For those of you that have been bothered or concerned with the notion of upgrading W3 Total Cache because new features have been problematic for you, we understand your concerns and we’re grateful to those that take the time to reach out about their challenges. As you may know, no amount of testing or known process allows us to identify issues that may occur on your site before hand due to all of the various hosting environments, plugins and themes that exist in eco-system.
So, to begin to address challenges nonetheless, the next release of W3 Total Cache includes two key new features that will allow us to iterate faster, provide maintenance updates which are not expected break your installation (because they don’t relate to features) and also make you aware of security or best practice updates so that you can keep your site as up-to-date as WordPress itself.
Version 0.9.4 (among numerous new features and fixes includes the following key improvements):
- Maintenance Updates Now each release will notify you of the changes that have occurred to the default settings since the last update and also make it easy for you to identify best practices that will help you make your site or application faster. The notifications can be ignored or automatically applied to your settings in just a click.
- Edge Mode
WordPress is used in countless ways, environments and alongside of various software including plugins, themes and even drop-ins. For that reason, rather than continue to fail to maintain a developer network to help us go beyond our automated testing suite (and continuous integration practices), we are rolling out edge mode.The key is that in the new update you will be prompted to opt-in to edge mode that will allow you to test features that have not yet been tested in a large enough % of the user-base. This provides us the ability to use the typical WordPress workflow to provide updates more frequently for maintenance and also allows us to allow testers and early adopters to benefit from new features immediately as well.We anticipate that this change will allow us to make at least one release per month, but will be targeting one release per week.
Again, those who have opted into edge mode would be able to preview features that are not available to users who have opted-out (the default setting).
Pro subscribers will not be opted into the edge mode; however there will be Pro features available in edge mode periodically.
We hope that these changes will create a much better user experience and allow us to more aggressively further our mission to empower publishers and application developers to focus on their content and business rather than on web performance optimization.