There has been an interesting feature in concrete5 which can improve your sites performance noticeably. If you log in to your site and look at the Sitewide Settings screen, you can see this box:
As already mentioned on the screenshot, these settings improve the performance by caching various outputs generated by blocks. In order to get the most out of your own blocks, you should look into this feature a bit closer. Think about this: How does concrete5 know that the output of a block can be cached? It can’t!
Block Cache Options
If you already created your own blocks in the past, your should be familiar with the BlockController. You probably also specified properties like $btTable and $btInterfaceWidth. Now, there are a few more properties you can set. Look at the following start of a BlockController:
class MusicBlockController extends BlockController { protected $btInterfaceWidth = 450; protected $btInterfaceHeight = 430; protected $btTable = 'btMusicPlayer'; protected $btCacheBlockRecord = true; protected $btCacheBlockOutput = true; protected $btCacheBlockOutputOnPost = true; protected $btCacheBlockOutputForRegisteredUsers = true; protected $btCacheBlockOutputLifetime = 60*30; // 30 minutes
There are a number of variables starting with btCache. All of them are related to the new cache functionality of concrete5. They let you specify if the content changes once a user is logged in ($btCacheBlockOutputForRegisteredUsers) they let you tell concrete5 if the content stays the same if the page is opened using the POST method allowing the cache to be enabled during a form post too ($btCacheBlockOutputOnPost).
You probably won’t be able to measure a huge impact if you’re block doesn’t have to process lots of data in order to print the output. But if there’s a complex method in the background of your block you can use these variables to easily control the cache of the output making your site feel faster.