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Cloudflare, Wordpress and DIVI CMS

All three of these products are, in my opinion, very useful and worth using in terms of web site development. 

For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, Cloudflare is a CDN (Content Distribution Network/cache), Wordpress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System) used to create websites and DIVI is a paid for WYSIWYG editing tool which is often used with Wordpress.

What's not to like?... well.....

 If you have recently migrated a website developed in Wordpress and DIVI to use Cloudflare, everything from a users perspective works fine, with faster load times and an enhanced degree of security too. But, the fun starts when you, as Webmaster, try to edit or create a new DIVI page. You login,  - hopefully with DFA - and start to edit a page and... all you get is a 'roundy roundy' on screen. Nothing loads. Exit your browser, try again, same thing. Perhaps you might get a cryptic message flash up about 'session exhausted' and needing to login again, but this doesn't work either.

Try Chrome, Edge, Firefox, flush caches, nothing works. Perhaps try to edit another site you manage, constructed in a similar manner, and - it works!   

So what is going on - and how do we fix it? Well, the sort answer is, 'I don't know.. but it feels like a caching issue'. Bear in mind that Cloudflare sits between your browser and your web site - the DNS records, help in Cloudflare's DNS, point to the Cloudflare CDN and the CDN points, internaly, to your actual webserver. 

So the simplest 'fix' is actually a work around and that involved setting the Hosts file on your workstation to point directly at your web server and thus bypass Cloudflare's caching.  

It then all, magically, works! Hurray! 

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