Yes – that is correct.

I would like to be able to cache most of a page but not some elements (depending upon the situation I can imagine many such uses, but the easiest example is a random banner image).

Previously I used a CMS that had caching that worked like this, and I used it all the time for mixing dynamic and cached content.

Yes. Those are both very helpful options, and I use them. However what I want to do here is to exclude certain parts of a page from caching (but otherwise cache the page).

For example, I may have a page that is something like this:

header
title
content
* other content that you may like -> should be random! *
footer

So what I’m looking for is a way to exclude that specific block of the page (or multiple such blocks) from being pre-rendered and cached, but I want the rest of the page cached. This is not content loaded in a separate iframe or something like that. It’s on-page content, but I would like to be able to do something like include comments in my template files for the beginning and ending of blocks that shouldn’t be cached or use some other method of setting those apart from the caching system.

I used to do this in a different CMS that I used back in the day (MODx), so I’m hoping that I can here also.

The best solution that I’ve found so far is just to set the cache time to something short (like six hours) so that at least this content rotates occasionally, but that’s not a good solution (it just kind of makes the problem less obvious).

Ideas?