Question: Why the changed features in 3.)

  • Resolved Abigailm

    (@abigailm)


    9 years, 8 months ago

    Comparing v. 3.0 of the plugin with the previous version.. it seems like almost an entirely different plugin, which no longer supports features I relied on with 1.3.25.

    I have a number of questions as to whether some functions are still supported with the new plugin and, if not, why they are no longer provided. Either these functions are gone entirely, or else they are hidden or changed in some way that is not apparent.

    1) True Visitor IP restored.

    (I don’t really need this because I have mod cloudflare installed .. but what about users who don’t have that?)

    2) “CloudFlare will be notified when you mark comments as spam”.

    Is this gone? or simply now a hidden default setting?

    3) Toggling Development Mode on/off

    I need to turn development mode on when making edits to the stylesheet. But the toggle option isn’t available in version 3. I see there’s a new option for “Automatic Full Cache Management” when I “update the appearance of your site” — but it’s not at all clear that would kick in with a change to a style sheet, as opposed to a change or upgrade to a theme.

    4) HTTPS Protocol Rewriting

    This feature is my primary reason for installing the cloudflare plugin on all sites. I have several sites configured to respond to either https or http protocols– but I am not forcing it on most of the sites. That is, users can enter and browse via either protocol. But the protocol rewriting also seems be missing from Version 3, and on one site where version 3 appeared to be working, I discovered that I was unable to access the dashboard because of an error when trying to access via https.

    It seems that rather than providing useful tools to integrate wordpress with Cloudflare, the new version 3 is simply a tool to access the Cloudflare domain control panel. This might be useful for newbies, but it makes little sense to me, as I’ve already tweaked my Cloudflare setting with rules as needed for each site –and I frequently access Cloudflare directly to make changes that are not accessible from the version 3 plugin.

    Final questions: Will Cloudflare continue to support the features in version 1.3.25 listed above?

    I am asking because the upgrade seems to do away with the Cloudflare tools that were helpful to me, instead substituting something that lacks any features that I want or need, and adds unnecessary bloat to my sites — so as it seems that there is such a radical change in functionality I am not sure what the value would be of having the plugin at all.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • zandercent

    (@zandercent)

    9 years, 8 months ago

    what he said…

    anonymized-11892634

    (@anonymized-11892634)

    9 years, 8 months ago

    I don’t really understand why anyone would need the ‘HTTPS Protocol Rewriting’ feature. Just make the site content default to https and there won’t be any mixed content warnings. Do a search and replace on any content/images already set – https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/

    Development mode does seem like a weird feature to lose though, I agree.

    jwineman

    (@jwineman)

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Hi,

    1) True Visitor IP restored.

    3.x still supports restoring the original visitor IP. The code for this is found here.

    2) “CloudFlare will be notified when you mark comments as spam”.

    The API endpoint that CloudFlare sent spam comments too only existed in our V1 API which we are deprecating. Since there is no equivalent endpoint in our V4 API we were forced to remove this feature. We may reintroduce it in a future release assuming we recreate that old endpoint in our new API.

    3) Toggling Development Mode on/off

    We removed Development Mode in 3.x because we got a lot of support tickets where the root cause was a user enabling development mode, forgetting to turn it off, and wondering why CloudFlare functionality wasn’t working.

    However 3.x still supports it, you can enable it by following the instructions here.

    4) HTTPS Protocol Rewriting

    We removed Protocol Rewrite because our implementation couldn’t handle a lot of edge cases and we were receiving too many support tickets. We plan on rewriting this functionality so that it can support all the edge cases we’ve seen in the next few weeks.

    Thanks,
    John

    Thread Starter Abigailm

    (@abigailm)

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Phil, on some of my sites I don’t want to force https right now. I’m taking a go slow approach with converting, in part because I am using the cloudflare SNI based Universal SSL on those sites, and there are potential compatibility issues with older browsers. See: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/204144518-SSL-FAQ.

    So I am taking a more gradual approach and definitely need the https protocol rewriting for now. Maybe down the line I will be able to abandon it, but for now it is a feature that I want to have.

    Thread Starter Abigailm

    (@abigailm)

    9 years, 8 months ago

    John, thank you for your detailed answer.

    Because I want to have items #3 and #4 on my list (development toggle & https protocol rewrite) I will stick with the older version for now.

    Given that there seems to be very little overlap in version 1.3 and 3.0 capabilities – have you given any thought to maintaining them both as separate plugins? I don’t really want the features in 3.0 because the “Apply Default Settings” option makes it too easy to undo settings tweaks that I made after hours of testing with different sites & themes. (Some of Cloudflare features like Rocket Loader work beautifully with some site but wreak havoc on others).

    At least for me that creates a much higher potential for causing problems than accidentally leaving the development mode toggled to on. So I’m wondering if Cloudflare might repurpose/redesignate the 1.3 functions as a separate plugin, perhaps with a different name (such as a “Basic” and “Enhanced” plugin, or something along those lines).

    If the two plugins would be incompatible they could be set up to detect the presence of the other and throw off some sort of notice to prevent activation of both at the same time.

    I appreciate your providing the code to enable the development mode toggle, but if I modify code in a plugin that would get overridden in any update — and obviously you are still in the process of working out tweaks and possible bugs in version 3. I would suggest that you consider restoring development mode but adding a function that creates a prominent alert that displays on the dashboard: “Cloudflare Development Mode is ON” — there are several maintenance-mode plugins that have that sort of function, so I know it can be done.

    technabob

    (@technabob)

    9 years, 8 months ago

    To answer your question about the Automatic Full Cache Management, this is the code in the plugin that appears to be relevant to this…

            add_action('switch_theme', array('\CF\Hooks\AutomaticCache', 'switchWPTheme'));
        add_action('customize_save_after', array('\CF\Hooks\AutomaticCache', 'themeSaveButtonPressed'));

    So basically, it looks like it clears the cache if you switch themes or save a theme change via the WordPress GUI. It won’t purge based on changes on the file system.

    Thread Starter Abigailm

    (@abigailm)

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Thank you.

    From the code, it looks like it might also miss clearing the cache on changes to a child theme when the parent theme is updated. (I use child themes on all my sites, so that would be important for me to know)

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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