Issue: Site moved to Flywheel hosting two months ago. During a maintenance check in advance of upgrades, the .htaccess pwd protection popup for the staging site launched. Workaround was to close popup, or disable required privacy protection on staging site.
Root cause and resolution: Flywheel support professional identified issue related to WPML cache. She reset the cache through the WPML troubleshooting dashboard and issue was resolved.
Followup: ran maintenance upgrade of all plugins and then WP to 5.4. WPML CMS plugin version now 4.3.12. Reviewed changelog for the plugin and noticed under 4.3.7 a fix titled "Improved non-persistent cache"
Questions:
Was this an issue resolved by the fix in 4.3.7?
Flywheel hosting offers a WP_CACHE compatibility option which is designed to support the co-existence of their caching solutions if a third party Cache plugin is enabled.
Does the caching used by the WPML CMS plugin utilize WP_CACHE?
If so, should one enable the Flywheel WP_CACHE option when using WPML?
Thank you for contacting WPML Support. I've fowarded your questions to our second level support for more details regarding the internal implementation of WPML cache system, I will let you know as soon as I have some more details from them. Thank you for your patience and understanding, have a nice day.
Thank you for your patience while waited for a reply. I've got some more details from our second level support, so here are the answer to your questions:
1 - "Was this an issue resolved by the fix in 4.3.7"
It wasn't an issue, it was an improvement to the bultin cache featured of WPML wich uses WP_CACHE.
2 - "Does the caching used by the WPML CMS plugin utilize WP_CACHE?"
Yes, it uses the WP_CACHE.
3 - "If so, should one enable the Flywheel WP_CACHE option when using WPML?"
Although I didn't test this scenario but as both Flywheel and WPML uses the same source of cache (WP_CACHE) we believe no issue will be seen.
Thank you for following up on this. From a technical perspective I understand.
However, I wish to avoid this issue in the future. That is, I do not want to have a client text me with a message wondering why his live site is asking for authentication to view it. He and his customers who use the site do not understand or care about htaccess password protection of a staging site or the many problems that can be associated with caching.
In this particular case there were no changes made over a two month period to the production or staging site. Then all of a sudden a popup asking for the username and password provided through htaccess protection of the stating site shows up on the live site.
I would prefer to leave caching to my hosting provider and not to plugins. To reduce the risk of receiving an embarrassing message from a client I would like to disable caching by the WPML plugin. I am not supporting sites with a large amount of content and already have top-performing hosting and caching by using Flywheel WordPress managed hosting.
Is it possible to disable caching by the WPML plugin?
Thank you for the updates. I understand your concerns, unfortunately the only way to flush WPML cache is using the troubleshooting tools from the WPML > Support admin screen. There's not a feature to permanently remove it via plugin options, I would never recommend make it in code as you could break things and have some unpredictable results mainly related to performance for example. Even so, I've found this related ticket: https://wpml.org/forums/topic/wpml-cache-2/ dealing with some code editings (never recommended).
Your issue is not something usual and it seems the exception here not the rule. In the end WPML is using the cache mechanism provided by WordPress itself, so disabling it would make any difference from my point of view.
Hope it adds a bit of clarification here, have a nice day.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I certainly will not try and change your code.
After my last post I realized that there would have been changes during the two month period I mentioned as I allow for maintenance upgrades of WordPress.
