Transient Cleaner vs Fresh Forms for Gravity

Clean expired transients from your options table. The original and best! Transient housekeeping was added to the core of WordPress after version 5.8. However, I have decided to open up this plugin to all versions to allow for manual transient cleaning. Longer term I am working on a new version of the plugin, designed specifically for all WordPress releases. Tested up to PHP 8.2 Fully complies with WordPress coding standards Compliant with the stronger WordPress VIP coding standards, as well as compatibility with their platform Community plugin – visit the Github page to get involved with the latest code development, request enhancements and report issues “Transients are a simple and standardized way of storing cached data in the WordPress database temporarily by giving it a custom name and a timeframe after which it will expire and be deleted.” Unfortunately, expired transients only get deleted when you attempt to access them. If you don’t access the transient then, even though it’s expired, WordPress will not remove it. This is a known “issue” but due to reasons, which are explained in the FAQ, this has not been adequately resolved. Why is this a problem? Transients are often used by plugins to “cache” data (my own plugins included). Because of this it means that expired data can be left and build up, resulting in a bloated database table. Meantime, this plugin is the hero that you’ve been waiting for. Simply activate the plugin, sit back and enjoy a much cleaner, smaller options table. It also adds the additional recommendation that after a database upgrade all transients will be cleared down. The Settings Screen Within Administration -> Tools -> Transients an options screen exists allowing you to tweak when you’d like cleaning to happen, including the ability to perform an ad-hoc run, and when you’d like the to be automatically scheduled. You can even request an optimization of the options table to give your system a real “pep”! Running in Lite mode A “lite” mode is available. By activating this the options screen will no longer appear and default settings will be used. The advantage? Improved performance to Admin and, especially if you’re running multi-site, no chance of anybody “tinkering” with the settings. To activate, use the following… define( 'TC_LITE', true ); This should be added to your wp-config.php file. Using hooks If you’re the type of odd person who likes to code for WordPress (really?) then I’ve added a couple of hooks so you can call our rather neat cleaning functions… housekeep_transients – this will clear down any expired transients clear_all_transients – this will remove any and all transients, expired or otherwise Acknowledgements I’d like to thank WordPress Developer Andrew Nacin for his early discussion on this. Also, I’d like to acknowledge the useful article at Everybody Staze for ensuring the proposed solution made sense, and W-Shadow.com for the cleaning code. Iconography is courtesy of the very talented Janki Rathod.

Caching is great for scenarios where your post or page content it’s not changed frequently, but if you have a form embedded to which you do changes very often or you’re using dynamic code, that doesn’t run for a cached page, or using third-party solutions relaying in dynamic live data (e.g. reCAPTCHA), using caching in these cases is going to cause issues. The same applies to certain automatic JS optimizations done by caching plugins that are known to break JS execution easily. An easy solution is to configure your caching plugin or proxy to exclude the page where the form is embedded, but you need also to remember this when you create a new page or embed a new form in an existing page… This plugin will take care of the above automatically doing the following: Flush current cache on plugin activation. This is required in order to allow the next step to run. Dynamically check if there’s a Gravity Forms for any of the supported embedding methods (see below for the list). If so, it will prevent post/page from being cached by any of the supported caching plugins, browsers and CDN/Proxies. Embedding methods supported: WordPress default editor, shortcode or Gutenberg block. Content of any post type, including pages and custom posts. ACF fields of type Text, Text Area, and WYSIWYG. Disabled by default. Avada. The following elements has been proven to work: Content Boxes, “Gravity Form”, Modal, Text Block. Other elements could work too, but not tested. Beaver Builder. It will detect Gravity Forms shortcodes added to a Text Editor module. Conversational Forms add-on. It will automatically detect any form page using the conversational_form post type (requires Conversational Forms add-on 1.3.0+). Divi. It should work with any of the default modules where you can insert a GF shortcode into the content. e.g. Call To Action, Text, Tabs… Elementor. The following widgets added to the post content are supported: Shortcode, Text. Essential Addons for Elementor Gravity Forms widget. GravityKit Gravity Forms Widget for Elementor. PowerPack for Beaver Builder Gravity Forms Styler module. Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder Gravity Forms Styler module. Ultimate Addons for Elementor By Brainstorm Force. WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-ons by Lucas Stark. WPBakery Page Builder. The following elements has been proven to work: “Gravity Form”, Text Block. Other elements could work too, but not tested. WP Tools Gravity Forms Divi Module. If you’re not using any of the above embedding methods you can still use Fresh Forms with a filter to pass the ID number of the posts where you want to run Fresh forms. You can also make Fresh Forms to add a cookie when a form is detected to use this cookie as a way to skip caching for hosts using Varnish based caching. Please see FAQ for more details. There’s no options page. Only the plugin version is saved to the database to be able to handle actions after an update when needed, no other data is stored. It should work with any caching plugin with support for DONOTCACHEPAGE constant, and proxies respecting the use Cache-Control HTTP header. Caching and Optimization plugins supported: Autoptimize Cache Enabler Comet Cache Hummingbird Kinsta Cache LiteSpeed Cache Page Optimize (Script concatenation only) Perfmatters (Delay JS exclusions only) Speed Optimizer (by SiteGround, the plugin with more name changes in the history of WordPress!) Surge W3 Total Cache WP Engine System WP Fastest Cache WP Optimize WP Rocket WP Super Cache Caching plugins NOT supported: Breeze. It doesn’t support DONOTCACHEPAGE constant or filters to skip caching. Check FAQ for a workaround. NitroPack. It doesn’t support DONOTCACHEPAGE constant or filters to skip caching. Check FAQ for a workaround. Cloudflare and other CDN/proxies: This plugin will add appropriate HTTP header to pages with a Gravity Forms form to exlude the page HTML from caching when the web host setup allows it. By default Cloudflare doesn’t cache the page HTML, it does only when you have configured it to “Cache Everything”. In this case, after activating the plugin, you need to purge cache in your Cloudflare account or wait for cache expiration to let Cloudflare know the page must be excluded from caching. Certain hosts like WP Engine and Kinsta don’t allow HTTP headers modification from WordPress side of things, therefore Cloudflare support will not work for these hosts. Other proxy services should work in a similar way, but I don’t have access to test any other proxy service. Feel to reach me if you want to provide me access to add support for your proxy service (documentation for the proxy would be required). Note for these cases (caching is done by an external service), Fresh Forms can just include the HTTP header when your web host allows it. Once the header is added, it’s up to the CDN/proxy being used to obey the header and skip caching for the page. Requirements PHP 7.0 or higher. WordPress 4.9 or higher. Gravity Forms 2.3 or higher. Only forms embedded using classic editor shortcode or Gutenberg block are supported. Usage Just install and activate. No settings required except for ACF support (see FAQ).