[ic] Timed build and sessions

[Jamie Neil]

Hi all,

I've got a problem that I'm trying to use timed-build to solve, but I'm 
getting stuck on session id's.

I have two different components that each show a small selection of 
products randomly selected from a subset of the database: "Featured 
Products" uses the merchandising table and "Special Offers" uses a 
sale_price field in the pricing table (see http://www.clickgolf.co.uk/).

These work fine, however I want to modify them so that on any given day 
they display the same products on the same page instead of presenting a 
new set each time the page is refreshed. The idea is to make the pages 
more "stable".

I thought timed-build sounded perfect for this, so I tried this:

[timed-build period="1440" file=|timed/promo-[control banner Featured 
Products]-[control matches 3]-[control promo_type featured]-[value deptid]|]
...component code...
[/timed-build]

(The reason for the complex filename is that the components are called 
on several different pages with different arguments for display and 
filtering.)

This seems to work fine, except when a user is logged in, so I tried 
adding "login=1". Unfortunately this didn't help because the id and 
mv_pc values are embedded into the URL when users log in on my site. 
Finally I tried "force=1", which _did_ work but now I have the problem 
of session ids being embedded in some of the cached pages, which is 
obviously not a good idea.

The only solution I can think of is to use "login=1", but disable the 
session id and mv_pc values in the URL for logged in users. Does anyone 
know if doing this will cause me any problems? Obviously users without 
cookies will still see new products on each refresh, but if it works for 
everyone else I'll be happy :)

Finally, can anyone tell me whether Google will see the cached pages or 
not? I understand that in 4.9.x the session id is suppressed when 
serving pages to known search engines (I'm using a late 4.9.7 snapshot). 
If so, I'm hoping that Google will see pages that change once a day 
rather than each time the page is accessed. This should encourage the 
Freshbot to visit while still serving up reletively stable content.

Sorry for the long rambling post - it's 1am and I'll probably read this 
in the morning and wonder what I was on about :(

Thanks,

-- 
Jamie Neil <jamie at versado.net>
Versado I.T. Services Ltd.
http://versado.net/