It's been a while since I've updated the Caching Manager, which is a module on the Sitecore Marketplace, so during a recent upgrade it was about that time. I'm using the design from Sitecore 8. It's backwards compatible through Sitecore 6 (SIM makes this possible) so there's no excuse for not getting it. Unless, you're on 5? Was caching on 5? I honestly don't remember or probably never knew.
On a recent project I was looking to replace some existing infrastructure that built a sidebar on a page using a list of content items (non-page items) that were selected by the content editor. The existing system was using a single sublayout which had several templated server controls that defined the display for different types of content. This was a global resource and any individual site that wanted to modify the display would have to copy the file in it's entirety even if it only wanted to modify a single line. It also didn't provide a default display for items that weren't explicitly defined. Only predefined types were displayed so there was some confusion as to why some things wouldn't be displayed.
I wanted to write up an article that elaborates on a presentation I gave on some but not all of the new features that will be upcoming in Sitecore 7. Mostly I'm going to focus on the updates around Lucene search but I'll also touch on some of the other features as well. This will be a longer article so be warned.
I've recently updated the Caching Manager module on the Sitecore Marketplace. The improvements were focused on the UI which I've made to mimic the native design of the content editor. It's a lot more compressed and easy to use. The different cache regions are broken into separate tabs and parts of the form are broken into sections. You can collapse the sections by double clicking on the title bar like you can in the content editor. There's use of Sitecore's icons and the buttons are better defined and the font size is smaller so that more fits on a screen.
*the code was updated 8/2/2011 with some insight from Mrunal Brahmbhatt. Much appreciated.
So I recently upgraded my system to Sitecore 6.4 from Sitecore 6.2 and was pumped about a lot of the new features like multi-browser support, new Rich Text Editor but mostly, the new built-in multi-target cache management system. Now I have to say that when I heard the words "partial cache clearing" I completely misunderstood what it meant. I thought it was partial html cache clearing thinking that when a single page got published, just that item was removed from cache. The truth is that when anyone publishes anything all html cache for all sites defined under the web.config's "publish:end" or "publish:end:remote" event are cleared. Sitecore manages a lot more cache than just html cache so by their thinking when just the html cache is cleared, that is just part of all the cache they're working with. In this way they're right, but this strategy is a problem for my particular system because of the large number of sites and editors working on it at any given time. The continually growing number of sites means that I rely on the html cache a lot to minimize the workload on the servers and keep sites loading quickly. I had solved this same issue working with the Stager Module but doing it with this new system is a bit different. Before I go into details about how to do this I will say that I am expecting that you have already setup your system as a mutli-target platform and have properly configured your ScalabilitySettings.config file. If you're looking for more on how to setup a multi-target platform then I'd suggest first starting by reviewing the scaling guide on SDN first which answered all my question about how to get it working.
If you're on a Sitecore environment pre-6.3 and you're using the Sitecore Stager you may have noticed that each publish will clear the entire HTML for a site. This may be fine for you but I like to have more granular control over the cache so I've updated the source code a bit to clear only entries related to the published items. I'm not going to knock the Sitecore Stager, it's an excellent utility. Plus this why they release source code in the first place.