[TYPO3-mvc] Cache duration for plugin content

[Stephen Bungert]

Hello!

I have just completed an extension to display user profiles and topics/posts 
from scoop.it.

As the information comes from scoop.it, I made the plugins action for topics 
non-cached. From what I understand, the rest of the page will be cached, and 
just markers for my extenions content will be replaced with my extensions 
content everytime the page is viewed. As it is not cached, I decided to 
cache the data from scoop.it in a cache table. I then set a duration for 
this cached data in TS and then scoop.it isn't queried every time the page 
is rendered.

Also currently I'm just caching the scoop.it data, not the whole output of 
the extension, I thought this would be useful as you could change the 
templates and still use cached scoop.it data, but maybe it's better to cache 
the whole content as a string and just get fluid to output this.

Is there a better way of doing this? Can I control how long a cached 
extension would keep it's content in the cache? Say maybe just for an hour? 
I know that if you change page content the cache gets cleared, but as all my 
information comes from scoop.it, any new scoops wouldn't cause the page 
cache to be cleared, that is why I decided to make an uncached extension.

Thanks for any tips and help.

Stephen.