880614 - Add option to macros that triggers periodic page rebuild

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: KumaScript, enhancement)

Description

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Some macros (templates) are particularly sensitive to changes that are made, and can result in inaccurate output if not rebuilt periodically. Let's make it possible to mark a template (in the template editor interface) with how many hours/days its output should be allowed to be cached.

There should also be a "dump all caches now" button available to template authors, so they can force the caches to be cleared if they've made a change that should require all cached values to go away.

Who would use this?
===================
Template authors.

What would users see?
=====================
More up-to-date results from templates.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
Template authors would have a drop-down menu in the editor interface allowing them to choose a TTL for the template's output. Options would include:

* Indefinite (don't dump the cached results except on force-refresh)
* 1 hour
* 4 hours
* 8 hours
* 1 day
* 1 week

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
This will be increasingly useful as we build out landing pages that build their contents based on their subpages or on tags, since they only refresh currently if someone knows to force them to.

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

This also impacts zones, as many zones are likely to involve macros that build lists of pages related to the topic based either on subpages or tags. Keeping zone landing pages and menus up-to-date means being able to flush cached lists on a regular basis.

Comment 2

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Something to keep in mind -- we are gradually paying more attention to votes and less attention to the priority field, mostly because the former is usually more accurate and up-to-date. So thanks for voting!

Comment 3

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

There's an additional trick here -- templates that reference other templates.

If template A calls template B, and template B gets dumped, template A should be dumped too.

Comment 4

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

Tweaked the title, just to be semantically picky. There's no cache, and we don't store execution result at a macro-by-macro level. We'd need to rebuild whole pages. 

So, if a macro was flagged as needing rebuild every hour, we'd need to track all the pages that use it and queue up a rebuild of each of those pages one-by-one. Similar to bug 772704, but triggered by a schedule rather than an edit to macro code.

What we might be able to implement sooner is bug 773522. That is, we could flag whole *pages* (and not macros) as needing periodic rebuild. Simpler system, no macro tracking or dependency tracing involved, but needs a bit more manual effort to set the time-to-live for each page.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

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