hello fredericktownes and others.
 * I have 3 features requests for the interesting W3 Total Cache plugin:
 * 1) automatic CSS finding. I see this is already done with [http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/web-optimizer/](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/web-optimizer/)
   
   2) combining this plugin with free CDN ? [http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/free-cdn/](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/free-cdn/)
   3) I would love to know what features w3-total-cache gives that the two other
   major cacheing plugins don’t (e.g: wp-super-cache and web-optimizer), and vise
   versa. To: frederick, I imagine you won’t do it yourself, but know that I personally
   find it of interest. And in that I believe I reflect other people in the community
   as well.
 * Great job, thank you!
 * Tal
 * [http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/)

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

 *  Thread Starter [talgalili](https://wordpress.org/support/users/talgalili/)
 * (@talgalili)
 * [16 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-3-features-requests/#post-1237423)
 * Oh, and one more tiny thing:
    When I enter CSS into minify. Then turn off the
   plugin, and then turns it back on – the CSS I entered will disappear (it might
   be worth keeping them stored someplace).
 *  [Frederick Townes](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fredericktownes/)
 * (@fredericktownes)
 * [16 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-3-features-requests/#post-1237533)
 * > automatic CSS finding. I see this is already done with
 * This is already scheduled for the final release among other features you will
   not find anywhere else. As it stands, W3TC is already planned through v1.1 at
   which point I doubt there’s more than I can transparently automate for the needs
   of _all_ blogs.
 * > combining this plugin with free CDN ?
 * I’m not sure I see the benefit. At this moment only Amazon Web Services are not
   supported in W3TC (coming in v1.0). With W3TC, a user can use their own subdomain(
   via FTP) to improve pipelining and progressive render of their site or they can
   use a CDN that supports Mirroring (origin pull). W3TC already supports custom
   files, theme files, media library (also imports files into the media library)
   and wp-includes files with your CDN provider. That’s everything. 🙂
 * > I would love to know what features w3-total-cache gives that the two other 
   > major caching plugins don’t (e.g: wp-super-cache and web-optimizer), and vise
   > versa. To: frederick, I imagine you won’t do it yourself, but know that I personally
   > find it of interest. And in that I believe I reflect other people in the community
   > as well.
 * Believe it or not, this question is not frequently asked once people review all
   of the options and the plugin’s FAQ tab.
 * You also may not be aware, but there are *several* more caching plugins for WordPress
   available than those you listed and none to date combines server-side performance
   optimizations with client-side optimizations in a unified manner, nor implements
   practices that consistently benefit any WordPress installation (rather than a
   few specific use cases).
 * Anyway, the features and benefits on the plugin description are all things that
   no other plugin is reliably delivering at the moment:
 * WP Super Cache (WPSC) is only a disk bound page cache, that functionality is 
   1/4 of the W3TC suite. I’ve personally worked on blogs that saw no benefit from
   WPSC without the introduction of an opcode cache (like APC), so until W3TC there
   was no one-size-fits-all optimization plugin.
 * WPSC modifies WordPress’ output, while W3TC performs optimizations of WordPress’
   output and caches those, thereby not interfering with plugins and functionality
   or requiring theme changes.
 * Among other differences between WPSC and W3TC: W3TC can cache pages on disk or
   in memory. Minifies CSS, HTML, JS (automatically downloads 3rd party scripts)
   and RSS feeds (in memory or on disk), integrates your site with a CDN transparently,
   handles cache headers, handles http compression, caches database queries (in 
   memory only for now, but could offer disk in the future) and transparently supports
   multi-server hosting scenarios with ease all while making it available to shared
   hosting users. And it does it all without asking the user to modify .htaccess,
   their theme or how they work with WordPress. Also a user can create groups of
   CSS and JS per template in their theme, embed JS in a non-blocking manner in 
   the head or footer of their pages etc because as you know some plugins introduce
   CSS + JS into post pages only, so now you can deal with that case.
 * Web Optimizer (WO) is client side oriented, only offering a couple features that
   W3TC does not yet have in a publicly available release, however it’s also missing
   a few features that I would offer in a client-side optimization plugin. WO offers
   a number of features that have diminishing returns in practice or that cannot
