Hi! This is my first time posting, I hope my terminology will make sense...

On my website, pages for K2 items do not display properly until their category page displays first.

Once the category page is loaded, then the item pages will display properly for the next 15 minutes.

For example, when I click on the main blog page, I can then click on any of the individual blog posts and can do so for the next 15 minutes. But if type in a url of an individual blog post (without having visited the main blog page in the last 15 minutes), I get the problem.

When I get the problem, the top third of my page renders somewhat correctly - the menu, the main image. But head.php doesn't seem to be getting called as I don't see any contents from it and the html of the rendered page contains <jdoc:include type="head" />.

The page just completely breaks once it gets to the item.php section. In the html on the problem page, it contains <jdoc:include type="component" /> near the end of the html that the page gets.

If I turn off caching globally, then the item pages always display problematically, regardless if I've visited the category page first. It's like the item pages require the category pages dropping something into cache or memory in order to work. And that cache lasts 15 minutes and I can't figure out where to change it - when I change the minutes in the global cache settings, it does not affect the 15 minutes.

I'd be so thankful for two pieces of information, if anyone happens to have some advice:
1. Where can I extend the 15 minutes? If I could extend it out (my site doesn't change too often), my site would be usable at least.
2. Even better, does anyone know how I can set the items so that they can get their content even if the category page hasn't loaded the cache yet?

Thanks, in advance!

Hello gretchen,

First of all you have to correctly map your content in menu items so your modules can display properly in all views (I think you have already done that).

As for the caching, you can change it's configuration from System => Global Configuration => System Tab.
You can experiment with File Cache, XCache , APC and Conservative or Progressive caching.

Keep in mind that these issues you are describing are possibly server issues and you should inform your hosting provider as well.