Caching Tips for CMF Administrators

Out of the box, there is very little caching one can expect with the CMF. Due to the design of the out of the box experience the CMF does not allow for caching of the html pages. Outside of utilizing the Accelerated HTTP Cache Manager for setting the cache policy for images, one will need to rethink the design of their CMF implementation to take advantage of the powers of caching.

On two of my most recent customer gigs, I have had to work on these concepts explicitly and will provide some alternative design strategies for site administrators who require the benefits of caching sites powered by the CMF. I will provide screenshots and discussion of these various strategies at a later date; for now the important thing is to take the time to think about caching before defaulting to the out of the box CMF design if caching will be important to you.

CMF Cache Policy Manager

The CMF Cache Policy Manager allows site administrators to add a variety of policies for controlling the cache headers based on the matching of the polcies. At present, the only objects the this tool controls setting cache headers on is filesystem based skin tempaltes.

See CMFCore/FSPageTemplate for more information on it's implementation.

• HTTP 1.0 proxies ignore the Cache-Control: no-cache; max-age headers.

  A work around for this is to ensure that if your policy is setting the no-cache header, to set the Mod. Time: field for the policy to python:None. Setting this will ensure that the Last-Modified header is not set and HTTP 1.0 proxies will not cache pages unexpectedly.