Plugin / Transient Cleaner

Description

As of version 4.9 of WordPress, transient housekeeping now takes place automatically – this plugin is therefore no longer required!

Housekeep expired transients from your options table. The original and best!

“Transients are a simple and standardized way of storing cached data in the WordPress database temporarily by giving it a custom name and a timeframe after which it will expire and be deleted.”

Unfortunately, expired transients only get deleted when you attempt to access them. If you don’t access the transient then, even though it’s expired, WordPress will not remove it. This is a known “issue” but due to reasons, which are explained in the FAQ, this has not been adequately resolved.

Why is this a problem? Transients are often used by plugins to “cache” data (my own plugins included). Because of the housekeeping problems this means that expired data can be left and build up, resulting in a bloated database table.

Meantime, this plugin is the hero that you’ve been waiting for. Simply activate the plugin, sit back and enjoy a much cleaner, smaller options table. It also adds the additional recommendation that after a database upgrade all transients will be cleared down.

Technical specification…

• Licensed under GPLv2 (or later)
• Designed for both single and multi-site installations
• PHP7 compatible
• Fully internationalized, ready for translations. If you would like to add a translation to this plugin then please head to our Translating WordPress page
• Gutenberg ready

I’d like to thank WordPress Developer Andrew Nacin for his early discussion on this. Also, I’d like to acknowledge the useful article at Everybody Staze for ensuring the proposed solution wasn’t totally mad, and W-Shadow.com for the cleaning code.

Please visit the Github page for the latest code development, planned enhancements and known issues.

The Settings Screen

Within Administration -> Tools -> Transients an options screen exists allowing you to tweak which of the various housekeeping you’d like to happen, including the ability to perform an ad-hoc run, and when you’d like the to be automatically scheduled.

You can even request an optimization of the options table to give your system a real “pep”!

Running in Lite mode

A “lite” mode is available. By activating this the options screen will no longer appear and default settings will be used. The advantage? Improved performance to Admin and, especially if you’re running multi-site, no chance of anybody “tinkering” with the settings.

To activate, use the following…

define( 'TC_LITE', true );

This should be added to your wp-config.php file.

Using hooks

If you’re the type of odd person who likes to code for WordPress (really?) then I’ve added a couple of hooks so you can call our rather neat housekeeping functions…

• housekeep_transients – this will clear down any expired transients
• clear_all_transients – this will remove any and all transients, expired or otherwise