menu items display

Hello,

I have several menu items (e.g. users profile page) which are only accessed by logged-in users. When I have cache setting enabled (from global config.), these menu items don't show up when users log into the site until cache gets cleared. Same thing happens when users log out, these menu items don't go away till the cache get cleared.

I checked the CB login module's cache setting, no caching was selected by default, and I didn't specify any login and logout redirects.

Till now, I have disabled cache globally, but I would like to enable cache for many reasons.

Thanks.

That's how Joomla cache works. You probably have page cache enabled and it caches the entire output buffer doing exactly what you're seeing. Do not use page cache on any site with dynamic content. It's basically only useful for sites with a lot of static content (e.g. a blog with little to no user interaction).

Thanks, I just checked the page cache plugin, it has been disabled all long... does this mean I should disable cache from global config to display menu items properly?

The global settings enables view caching and module caching. Modules configured not to cache shouldn't though. If you've global caching set to conservative change it to progressive, purge the cache, then see if your issue persists. Aside from that I don't know what more to suggest besides disabling cache or posting to Joomla forums to see what they advise.

Thank you.
No luck on this issue yet. I wonder if this is an issue to every Joomla sites or specific to my site.

Caching is an issue for any site with dynamic content. I'm not sure most quite understand what Joomla cache is or does. When Joomla outputs a view it goes into an output buffer. This buffer is basically a giant string of the entire HTML DOM that's about to be output. Joomla takes this and compresses it into a cache file based off the view. If that cache file exists and it hasn't expired based off cache time settings it simply outputs what is already in the cache file. This is a huge problem for any view with dynamic content, because that cache file of course is out of date based off cache time.

The progressive cache usage however is at least user by user specific. So the cache is unique to each visitor making it a little more accurate. Progressive cache with say a 5 minute cache duration isn't too bad for dynamic content, but is still out of date and should never be applied to HTML forms. Conservative cache is not visitor specific so every visitor is given the same cache output, which could be a dynamic view not relevant to the user (this is where you get cases of a user visiting the site and are logged in as some random user).

Basically don't use Joomla caching on a site that's more than just a simple blog or has little user interaction. That caching was basically designed for blog or news sites. The best way to speed up your load times is caching the headers (CSS and JS compression) and most importantly Lazy Loading of images. The DOM waiting for 10 photos to load is very slow. With lazy loading they load in after the DOM. We use JCH Optimizer to great affect here for that. Your alternative is to look into some 3rd party caching extensions that let you define more specific cache rules (e.g. don't cache this component, this page, this module, etc..).