[wp-hackers] Caching as part of the core

[Mike Bijon]

Caching has always been heavily-debated. Putting aside the variety of cache
strategies, every site has slightly different effort vs. cost requirements
(ie: Akamai is great to work with, but only one of my clients is willing to
afford it).

Working with caching in Drupal recently, they have a much larger & more
time-consuming chore to maintain core page caching plus hooks for
customizing caching (which is largely what is done in WordPress now). And
even with page caching in core it's often not used correctly or effectively.

Personally, I think it would take less effort to educate the community on
the types, tradeoffs, & need for caching than to build & maintain some
flavor of it in our core. That would resolve as many problems as adding
caching to core would, but not create a new set of complexities for the
core team.

And, if you still want caching in core, take a look at these recent slides
on fragment caching,
http://www.ethitter.com/slides/wcmia-caching-scaling-2012-02-18/#slide-0.
It's close to the ideal case many people have advocated for in this thread,
but it's very app & site-specific. Anyone have an idea how to build
fragment caching in a globally-functional, non-site-specific way?