W3tc plugin feed problem

When your WordPress site has a great number of requests it could happen that your server can’t handle all the requests and can become very slow, rising errors, getting timeouts and -at last- can stop working. This happens because your WordPress site make a lot of work to render a page.

To avoid those problems, usually, developers use a cache. This means that when a visitor requests a page, the server create the page and stores it in a ready-to-serve version, an html static copy og page that doesn’t need database anymore. When there is a cache working, new requests are sent to the php WordPress site and processed as usual, instead if a page has been already processed, the static version stored in the cache is served:

This lets your WordPress site go faster.

Wt3c plugin is a tool for WordPress that lets you control how your WordPress site handles cache at many levels: you can control page cache, db cache, javascript and css cache, you can handle an external cdn link to handle files better and much more. It’s one of the best caching plugin service, but it has a problem: it caches also rss feed, and you can’t tell him to not cache feed unless you tell him to also don’t cache categories and tags pages.

In the next version (now it’s 0.9.2.4) this control will be fixed, they said, but at the moment this issue prevents correct working for services like Feedburner, or the refresh in Google reader or any other feed reader you use, since w3tc keeps serving the bad version of your feed until the cache becomes old or someone manually clears the cache.

You can fix it by editing the .htaccess and telling w3tc to handle your feed as an admin page, without caching it, this way, from this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\/wp-admin\/|\/xmlrpc.php|
\/wp-(app|cron|login|register|mail)\.php|wp-.*\.php|index\.php) [NC,OR]

to:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\/wp-admin\/|\/xmlrpc.php|
\/feed\/|\/wp-(app|cron|login|register|mail)\.php|wp-.*\.php|index\.php) [NC,OR]

(this is on two lines but you have to piut it on a single line).

This seems to work for me. :-)