Ryan Hellyer

PHP Library

Stale Cache

A Laravel-style caching library for WordPress. Clean architecture, smart dependency injection, and stale-while-revalidate semantics for high-traffic sites.

Install Package View Source code
⚡
20 stars Git Hub Rating
Method Stale-while-revalidate
100% Open Source
License MIT

About the Library

Stale Cache brings modern caching patterns to WordPress. Inspired by Laravel's cache system, it provides a clean, testable abstraction over WordPress transients with support for stale-while-revalidate, cache stampede protection, and multiple backends.

Unlike WordPress transients, Stale Cache serves stale data while regenerating fresh content in the background — your users never wait for a cache miss.

Core Concepts

  • Stale-while-revalidate: Serve cached content immediately while asynchronously refreshing in the background.
  • Cache stampede protection: Probabilistic early expiration prevents thundering herds when a popular key expires.
  • Multiple backends: Works with WordPress transients, Redis, Memcached, or file-based caching.

Usage

The API mirrors Laravel's cache facade, making it instantly familiar to any Laravel developer working in WordPress:

use RyanHellyer\StaleCache\StaleCache;

$data = StaleCache::get(
    'my_cache_key',
    [5, 3600],      // [stale_time, cache_duration, lock_duration (optional)]
    function () {
        return get_expensive_data();
    }
);

Installation

Install via Composer

composer require ryanhellyer/stale-cache