   be fully automated reliably (requiring user input or theme modifications). Furthermore,
   some of the techniques available in the plugin require more automation than the
   plugin currently offers, which means that the operations would have to be run
   more than once, while W3TC on the other hand is fully automated and far more 
   transparent. Yes, W3TC and WPSC are missing set up wizards, but that’s something
   already planned for the full release, W3TC is at present only in beta. And again,
   all of the other differences I listed above are also applicable. W3TC promises
   something much different to the blog owner.
 * In essence, other caching plugins are doing a subset of what W3TC offers. This
   is the only plugin that can scale your servers and improve your user’s experience
   at once with a set up that takes only a couple minutes. If you have advanced 
   needs, W3TC steps up to meet those as well.
 * Most importantly this plugin is in play and bringing all of this functionality
   to major blogs on the web, which simply has not been done before. Savvy blog 
   owners have arrived at some great results on their own marrying plugins together
   and doing their own coding, but that is not “duplicate-able.” W3TC makes performance
   optimization “duplicate-able.”
 * Web hosts are now able to increase their server density and be “greener” to the
   environment when the WordPress blogs they host use W3TC (making the blogs less
   resource intensive). No longer is user experience sacrificed for server density(
   packing as many domains on a server as possible without caring for the performance
   consequences).
 * To finish answer your question fully I’d have to repeat everything that’s already
   in the FAQ in the plugin or the plugin description page. Please take a look at
   those in more detail.
 * > When I enter CSS into minify. Then turn off the plugin, and then turns it back
   > on – the CSS I entered will disappear (it might be worth keeping them stored
   > someplace).
 * I don’t think I will change this behavior because if you deactivate the plugin,
   to me that means that you don’t wish to run it and as a result it should do housekeeping,
   which it does (permissions allowed). You can instead disable any functionality
   and keep your cache and settings, which is expected behavior as well.
 *  Thread Starter [talgalili](https://wordpress.org/support/users/talgalili/)
 * (@talgalili)
 * [16 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-3-features-requests/#post-1237564)
 * fredericktownes,
    First, I’d like to thank you for such a thorough response! 
   I am very very impressed by the hard work you are putting into this, and hope
   you will rip good benefits from it.
 * Just one thing to mention about the last question you answered:
    It so happens
   that people turn off their plugin so they could: 1) compare the performance of
   the plugin on their website (which was my case) 2) If there came to be some conflict
   of a new plugin with their blog, the custom is to shut down all plugins and turn
   them one by one, so to see which one is causing the problem.
 * Either way, if you are planning to enter automatic css detection, then there 
   will be no point in saving the input.
 * Best regards, and hope to encounter you much on the web – I like your work!
 * Tal
 *  [Frederick Townes](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fredericktownes/)
 * (@fredericktownes)
 * [16 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-3-features-requests/#post-1237565)
 * > 1) compare the performance of the plugin on their website (which was my case)
   > 
   > 2) If there came to be some conflict of a new plugin with their blog, the custom
   > is to shut down all plugins and turn them one by one, so to see which one is
   > causing the problem.
 * I see your point, however do keep in mind that when the entire functionality 
   of the plugin is disabled the difference in performance is ~= deactivating the
   plugin and would not remove your settings. Nor would it interfere with other 
   plugins when all options disabled.
 * > if you are planning to enter automatic css detection, then there will be no
   > point in saving the input.
 * Many goodies are planned! Enjoy!
 *  Thread Starter [talgalili](https://wordpress.org/support/users/talgalili/)
 * (@talgalili)
 * [16 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-3-features-requests/#post-1237597)
 * Thank you fredericktownes 🙂
 * BTW, for you and others, according to the response I got from site5.com support,
   Unfortunately, memcache will not work for a shared hosting accounts (such as 
   the one I am using).
 * Tal

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

The topic ‘[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] 3 features requests’ is closed to new replies.

 * 5 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [talgalili](https://wordpress.org/support/users/talgalili/)
 * Last activity: [16 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-3-features-requests/#post-1237597)
 * Status: not resolved

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