planetOzh

WordPress 2009/08/16 4 min read

How To Make HTTP Requests with WordPress

Making HTTP requests in PHP is not difficult, and a variety of methods exists: using fopen(), using cURL extension, using file streams with fsockopen() and fwrite() for instance. The problem is: depending on server setup, this might or might not work on another server. The good new is: once again, WordPress has a no-brainer API that makes it dead easy…

WordPress 2009/08/10 1 min read

Watering the WordPress Planet

Mostly thanks to a reminder from WP Tavern's Jeffro, I've done some much needed maintenance on Planet WordPress (if you don't know it, this is another "planet", just like the official WordPress › Planet, that I've been running for 4 years now) (if you don't know it, doh, dude, siriuzly, subscribe to it, it's wicked) So, I've removed a bunch…

My Life 2009/07/29 1 min read

No, I Didn’t Read Your Email or Twitter

Hey, guess who's back! After roughly 4 weeks offline I'm almost back to my computer. This has been a very enjoyable month: one week on the beach in the south of France with kids, ten days diving in Croatia with my wife, and visiting family in between. So, if you've sent me some mail, a Twitter message, or left a…

WordPress 2009/07/02 3 min read

Let’s Get More Contestants Into the WordPress Plugin Competition

The WordPress Plugin Competition is the best moment of the year, plugin wise. This year's edition is still running till the end of the month of July and as of writing, there are about 10 plugins (with some really interesting stuff). Still, new plugins are released every day. Why aren't these authors joining the competition? Participating in the competition is…

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The whole stuff is powered by a home made CMS written in Perl, something I did nearly 10 years ago and that is totally outdated today.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…