Thaya Kareeson has written an excellent article for plugin developers. It goes through how to make plugins work with WP Super Cache by using dynamic AJAX calls.
WP Super Cache can make static html copies of pages served by WordPress which is great for performance. Unfortunately that means some plugins don’t work because they rely on executing PHP on each request. The plugins need to be rewritten to use AJAX calls by the visitor’s browser. There’s a FAQ in the readme.txt all about it!
I previously wrote about adding AJAX to WordPress plugins but Thaya has worked through a simple example that will work perfectly with WP Super Cache. It’s a good foundation for plugin developers start from.
He also has versions of WP Postviews and Popularity Contest that have been rewritten to support static caching. I haven’t tried either plugin so leave a comment on his blog if you need help!
If you depend on a large portion of your content being dynamic this isn’t the solution for you as it will affect what search engines see. Those bots don’t speak Javascript, but for interactive purposes (ratings, stats etc) it’s the job.
- AJAX in Plugins is a must-read starting point for developers.
- wp_enqueue_script() is the command WordPress uses to load Javascript files. That page links to a couple of good pages too including this best practices post. As of this writing, Thaya’s example don’t use wp_enqueue_script() but it’s simple to use.
The vast majority of plugins work just fine with WP Super Cache, but some of the ones that don’t are quite popular. If your favourite plugin doesn’t work, why don’t you help the author out and fix it? You have all the source code after all and you’ll be helping everyone else who uses the plugin!