MilliCache Testers Updates

[ouun]

Dear @MilliPress/millicache-testers ,

I hope you're doing well! Please excuse the unexpected ping — it’s been a while since you kindly agreed to help test MilliCache, and we want to check in and make sure you're still on board.

📦 Beta 2 is out now and brings significant improvements, especially a new Settings UI that should make configuration and testing much more straightforward.

You can find a summary of the changes and current status here:
👉 Roots Discourse post

We’d really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to try this new version and let us know how it works for you — whether it’s bugs, ideas, missing features, or just a quick 👍 or 👎.

If you no longer have time or interest, that’s totally fine — just drop us a quick note.

Thanks again for your initial willingness to help test. Your feedback helps us move in the right direction.

Best regards from Munich & Zurich,
Philipp & Vedran

[ouun]

Hi @MilliPress/millicache-testers,

Some rainy summer days here in Munich — perfect timing to cook up another round of improvements for MilliCache. After five beta releases, the first 📦 Release Candidate (RC1) is now ready for testing!

To make testing easy, I’ve set up a temporary Redis-compatible server (running Valkey), so you can jump right in without any local setup:

define( 'MC_CACHE_DEBUG', true );
define( 'MC_REDIS_HOST', '78.47.94.0' );
define( 'MC_REDIS_ENC_PASSWORD', '58ybAEtJrV1EhFC1gxyz' );
define( 'MC_REDIS_PREFIX', 'your-custom-prefix' );

👉 Make sure to set a unique MC_REDIS_PREFIX to avoid key conflicts with other testers. And note that there is connection delay to the server in Germany. So pages will not load as fast as from a local instance.

⚡ RC1 Highlights

• Added wildcard pattern support (e.g. utm_*) for cookie and query parameter handling
• Extended cache flushing to handle cached redirects and 404 pages (#5)
• Added settings backup and restore to recover configuration after a reset
• Improved error handling with a retry mechanism in the settings UI

🧪 Bonus Tool: DevTools Helper

There’s now also a small Firefox DevTools plugin that displays the x-MilliCache-* headers in a dedicated panel — super handy for verifying what’s being cached:

Let me know if you run into any issues, or feel free to post feedback and questions right here.

Thanks for helping make MilliCache better!

Philipp

[ouun]

Hi @MilliPress/millicache-testers,

I’m happy to let you know that MilliCache RC2 is now available! 🎉
Special thanks to @bonakor for testing RC1 and sharing super valuable feedback — several of the fixes below come directly from his input. 🙏

Important

All MC_REDIS_* constants are now renamed to MC_STORAGE_* to reflect that MilliCache works with Redis-compatible solutions (Valkey, KeyDB, Dragonfly, etc.).

// Old
define( 'MC_REDIS_HOST', '127.0.0.1' );

// New
define( 'MC_STORAGE_HOST', '127.0.0.1' );

✨ Key improvements from feedback

• Composer: dist packages now ship with /build/ and dependencies
• Added No-Cache Paths option to exclude specific paths from caching
• Wildcard (*) and Regex support for most settings and flag-based cache cleaning
• Constants simplified for encrypted settings: MC_STORAGE_ENC_PASSWORD can also be defined as MC_STORAGE_PASSWORD
• Fixed bug where encrypted values could be encrypted a second time
• Renamed Max TTL to Grace Period: this is the extra TTL window for background regeneration. Setting Grace = 0 disables serving stale cache entirely

🔧 Other changes in RC2

• Improved Settings UI with short descriptions for each field
• Dropped legacy admin-ajax.php calls in favor of a dedicated REST API endpoint for cache operations
• Extended the Admin Bar: clear cache by context (e.g. when editing a single post, you can clear just that post’s cache without saving)
• Extended default cache flags (taxonomy, author, date archives, etc.)

🧑‍💻 Easy Testing

As mentioned in the previous post, we’ve set up a test server you can use for quick testing. Just add the following to your wp-config.php:

define( 'MC_CACHE_DEBUG', true );
define( 'MC_STORAGE_HOST', '78.47.94.0' );
define( 'MC_STORAGE_PASSWORD', '58ybAEtJrV1EhFC1gxyz' );
define( 'MC_STORAGE_PREFIX', 'your-custom-prefix' );

💡 Tool: The Firefox DevTools plugin helps you to get the cache info for a request.
⚠️ Note: there will be some connection delay to the test server in Germany, so page loads won’t be as fast as on a local instance.

💬 Looking for your opinion

Currently, users configure which cookies and request keys to ignore (so they don’t vary the cache).

I’m considering flipping this: instead, you would define which cookies/keys should vary the cache, and all others would be ignored by default.

👉 Would this approach make more sense for you, or do you prefer the current explicit “ignore” list?

Thanks again for all your feedback and testing — it’s a huge help in getting MilliCache production-ready! 🚀

Philipp