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Thinking About Publicly Distributed Code

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As I’ve been working away on WPUnlimited, I have been running into a small problem: people want to use things in ways I never intended. Of course, this is wonderful, as it gives me new ideas on the direction of which I will take the theme, but it also shows how different the mind of a programmer can be from the mind of a user.

In writing code, I have been working hard in making sure that the code I use will work effectively on nearly any environment, and as such, there are things I need to take into account, but as is usually the case, I’ve missed one or two things, which is why I am soon releasing an updated version.

A great example of something simple that was forgotten, that other plugin and theme developers would do well to remember, is that not all WordPress users upload their files to wp-content/uploads. This was a small headache for me the last few days because I had totally forgotten about the option to change where uploads go, and so made assumptions in my code.

It is something small, but important. While less than one percent of the users of WordPress would ever think about changing the location of where their uploads go, those users that did experienced an issue where they couldn’t use some of the built-in features of the theme. This lead to them feeling frustrated, and created a business experience that was less than perfect.

As people continue to build on top of WordPress and other platforms, changing the features, growing out the hooks, plugins, themes and more, it is very beneficial to find as many people as possible to test that code before you push it out live to the world. I had thought that through the testing I had people do, we had covered every basis, but everyone gets set in their ways, and can forget to check the smallest of details, especially ones that most users never use.

How do you make sure that your code will work with everything and in every way? Have your users ever tried to use a feature you created in an odd and interesting way? Please tell me your stories in the comments below.

Hey Sandboxers, How About an Update! (OR How to Update the Sandbox Theme to Work With WordPress 2.7)

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moar_sandbox

Note: This post is intended to be a little tongue-in-cheek although the author himself does not claim to be funny at all. Please read with your humor-glasses on.

Bump, bump. Hey Sandboxers, yeah you, Scott and Andy. WordPress 2.7 has been out for a while now and we still don’t have an update to Sandbox. I mean we’ve got sticky posts now, and threaded comments, and a new logout tag. I think it’s about time we had a talk.

I went and told all these nice folks to use Sandbox and we don’t even get a little logout love? It is the best theme out there, with all of its wonderfully plain goodness and classes-to-the-max and whatnot. I’d say it’s about time for version 1.7.

Oh, and while you’re at it how about updating the Drupal version too and hitting up the Movable Type guys about getting theirs in line with the changes. And why not add one single place to get Sandbox for ANY CMS out there. It could be a veritable template Mecca, but I digress.

It’s not like you have anything better to do anyway, right? Ok, I’ll make the first move, here’s how I did it in WordPress…

In basically every template file (404, archive, archives, attachment, author, category, image, index, links, page, single, and tag), replace

[php]
class=””
[/php]

with

[php]

[/php]

Ok so you lose all those date classes but the hentry is still there and now we’ve got stickies! Yay!

The other order of business, is of course the logout link on the comment form. She don’t work. Is broke. We need to replace this:

[php]
get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’) . ‘/wp-login.php?redirect_to=’ . get_permalink()
[/php]

with this:

[php]
wp_logout_url(get_permalink())
[/php]

…presses Easy Button.

Ok, the last thing: threaded comments. That’s pretty cool stuff, but optional IMO. So imma leave that one to you guys. Okay okay it’s just because I’m too lazy to recode comments.php. But seriously the whole comments loop got some great changes that make all this stuff a heckofalot easier.

So if you could please do that, k thx bye. 😉

On a more serious note, has anyone here tried out the new commenting loop? How are you implementing threaded comments in WordPress?

Bash Script for Updating Multiple WordPress Blogs

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While WordPress has finally added core update in its latest 2.7 branch, there are still people out there that will need to update multiple blogs quickly, and if you are managing your blog installations with Subversion, you can go through and update them all very quickly.

Of course, to update multiple blogs, you’ll have to go through to each folder, run the proper Subversion command, and then move onto the next folder. This can be a time consuming process if you have more than five or six blogs to do for each release.

I have previously written a post on Geeks are Sexy about updating WordPress blogs with Subversion. Read that first if you aren’t using Subversion.

Bash Script

The easiest way to help automate simple tasks on a Linux web server is to Bash script it. This is a very simple scripting language that allows you to do commands and using simple looping and an array, you can quickly do those commands multiple times for multiple blogs.

When I was working for Bloggy Network, I used a similar script to upgrade upwards of forty WordPress powered blogs in less than five minutes.

The following script assumes that your blogs are all in sub-folders under where this script will be placed. If the blogs are in different locations, make sure to include that in your path determinations either when you assign array values or as another variable you can make use of.

[code]
#!/bin/bash

blog[1]=foldername1
blog[2]=foldername2
blog[3]=foldername3

for a in 1 2 3
do
echo “Giving ${blog[$a]} an Upgrade”
cd ${blog[$a]}
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7.1 .
cd ..
done

exit 0
[/code]

This code basically creates an array, and then cycles through the array, going into each folder, and switching the blog to the latest version of WordPress. The only editing you’ll need to do to before using this script is change the blog variable, and change the tagged version number in the svn sw command. If you are using trunk, you don’t have to do this and instead of /tags/version.number you’d just put /trunk.

While I don’t recommend running on trunk, especially for your production blogs, I know many people that do.

If you add more items to the array, you have to make sure that you add more numbers to your for loop. So if there were ten items in the blog array, you would want to make sure to change the for a line to: for a in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.

Bash scripting is a relatively simplistic language, but can be very powerful.

This script could be easily modified to include error checking, create a log file where you can look over which files were changed, and when they were last changed, and you could also make it so that when the script ran, it asked you for which version number to use in the switch command.

I have also used Bash scripting to upload the same plugins to a number of different blogs all at once, make edits to the .htaccess file, and delete certain files.

