Introduction¶

What does it do?¶

This extension lets you flush cache on CloudFlare when content changes in your TYPO3 website and toggle “Developer Mode” for your domains from within TYPO3 Backend.

CloudFlare introduced a mechanism to purge single files instead of only allowing to flush all caches of a domain. This feature must be explicitly activated in the advanced configuration section. Even if activated, a full cache flush will be sent whenever your TCEMAIN.clearCacheCmd is set to “all”.

As CloudFlare acts a reverse-proxy for your website, originating IPs get replaced by the ones from the CloudFlare’s reverse proxies. TYPO3 lets you fix it but as they are numerous proxy servers, the configuration may be tedious. The best method is to restore the originating IP at the Web Server level but sometimes this is not possible. This is the reason why, in addition to flushing cache on CloudFlare, this extension lets the user restore the originating IP by ticking a configuration checkbox.

What is CloudFlare?¶

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through their intelligent global network. They automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. They also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

System overview with and without CloudFlare

CloudFlare’s system gets faster and smarter as their community of users grows larger. They have designed the system to scale with their goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet.

CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a simple change to your domain’s DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site’s existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Their core service is free and they offer enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.