Free Down­loads Work­ing Beau­ti­fully Again

UPDATE March 2012: To sim­plify things the pass­word pro­tected down­load sys­tem has been de­ac­ti­vated. I’ll now send the di­rect down­load links via email to my sub­scribers. END UPDATE

A few days ago I told you about a tech­ni­cal prob­lem with the free down­loads. I fi­nally fixed it, sim­ply by de­ac­ti­vat­ing the plu­gin that caused the problems.

It was the W3 To­tal Cache plu­gin. I’m a lit­tle bit sorry about de­ac­ti­vat­ing it, be­cause hav­ing it was a huge per­for­mance boost for wordpress.

Un­for­tu­nately it caused sev­eral prob­lems that I was­n’t able to fix.

  • Af­ter sub­mit­ting the se­cret pass­word it was­n’t shown to the users that they were ac­tu­ally logged in. Con­se­quently they could not get the free downloads.
  • The Javascript that dis­plays re­lated posts and tags in the side­bar stopped work­ing af­ter I mini­fied it us­ing W3 To­tal Cache.
  • Some Javascript in the footer bar also did not work anymore.

Long story short: W3 To­tal Cache is gone for now, per­for­mance is back to its much slower state, you can now eas­ily un­lock your free down­loads again.

P.S. If you’re fa­mil­iar with W3 To­tal Cache and know how to fix these prob­lems, you may chime in here:

My word­press fo­rum post about this problem.