If you have access to your server and can run Bash scripts, I suggest you play around with them, as they can be a great tool when the right circumstances rear their ugly head.

How to Use WordPress for Bookmarking

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After Ma.gnolia went down I was so disappointed that I decided to take matters into my own hands. I thought, why not use WordPress to store my bookmarks. It has all the neat features of most popular bookmarking sites, and even some more (XFN, for example).

Of course, I could just post a link whenever I saw one but it panged me to think that I would be putting to waste that wonderful link schema that the folks at WordPress have put so much thought into. And then Smashing Magazine reminded me about shortcodes. I had used them before in plugins but I never thought about just adding one off short codes to my functions.php file.

It turns out that this was the perfect solution to my problem. With one tiny little shortcode I was able to utilize the bookmarks system in WordPress and publish my links as normal. Here is how I did it.

1. The shortcode code

First you want to start by adding the following code somewhere in your functions.php file.

[php]
/**
* Get a bookmark and display it
*
* usage: [magnolia id=”bookmarkid”]
*
* @return string
*/
function magnolia_rip($atts) {
extract(shortcode_atts(array(
‘ids’ => ‘1’,
), $atts));

$idarr = explode(‘,’,$ids);
$bookmarks = ”;

foreach ($idarr as $id) {
$bookmark = get_bookmark($id,ARRAY_A);
extract($bookmark);

$bookmarks .= <<

$link_notes

$link_name

LINK;
}

return $bookmarks;
}
add_shortcode(‘magnolia’, ‘magnolia_rip’);
[/php]

I’ll skip the details on how shortcodes work, the Smashing Magazine post does a great job of summing that up. However, I do want to explain the bookmark stuff.

We start by passing in the id or comma separated list of ids through the shortcode. They get put into an array where they are iterated. For each id we call the get_bookmark method, which is currently undocumented. It returns an object or array with all the values from the links table in your WordPress installation. The ARRAY_A parameter tells the method to return an associative array.

Here are all the fields in the links table:

  • link_id
  • link_url
  • link_name
  • link_image
  • link_target
  • link_category
  • link_description
  • link_visible
  • link_owner
  • link_rating
  • link_updated
  • link_rel
  • link_notes
  • link_rss

I have used the extract() method to convert each key (field) in the returned array to a variable. That’s probably not the best idea for performance reasons, but for demonstrational purposes it’s nice and clean. Next, I create a div with some paragraphs and a link. This is the part where you can customize to your hearts content. I just went with something basic.

2. Add a link

Now all you need to do is head over to your links page in the WP admin and add a link. I put mine in a category called bookmarks just to keep things organized. You can go crazy here if you want. Once you’ve saved the link make sure to get the ID for it.

The ID isn’t anywhere obvious, unfortunately, which makes this technique feel a little hacky. Regardless, if you go back to the links page and hover over the title of your link you will see something like this in your status bar at the end of the URL:

[html]
link_id=165
[/html]

Just take note of the id, you’ll need it for the next step.

3. Write your post

Finally, lets post the link to the blog using the shortcode we created earlier. Start a new post and add the following:

[html]
[magnolia ids=”165″]
[/html]

That’s it! Now save your post and basque in the glory of your ingenuity!

Caveats

There is one caveat that I can think of. The RSS feed will not publish the generated text. So you’ll only have titles for those posts unless you add more text to the body of your post.

This is a great way to use an often under-utilized feature of WordPress. It is also fun to host and publish your own bookmarks for people to see. Let me know how it works for you!

Update: After more careful testing I realized that the full text does, in fact, show up in RSS. So there you have it, if you want to post your bookmarks to your site nothing is standing in your way!

CodeIgniter: Interacting With a Database

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ci_logo_flameIn my previous post entitled, CodeIgniter: PHP Development Fun – Part 1, I talked a little about my excitement regarding CodeIgniter. So far, I have found the learning curve to not be too steep and continue on my trek to develop my own website with the framework.

Today, I wanted to talk about what I have been working on with CodeIgniter. I decided I wanted to make my own versions of Popurls, or AllTop. This is something I could have done in an hour or two with WordPress and some plugins as well as a bit of SimplePie usage, but on CodeIgniter, it has taken a little longer, but the excitement I experience as each piece works is much greater than if I had done the hack job of using WordPress for something it wasn’t intended for.

The first step for me was coming up with my database and then adding some information to it, and using the scaffolding feature in CodeIgniter, I was able to do this quite easily. Unfortunately, this wasn’t perfect as I was using two tables, and taking information from one table, to be used to reference the other was a pain in the butt. I decided to create my own administration panel to control the input of data into my site.

There were only three pieces of data that I wanted to have to input: the site name, the URL and selecting which category I wanted it to be in.

At first, I coded the category selection system in a convoluted way before realizing how silly it was. Much of the mistakes I have made in programming thus far have been planning and logic mistakes that could have been avoided if I had taken the time to really sit down and think through my plans.

My Administration Panel

Creating my administration panel was as simple as adding another view with the relevant form, and creating a function to insert the information into my database.

I first had to create a function in my front.php controller related to showing the administration panel view, and showing the right categories in my option box.
[php]
function add_blog()
{
$data[‘query’] = $this->db->get(‘niches’);
$this->load->view(‘admin_view’, $data);
}
[/php]

Then I needed to create a form in my admin_view.php file to fill out the details of the site I was adding. The following is of course without the requisite xhtml that should surround the form and create a layout to look pretty.

[php]
echo form_open(‘front/submit’);

echo “Site Name: ” .form_input(‘name’);
echo “
Site URL: ” .form_input(‘url’);
echo “

Code & Tutorials

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