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I came across a bit of an issue with ReCaptcha and IE6 today, so I though I would write about it in case anyone else had the same issue (there wasn't a lot of stuff on Google about it) and so I can remember what I did in the future.

The form I was using was a multi stage form and the second part contained a call to the ReCaptcha function recaptcha_get_html(), which was part of the PHP library I was using (1.11 in this case). When users with IE6 came onto this page the ReCaptcha box was missing, but after refreshing the page the box appeared. ReCaptcha works by downloading and running a block of JavaScript from Google. After a little research it looked as though IE6 would not download this JavaScript when redirected to the page via a form post (other exceptions might occur) but would if accessed directly or after a refresh. The snippet below if the code that is returned from the Google on request:

If there is one thing in the PHP world that really annoys me it's programmers writing what I call "lazy code". This is code that works but takes the least amount of time (generally meaning keystrokes) to create. This is almost always a bad thing as it is difficult to read, hard to change and almost always uncommented. The main problem is that PHP is quite a forgiving and fluid language in that you allows you to write code in a variety of different ways and formats.

The most common problem I have come across with lazy coding is when programmers write if statements. These can be written in a variety of colourful ways, the most common approach I have found is to leave out the curly brackets, like this:

Since WordPress 3.0 there has been a funcion called get_template_part(), which has been used quite a bit in the new Twenty Ten default WordPress theme. This is an evolution of the usual way to include parts of themes by using functions like get_header() to include the header.php file. This function helps code resuse by including the same files multiple files, but also allows child themes to override parent themes.

The function takes a required slug and an optional name as parameters, the two parameters being used together to select the correct template file to include. The best way to describe how this function works is to show how it would work in certain situations. Take the following call to get_template_part() using only the slug parameter.

SimpleTest is a great way to test your modules, but it can take a bit of setting up. For every test that is run SimpleTest effectively has a fresh install of Drupal, so if you need to test a particular function you need to have everything in place before you run the test. I was recently testing a migration module that I had written and needed to create nodes with a variety of CCK fields, which is quite common in Drupal site setups. In order to test that a CCK field saves the data for a test you need to do the following in the setUp() method, remember that this all happens before any tests are run.

Drupal SimpleTest is a module that will allow you to unit test your own modules or unit test any patches you have made for third party modules. This module will be integrated into Drupal 7, but for Drupal 6 you have to do a couple of thngs before you can start testing. This article is a very quick introduction to Drupal SimpleTest and will be followed up by more articles in the future.

The first step is to download and install the SimpleTest module as you would any other module. You can use Drush to do this if you know how.

To convert a time value into a decimal value representing the number of minutes can be useful for certain calculations. The following function takes a time as a string of hh:mm:ss and returns a decimal value in minutes.

/**
 * Convert time into decimal time.
 *
 * @param string $time The time to convert
 *
 * @return integer The time as a decimal value.
 */
function time_to_decimal($time) {
    $timeArr = explode(':', $time);
    $decTime = ($timeArr[0]*60) + ($timeArr[1]) + ($timeArr[2]/60);

    return $decTime;
}

If we take the time of 11:11:11 this gets split into 3 parts by the explode() function into hours, minutes and seconds, which then gets treated in the following way:

Minutes = (Hours x 60) + (Minutes) + (Seconds / 60)
Minutes = (11 x 60) + (11) + (11 / 60)
Minutes = (660) + (11) + (0.18333333)
Minutes = 671.18333333

The function can be used as follows:

Automatic building with Phing makes deploying to a server nice and easy, and if you are using SVN as your source control system then you can easily deploy directly from your repository to your web server.

To allow Phing to utilise an SVN server you must first install the VersionControl_SVN pear library. Although this is in alpha release I have used it quite a bit with no issues. The only thing is that you will need to specify the version number to pear if you want to install it, like this:

pear install VersionControl_SVN-0.3.4

To get Phing to export from an SVN repository you can use the svnexport task. The following build file sets up some parameters (for use in this task), runs a target to delete the existing export and then runs a target that exports from the SVN repository we have set up.

To sync files using the Windows command line you will need to use the xcopy command. The default action of this program is to copy a file or directory from one place to another, but you can give it flags to tell it to sync the files. There are a few flags available (use xcopy /? to see them all) but you will probably only want to use the following:

I have looked at printing an intelligent list of WordPress pages in a previous blog post, but I wanted to revisit this topic and use the Walker classes that are part of WordPress. The Walker class is an abstract class that sorts out a lot of the basic functionality needed to extract and render a hierarchical list of items from a database. It is essentially an iterator class that understands lists of items that contain lists of items and can be used anywhere in WordPress where this structure is needed. The Walker class can be found in the file wp-includes/classes.php along with four other classes that extend Walker, these are.

I know what you are thinking, but this isn't just another WordPress plugin blog post. I am asked every few weeks what WordPress plugins I would recommend, and I always end up giving a disjointed list of some from the top of my head. So instead of doing this I thought it would be a good idea to write down the plugins I use quite a bit and would recommend other to use. I will also try to add any alternatives (if they exist) to plugins I use.