Circumventing Drupal's Cache for New Content

Question

We like to post updates to Facebook and Twitter when publishing new content. We are running into a problem, however, in that anonymous users will get the "Access Denied" page until the cache recycles to show them the new content.

Currently, we're caching pages for anonymous users for three minutes. How do we keep our cache, yet allow anonymous users to see new content immediately as it's published?

For what it's worth, we are not using Memcache, Varnish or anything outside of the standard Drupal page caching.

Answer 1

I'm not sure why you're getting "Access Denied" when you view new content as anonymous user. New content shouldn't be cached yet.

As a solution for your issue, you can clear all Drupal cache or only Drupal page cache after adding new content.

The following code will clear page cache after inserting new content:

   function MODULE_NAME_nodeapi(&$node, $op, $teaser, $page) {
      switch ($op) {
        case 'insert':
          cache_clear_all('*', 'cache_page', TRUE);
          break;
      }
    }

Note: This code will not work on Drupal 7

Answer 2

403 "Access Denied" on a cache miss seems odd to me. One thing to try is http://drupal.org/project/adbc as it makes the Dupal cache operate like one expects.