I am new to PHP generally and caching and am trying to develop a Facebook share counter for Wordpress. As advised by a member here, since it's not optimum to make calls to the API and slow down the website each time, I decided to cache the results and went with the static method. Here's the code I am using.
function fb_cache($atts) {
$url = $atts['url'];
static $fb_cache = array();
if (isset($fb_cache[$url])) {
$fb_count = $fb_cache[$url];
return $fb_count;
} else {
$fb = json_decode( file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/' . $url) );
$fb_count = $fb->share->share_count;
$fb_cache[$url] = $fb_count;
return $fb_count;
}
}
This doesn't seem to work as the number keeps changing every few seconds and the API calls are thus being made each time. To use it as a plugin, I also have an instantiating code in the end.
static function get_instance() {
static $instance = false;
if ( ! $instance ) {
$instance = new self;
}
}
Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong. I apologize if it's a noob question and if I am using the wrong method altogether.
