First or Last Page in Page-Structures of WordPress

Posted in: WordPress Hacks

Now and then little snippets are pretty useful. For a fix in a Premium-Theme, I needed a kind of evaluation, where I am in the site structure and with little effort I was able to expand the classes and react with CSS.

The following code shows the basic for it and get_pages() is the key from the core of WordPress to get to these results. This function provides the necessary result of using the parameter and the output via the parameter sort_order provides the sequence and identification of the first page, which is then either the first or last page in this structure.
Continue reading …

Don’t use strlen()

Posted in: WPengineer Misc

Each time I see someone use strlen() I cringe. It will break.

Despite its name, strlen() doesn’t count characters. It counts bytes. In UTF-8 a character may be up to four bytes long.

So what happens if we use strlen() and its companion substr() to shorten the title of post?

<?php # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
declare( encoding = 'UTF-8' );
header('Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8');

$string = 'Doppelgänger';
print 'strlen():    ' . strlen( $string ) . "\n";
print 'mb_strlen(): ' . mb_strlen( $string, 'utf8' ) . "\n\n";

print 'substr():    ' . substr( $string, 0, 8 ) . "\n";
print 'mb_substr(): ' . mb_substr( $string, 0, 8, 'utf8' );

Output:

I have to use an image here. If I had used the plain text output our newsfeed would break. And that’s what happens each time you use strlen() and substr() on strings encoded in UTF-8: You end up with partial characters and invalid UTF-8.

Alternatives for mb_strlen()

You can use different methods to get the real string length.

$length = preg_match_all( '(.)su', $string, $matches );

See also Hakre: PHP UTF-8 string Length.

Or just use …

$length = strlen( utf8_decode( $string ) );

There is also a nice php-utf8 library on GitHub from Frank Smit.

Stop SOPA!

Posted in: WPengineer Misc

What is this all about: Help Stop SOPA/PIPA
Turn off your website on January 18th for 12 hours.

Simple and fast solution for turn the website off; use the Plugin WP Maintenance Mode, original for the activation of the maintenance mode; but its easy for this requirement. As useful; the plugin send an 503 Service Unavailable header.

Set the following settings in the plugin

Code for the field text, the video markup:

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/31100268?byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/31100268">PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/fightforthefuture">Fight for the Future</a>.</p>

Here is the result for not signed in visitors:

Best Practice for Multilanguage WordPress Content? New Plugin!

Posted in: WordPress Tutorials

Since the beginning of WordPress the desire to publish the content in different languages is huge. But the topic can quickly become complex, because not only the rendering of content in the form of text in different languages ​​is an issue, we also have to take care of the meta data for content, for images that can be different depending on the language and the use of the admin interface in the preferred language. Thus, only a part would be covered depending on the requirements (a example on StackExchange) it would quickly become an project and WordPress would be just a “small” framework behind it. There are already many Plugins available, the different approaches – new tables in the system or separation of content for each language in a table entry to post, or other solutions.

All these solutions have their limitations, are inflexible and you go into a dependency that will be hard to get out and with each update of WordPress you have to check if the Plugin is still working or has any bugs with the new version. Therefore, I would suggest a solution that we use in our Inpsyde Team frequently for customers and maintained their strength in the flexibility, in extensibility and in its capacity to use the WordPress standard without changing the core or anything else. You can deactivate the Plugin at any time, you won’t lose anything, your website remains the same.

Continue reading …

Separate Logic From Output

Posted in: WordPress Tutorials

Once HTML is defined within a function for output, the HTML will be separated from the logic! In this case the function is defined twice. A function contains only logic and values ​​are returned only as return. The second function will contain HTML, test logic, loops or hooks and outputs values ​​as echo. Ok, the smart asses will say MVC, yeah you right, but WordPress does not pursue a Consistent MVC pattern!

Continue reading …