Here is my recipe for quickly spinning up a WordPress site with: Plugins and themes managed by PHP Composer, so they can be checked into version control. Several of my favourite plugins installed, including FooGallery and Advanced Custom Fields. A minimal theme combining Roots Sage 10 and Bootstrap 5.2 (at the time of writing this … Continued
Recently I’ve mostly been using Understrap as a theme for WordPress, however the Understrap GitHub repository has shown a disturbing lack of maintenance for the last year or so. With Bootstrap 5 on the horizon, and WordPress and PHP constantly moving forward, I don’t want to be stuck in a potential development dead-end using Understrap. … Continued
I’ve previously blogged about creating keyboard shortcuts in WordPress. Now I’ve bundled that up into a plugin. It’s available on GitHub. https://github.com/tobyink/php-wp-ctrl-semicolon
Usually when I blog about programming, it’s Perl stuff, but here’s something that’s mostly Javascript (with a little PHP to act as a shim for WordPress). It’s a script to use Tempus Dominus as a date/time picker for HTML 5 date and time form inputs on Bootstrap/jQuery-based sites. It lets you do stuff like this: … Continued
This is my look at what’s planned for the forthcoming revision to the PHP language. Removal of Deprecated Features PHP 6 includes a lot of tidying up, removing features of the language that have caused annoyance, confusion and security headaches. Although these changes are too numerous to list here, and the list will probably change … Continued
An update to my PHP encryption class. Despite the name, it's becoming a pretty sophisticated encyption machine. New encryption algorithms added: Vigenerè cypher One-Time Pad Bruce Schneier's Superencyption Various other methods using the MCrypt library The TrivialEncoderManager class has been obsoleted by TE_Machine, an abstract class with several different child classes for encoding, decoding and … Continued
PHP lets you define your own error handler, so I decided to get a bit fancy. MegaErrorHandler (MEH) outputs its errors as specially-formatted HTML comments, with the details of the error encoded using JSON. A small client-side script, with an associated stylesheet then pulls this data out of the comments and formats it as a … Continued
Here’s a simple PHP library for encoding and decoding text. Examples: TrivialEncoder.class.php (Highlighted source code.)
Here’s an example of how to parse an HTML table into an array using the PEAR module XML_HTMLSax3. It supports the , and elements and the rowspan and colspan attributes. It’s worth noting that this code will raise a bunch of notices if you run it displaying all errors. This is pretty difficult to avoid, … Continued
On Usenet an often-asked question is how to programmatically determine the “domain” of a particular hostname. That is, excluding the components traditionally thought of as subdomains. As an example, groups.google.com and www.google.com both have a domain of google.com. Invariably, one answer comes back stating that you just need to chop off everything from the front, … Continued
Here’s a nifty bit of code I wrote a while back (utilising a function from PHP SmartyPants) that takes a bunch of HTML, searches it for some word or phrase that you specify, and turns all occurances of it into a link, unless it’s already a link!
Here's a simple program which calculates, to eight decimal places, the value of the Golden Ratio φ implemented in both PHP and Perl, to demonstrate their similarities. Perl #!/usr/bin/perl $a = 1; $b = 1; $c = undef; $psi_old = undef; print “Approximating psi…\n”; while (1) { $psi = sprintf(‘%.08f’, $b/$a); last if ($psi_old eq … Continued
Here’s a PHP function for reformatting the whitespace in PHP code:
If you’re not aware of EXIF, here’s what it is: EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format, and is a standard for storing interchange information in image files, especially those using JPEG compression. Most digital cameras now use the EXIF format. That is, many images, including most of the JPEGs you get off modern digital … Continued
Firstly, three disclaimers: PHP is a great programming language, one of my favourites — this website is written in PHP; there are many great PHP programmers out there, some of whom probably never get things wrong; I probably get things wrong a lot of the time. The majority of the database-backed Open Source PHP projects … Continued
At last, my new CMS is at a stage when I’m able to actually start publishing with it. Now that I have an easy-ish tool to publish with, you can expect that this website will be updated more frequently and with more and better content. Updating this website in the past has been a major … Continued
Tyno Gendo wrote: I have been pondering over building a “modular” site which accepts add-ons built by other people. I was wondering if anyone has any links to any reading material on how you build this kind of facility into your site? The basic technique is this: Firstly, provide a plugin registration function, which we’ll … Continued
lawrence k wrote: What PHP code would give me this kind of 100% certainty? I was bored so wrote this. I’m quite proud of myself, as I wrote it and ran it and it worked first time! 🙂 It not only checks that the UTF-8 is valid, it forces it to be valid.
walterbyrd wrote: I honestly don’t know. But, I have seen articles and posts about how PHP is terribly insecure. PHP is not inherently insecure, but because it’s very easy to write PHP, it has become rather a popular language amongst people with little, if any, formal training on how to program. Because of this, there … Continued
Michael Fesser wrote: My scripts make use of many of the new OOP features in PHP 5, so they won’t run at all on PHP 4. Ditto. My current big pet project is http://demiblog.org/. This is PHP 5+ only and supports MySQL 5+ and PostgreSQL 8+. Although I do realise that earlier versions of these … Continued
