Internals

Debug mode

TubePress can be put into "debug mode" which prints out details of what's happening under the hood. To activate debug mode, simply add tubepress_debug=true to the end of the URL in your address bar. Feel free to use our tool below to find your debug URL.

Enabling or Disabling Debug Mode

Keeping debug mode enabled incurs a negligible performance penalty, though it does present a minor privacy risk as some of your web server's internals can be exposed to the world. If you are not having any issues with TubePress, we recommend that you disable debugging.

WordPress users can enable or disable debugging from WP Admin > Settings > TubePress > Advanced > Enable debugging

Standalone PHP users can enable or disable debugging via the debugging_enabled option. This can either be passed as an option to TubePressPro::getHTML(), or it can be saved in database.json.

Content directory

The "TubePress Content Directory" is a special directory located alongside your TubePress installation. The purpose of this directory is to store any customizations (add-ons, themes, or low-level configuration) that you make to TubePress. Since it does not change between TubePress versions, it's "upgrade safe."

Location

For WordPress users, the TubePress Content Directory is always located at wp-content/tubepress-content. In most cases, TubePress auto-creates this directory when you activate TubePress for the first time.

Contents

The TubePress Content Directory may contain zero or more of the following immediate subdirectories:

• themes which may contain [themes](themes link) that aren't shipped with TubePress
• add-ons which may contain add-ons that aren't shipped with TubePress
• config which may contain low-level configuration for TubePress such as settings.php and/or database.json

System Cache

TubePress is a fairly complex piece of software with many interconnected internal systems. When it is first installed to your web server, it "looks around" to discover what's available to it and how it should configure itself for your particular environment. This usually takes a few hundred milliseconds on most servers. On the web, that's a very long time and your users will feel the delay. So to keep your site running as fast as possible, TubePress performs this initial setup once and caches its findings on your web server's filesystem. On the next request, TubePress quickly reads its cached findings. This usually takes anywhere from 5 milliseconds to a few dozen milliseconds: dramatically faster and virtually negligible for most websites.

When to Clear the System Cache

There are a few relatively rare instances when the system cache needs to be manually cleared:

• Adding or removing a TubePress add-on
• Adding, editing, or removing a theme's template
• Making any changes to a theme's manifest

Other than the events listed above, there is no reason to clear the system cache.

How to Clear the System Cache

Clearing the cache is very easy. Simply add tubepress_clear_system_cache=true to the end of the URL in your address bar. TubePress will delete the entire system cache and immediately rebuild it. Feel free to use our tool below to calculate this URL for you.