planetOzh

WordPress 2009/06/26 1 min read

Massive Migration to WordPress

One of the sites I'm running is a long established community website with zillions of posts and bazillions of comments. The whole stuff is powered by a home made CMS written in Perl, something I did nearly 10 years ago and that is totally outdated today. For instance, there were no such things as "comment spam" back in that time,…

WordPress 2009/06/25 1 min read

Introducing YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) and its WordPress Plugin Companion

So, if I didn't forget to upload a zip archive or to press a "Commit" button, it should be all here for you: the GPL'd URL shortener I wrote about earlier that Lester Chan and I have been using for a while now. Our URL shortener service is called YOURLS, as in Your Own URL Shortener. It's all GPL, free,…

Music 2009/06/22 2 min read

Bands I’ve Seen This Weekend: Hellfest 2009, My Recap

One week after AC/DC's Black Ice Tour in Paris, I've had yet another musical rendez-vous: Hellfest Open Air 2009 (momentarily closed as of writing), a music festival held about 30 kms from where I currently live. I've seen live on stage:

WordPress 2009/05/31 1 min read

Hot News of the Day: WordPress and WordPress Mu to Merge

Update: Lorelle in the comments has a totally different interpretation on "merging". Much less exciting to be honest :) Update 2: Jeffro got some clues from Donncha. Bottom line: Merge, as anticipated at first. Yay! The hot scoop of the day is, as announced by Matt at WordCamp SF, that WordPress and its multi-blog flavor, Mu, will merge. As Technosailor…

Something to watch: EasyWP is a one-file script that downloads and unzips latest WordPress build on your web server (so the average Joe doesn't have to download the archive, unzip on his computer, and then upload everything). The file is rather immature at the moment (using only fopen(), needing Zip PHP extension, these things) but will evolve. Eventually this kind of feature has to be integrated to WordPress, I'd say.

2009/05/14 23h00 #

WordPress 2009/05/07 1 min read

Encoding JSON with WordPress

Encoding an array to JSON is dead easy on PHP 5.2+: you just use PHP's function json_encode(). The thing is, WordPress has pretty loose requirements and is designed to run on older PHP builds. For those, you need a third party library that will encode to (and decode from, if you need) JSON. The cool news is that you don't…

WordPress 2009/05/05 2 min read

Didn’t Know, But I’m Awe.sm (a Post About URL Shorteners, GPL and WordPress)

I've just read on TechCrunch the announcement about awe.sm, a service that sells custom URL shorteners (a la TinyURL) for your own domain. That's funny: I've been using my own private URL shortener for about a week now (notice the "shorter link" mention at the top of this post). The script I'm using is based on something created by Lester…

WordPress 2009/05/05 2 min read

Handling Plugins Options in WordPress 2.8 with register_setting()

In the upcoming WordPress 2.8 there's an interesting function set meant to help authors manage their plugin custom options. In a nutshell: whitelist your options, define how you want them to be validated, and just lean back and rely on the API to handle everything for you. Your new best friend is function register_setting(), and I'm going to recapitulate how…

WordPress 2009/05/04 1 min read

Find a WordPress Job With Twitter

If you're a WordPress freelancer, you already probably have your regular web sources for your gigs (and if you don't, do read How to find a WordPress job right now). Did you know that Twitter was also a fine potential source of information for your next project ? Here are three Twitter users that you should follow: @wordpress_work: about 20…

Code 2009/04/29 1 min read

HTTP Authentication on PHP as CGI (like Dreamhost)

Using PHP's HTTP Authentication is a simple way to protect scripts behind a login/password prompt. There's one little problem: it's supposed to work only on PHP as an Apache module, not the CGI version. It took me a while, hair pulling and some googling to get a basic HTTP Auth system working on Dreamhost's PHP as CGI so for my…