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This weekend saw the 3rd PHPNW conference and being a PHP developer, working in Manchester, it would be inexcusable for me not to attend :). After missing my train and pouring my first coffee of the day into my conference pack it wasn't the best of starts. However, I still managed to turn up in plenty of time so I didn't miss any of the talks and got to say hello to the people I know from the PHPNW user group and some who I met at the PHPNW conference in previous years.

Day 1

Keynote: Teach a Man to Fish: Coaching Development Teams
Lorna Mitchell @lornajane

Simpletest is a Drupal module that I have been using for about a week to unit test a module I have been working on. It is a brilliant and powerful module that every module developer should be using to test their code properly. I did, however, encounter a couple of weird errors that took me a while to fix. So for the benefit of everyone else I thought I would post them here, along with the solutions. These errors are probably things that developers new to Drupal Simpletest will come across, which is why I have labelled them beginner errors.

Today I needed to grab some data from a table where there was more than one occurrence of a string within another string. Basically, I needed to find all URL's from a table that were more than 3 levels deep (i.e. with 3 slashes), but realised there wasn't a function to do this in MySQL. I found an alternative method, but it got me thinking on how that might be possible.

Finding the solution wasn't too difficult really, all I needed to do was find out the length of the URL string and then subtract the length of the string with the slashes removed. This MySQL statement will give you the URL and the number of slashes in that URL in a table.

The UK PHP TestFest this year was held at MadLab in Manchester on the 11th September. I was one of the 12 people who went along to learn about testing the PHP language. So I thought that I would collate some of the things that we went through during the session.

Before creating a test you need to set up your testing environment, you can do this by going to the TestFest site and running through the tutorial on setting up your system for testing PHP. When you have finished setting up your test environment you will have a folder containing three folders, these are php52, php53 and php-trunk, these are the different versions of PHP which you can test, although we will be concentrating on the php53 version in this article the same practices can be used for the other trunks.

When displaying images added by users it is quite often necessary to resize them in order that they fit into a specific area of the page. Not doing this can cause problems with the images breaking the page layout. The trouble is that if you resize the image absolutely you tend to squash and distort it.

The following function can be used to calculate the width and height of an image to the correct aspect ratio, which will preserve the contents when printed out. This function makes use of the getimagesize() function, which is available as part of the GD library in PHP.

Drupal has two ways in which to allow users to download files, these are private and public.

With public the files are open for anyone to download and Drupal is not involved in the download process. This means that no statistics are recorded or permissions used when downloading the file. Each file is referenced by name.

Private file access means that Drupal is run every time a file is downloaded. This allows the download to be recorded and a permissions check run to make sure that the user in question is allowed to access the file. Each file is referenced by a path that can be completely different from the original filename.

WordCampUK is an informal 2 day conference and barcamp that centred around using, working with and developing in WordPress. This year's WordCampUK was held in Manchester and so being local I could hardly miss the opportunity to attend. It was a great event, with great talks and lots of friendly people who were really enthusiastic about WordPress.

I just spend the last few minutes looking for the solution to this so I thought that someone else might be able to benefit from it.

Calling the hook_form_alter() hook in your module using just the module name allows you to target all forms in your system, if that's the sort of thing you want to do. For a module called "My Module" this would be called mymodule_form_alter().

The power of hook_form_alter() hook is that it alos allows you to specifically target a form with a specific name within a module. A good example is if you want to alter the search form to add a class, which is a common task. To do this, create a module so that you can add the hook_form_alter() hook to it and then construct the function name in the following way:

This article relates to WordPress 3.0. Much of the code posted here won't work on previous versions and some of the information may change in newer versions.

WordPress already comes with five different content types built into the system.

Posts

This is the standard content type and is generally the most used in a blog install. Posts tend to be aggregated onto pages but this is not always the case.

Pages

This is a static content type and is used to display non-aggregated pages.

Attachments

Every time you upload a file through WordPress it will store a record of it in this area. You can see this list of files by going to the Media menu item in your admin area. This is what is used when you click on the Media Libray tab on the Add and Image dialog in the edit post screen.

Revisions

Different functions and options are always being added to PHP. Although new versions generally don't create much backward compatibility issues it is usually prudent to write production code that you know will work on servers running a slightly older version of the language.

To check the currently used PHP version you can use the function phpversion() or the constant PHP_VERSION. Both the function and the constant return a string that contains the version number. There are a couple of ways in which this information can be used, the first is to take the string and convert into an array using the explode() function. With this array you can then check the minor version number and run code like the following: