Transients are just database keys that expire. It’s like telling WordPress you want it to remember a certain piece of information, but for a limited time. In general, transients are accessible to PHP through any request. But since they’re server-side, transients are only exposed to front-end users if you as the developer expose them. A … Read more
Is this ok or should I just store it in an array form so I can just directly access it without using json_decode? In your case store it directly means store it serialized. Because $data is an array and cannot be stored as is, but converted to a string. Even if you access it directly … Read more
For development I would advise to always work with WP_DEBUG set to true and do the following: $key = ‘transient_key’; if( !WP_DEBUG && ( false !== ($transient = get_transient($key)) ){ /* Generate transient manually */ $expiration = 24*60*60;//How long to keep for set_transient($key,$transient, $expiration); } In general – it should be fine deleting transients, as … Read more
Catching the weather API remote data The msg, you’re showing in your question is basically the result from the weather API. And it says, that there’s no data available for your location. The first thing you want to do is some research in the Codex and the “WP HTTP API”. The right/WP way to grab … Read more
Today I run a test over my db to explore the speed difference between accessing a key from options, custom table & transients. I ran the test for 1000 times and following is the time taken to run 1000 get operations: Keep in mind that the options table is used for both options and transients … Read more
Transients are great when you’re doing complex queries in your themes and plugins. I tend to use transients for things like menus and showing other things like Tweets from Twitter in a sidebar for example. I wouldn’t use them for absolutely everything more-so just temporary pieces of data that can be cached. Keep in mind … Read more
This is a fairly definitive set of responses about transients WPSE: Are transients garbage collected?
Should I use Transient API at all here? No. In a stock WordPress install transients are stored in the wp_options table, and only cleaned up during core upgrades. Suppose you have 50,000 posts, that’s 50,000 additional rows in the options table. Obviously they’re set to autoload=no, so it’s not going to consume all your memory, … Read more
WordPress, by default, does a form of “Object Caching” but its lifetime is only a single page load. Options are actually a really good example of this. Check out this answer for more info. The summary: A page starts All options are loaded with a simple SELECT option_name, option_value from $wpdb->options statement Subsequent requests for … Read more
They now are Starting with WordPress 3.7 expired transients are deleted on database upgrades, see #20316 Old answer If someone can’t show me otherwise it seems that transients are not garbage collected after all. What makes it worse is that unlike options they are not guaranteed to be stored in database. So there is no … Read more