Global overloading in advanced-cache.php

As a part of the 4.6 release, a change is made to the order of loading files during the bootstrap process. This change included an attempt to protect sites from the overloading of the hook related globals in advanced-cache.php. This change was reverted with [38251]. This means that the 4.5 behavior where if an advanced-cache.php sets one of the globals to an empty array, previously entered records will not exist.

This is a general reminder to not directly touch the globals in WordPress and to always use APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. functions. The format that the globals are in is not guaranteed to stay consistent from version to version. If you need to interact with the Plugins API in advanced-cache.php, as of 4.6, you can use the Plugins API (add_action(), add_filter(), etc.).

How to know if you are using advanced-cache.php

advanced-cache.php is a drop-in. If you are using any drop-ins, you will see “Drop-ins” at the top of wp-admin/plugins.php as one of the filtering options. If advanced-cache.php is listed and no warning is displayed, your site is using it. This file lives in your wp-content directory as a peer to plugins and themes. Updates to it are not made like updates to plugins. You will never see a notice that there is an update pending. If you did not write this code yourself, you are encouraged to keep up to date with upstream updates.

#4-6, #bootstrap-load, #dev-notes