Defining your own Drupal block plugins in custom code is really powerful, but sometimes you can feel limited by what those blocks have access to. Your block class is like a blank canvas that you know you'll be pulling data into, but how should you get that data from the surrounding page? Often you have to resort to fetching the entity for the current page out of its route parameters (e.g. on a node page)...
A little while ago I blogged about views content cache as a way to increase performance of your Drupal site. Today I released version 2.2 of the module, that adds lots of lovely features. The module has basically been re-written by Young Hahn from Development seed to provide a plugable mechanism for exposing cache segments. This means that any contrib module can contribute to keeping track of the what content has changed on the site...