A brief outage this morning here that was caused by the malfunctioning W3 Total Cache disk cache plugin has been fixed. We’re replacing it WP Super Cache. W3TC has many excellent features but is a cranky, temperamental, high-strung sports car compared to the WP Super Cache sedan, which gets the job done fine too, even if it’s not as flashy or full-featured.
The blog has been using W3 Total Cache for some time but a new version to fix a security hole apparently borked things for some users, including here. From the WP support forum.
Since the update of W3TC we can’t schedule any blogposts anymore. All schedules are failing. In search of the cause of the failings I disabled W3TC and the scheduling returns working again. So the cause is clearly W3TC.
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I am getting the same problems, also I cannot save posts or update them. I also cannot deactivate the plugin, or empty all the caches. Everything ends up at a page not found.
I tried deinstalling W3TC and got timeout errors several times then a server error and couldn’t even access the site. W3TC had partially deinstalled itself but then mangled .htaccess which is what caused the server error.
I used the very helpful advice in Uninstall W3 Total Cache – The Proper Way to completely deinstall it via ftp after redoing .htaccess.
I’m a software developer too and understand that WordPress is increasingly complicated and that plugins can have conflicts. However, I use WP Super cache on several client’s blogs though and there are never conflicts.