Today was a busy day, so I flailed around a bit trying to find a patch to write for my blogrimage. I ended up working on one of my own Drupal modules, Quick Cache Cleaner, and finally rolling a 7.x-1.0 release.

Like most PHP-based database-driven websites, Drupal's performance suffers a bit from its complexity. To make pages load faster, Drupal caches stuff as it builds content. This site, for example, heavily caches content and uses tools to save pages in memory to reduce database lookups. That's all great until you need to flush the cache. For example, on this site, new blog posts won't appear until the cache is cleared, which could take hours the way I have it set. Of course, Drupal comes with a way to flush your cache, but it's buried deep in the performance settings, and you have to have site administrator privileges to get to it.

Enter Quick Cache Cleaner. It's really a little no-brainer module that takes the built-in drupal_flush_all_caches() function and exposes it as a menu item. Permission to use it can be assigned to any user, so content creators can clear caches without full administrator access.

I upgraded this module to Drupal 7 about seven months ago (and have been using it since then) but there was one little bit that needed to be tested and cleaned up before it was ready for release. I spotted this one while looking through my open issues today, and decided to take care of it. So I did my testing, made my changes, then did all the steps to create a full release.