Password protected galleries won't load after password submitted

When managing client photo galleries in Sunshine Photo Cart, a common issue that arises is gallery passwords not working as expected. This can be particularly problematic when you or your clients try to access a password-protected gallery. You enter the password, but instead of granting access to the gallery, the page just reloads and prompts for the password again. The root cause of this frustrating loop is typically related to caching.

Caching is used to speed up website loading times by storing static versions of pages. However, this becomes a problem with dynamic pages that require real-time updates or interactions, such as entering a password to access a client photo gallery. What happens here is that your caching system is serving the password-protected, cached version of the page, which doesn't recognize the newly entered password.

This caching can occur at two levels:

1. Server-Level Caching: This is provided by your web host. It's integrated at a deeper level and can be more challenging to configure or disable for specific pages.
2. Caching Plugins in WordPress: These are more common and user-configurable. Most caching plugins for WordPress come with options to exclude certain pages or cookies from being cached.

To resolve the issue with your client photo galleries, it's recommended to configure caching for all Sunshine Photo Cart related pages and/or cookies. This action ensures that when a password is entered for a gallery, the server processes it in real time and grants access as intended, rather than redirecting back to the cached login page. By fine-tuning your caching settings, you can maintain the speed benefits of caching for your website while ensuring that dynamic pages like your client photo galleries function correctly.