Not Worth the Trouble

  • The documentation is poor, and disorganized (and doesn’t cover Debian, which is the OS I use). The support is not all that good and tends to refer you to that poor documentation for answers.

    But, worst of all, you’ll not only spend a LOT of time trying to configure this thing but, once you’ve got it even sort of working, you’ll spend even more time dealing with the problems it causes. Today’s example: messages to the effect that I can’t delete a plugin when it’s active on the main site. Messages which didn’t go away when I purged the cache, as suggested by the plugin, but which immediately vanished as soon as I disabled W3 Total Cache.

    I’m willing to agree this plugin offers potentially better performance than WP Supercache. But WP Supercache is much easier to setup, configure and use. That’s worth not being able to squeeze the last drop of performance out of a cache. Or trying to figure out what some obscure error message you’ve never seen before might mean.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Marko Vasiljevic

    (@vmarko)

    Hello @markolbert

    First of all, thank you for your review.
    The only other solution that I could have offered is to do it for you and what I offed was the documentation on how to install the necessary extension on your server, in order to be able to use it via W3 Total Cache. It’s like blaming google Chrome for not having internet access, and the problem is in the router.
    W3 Total Cache absolutely covers Debian OS, with no problem.
    W3 Total Cache is that advanced plugin and yes, when configured properly it offers the best possible performance of your website, however, optimal W3 Total Cache configuration takes into account a number of factors: your theme, your plugins, the technologies available on the server. Since everyone’s site, traffic, and theme are different, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
    And using the example you provided regarding uninstalling the plugin, this is most likely due to the configuration in the W3TC potentially caching wp-admin requests.
    While other plugins seem easier to configure due to the robust features of the W3 Total Cache, one thing that W3 Total Cache is offering is freedom of choice, which unfortunately may cause problems if something is not configured properly.

    We are always happy to assist you with any issues that you may be encountering, and you can reach out to us always via the support forum, plugin support page, or the website.

    THank you very much and please let me know if there is anything I can assist you with regarding the W3 Total Cache!

    Thanks!

    Thread Starter MarkOlbert

    (@markolbert)

    Your analogy to google is off target: your documentation is simply inadequate to the task of getting the plugin working. That is no doubt due to the complexity of what the plugin is attempting to do…but the point of software development, ultimately, is not to just do cool things but to do cool things in a way that is reasonably straightforward for the end user to achieve. That makes documentation an important (but often overlooked or minimized) component of any software tool.

    What constitutes an end user is inherently amorphous. Are we targeting sysadmins with 20+ years of experience running commercial WordPress hosting sites, intermediate-level users (like me) who have a good bit of personal (but not commercial scale) experience setting up and running WordPress sites or a rank novice?

    I’m willing to believe your plugin and documentation is fine for that first group. The other two? Not in its current state.

    Plugin Contributor Marko Vasiljevic

    (@vmarko)

    Hello @markolbert

    First of all I am sorry for the late reply as I have not received the notification for this.

    While I understand your point, I need to point out that the problem is related to the hosting environment and different providers have different methods for installing some extensions or modules. So, this is specifically related to Debian in your case, and I’ve shared a video of a step by step information on how to install the Memcached PHP module that is needed for the W3TC to be able to use Memcached as a caching method.
    Once again I am sorry about any inconvenience, however, as an advanced plugin as W3TC is, it cannot do everything automatically.

    Thank you again and I hope you will reconsider and go back to the W3 Total Cache.

    Thanks!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Not Worth the Trouble’ is closed to new replies.