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After writing the function that creates a list of pages that are children of a given page in Wordpress I needed something more robust and automatic. To that end I created a plugin that will create a widget that contains a dynamically created menu of pages.

The widget figures out what page is currently being displayed and will climb the page tree until it finds the root page. Whilst climbing the page tree the plugin will keep the path to the currently selected page and when the tree is printed out the path will be open. It is best suited for sites that have a solid hieratic page structure, rather than a simple blogging site.

In terms of efficiency I have tested it with pages nested up to 25 levels deep with only a small decrease in page load. However, for the average small Wordpress site this plugin is perfect as pages will only be nested a few levels deep.

Whilst creating a view for a Drupal site the other day I created an exposed form but rather than the usual select boxes that get displayed I needed them to be a list of check boxes. Whilst searching about on Google I eventually found this article, which kindly provides a function that will do this. Here is the function in full.

The title tag on the Blog module index page (found at /blog after the module is installed) is by default "Blogs | Sitename", which isn't editable in the backend of Drupal. I've been talking to other Drupal developers and reading forums about the best way to go about changing the title of the blog index page. Ideas ranged from editing or duplicating the blog module (which is bad practice) to installing the String Overrides to provide a quick translation of the string in the title.

These suggestions are either quite poor, or simply overkill for what should be a simple string replacement. There were two methods we decided upon that work quite well and are easy to implement.

1) The first involves creating a page-blog.tpl.php template file and adding a str_replace() function call to replace the word blog from the title of the page. This would look something like this:

It is possible to print out a list of pages in Wordpress, but these functions are designed to print from the root pages to a certain level. I often need to print out a list of pages that are children of the current page being looked at so I created the following function.

A useful technique to know about when using Linux is to run commands in the background. Sometimes certain commands can either take a while (like copying a large file) or will simply take over the terminal window when run. For example, lets say that you open a file in gedit, you might use the following command.

gedit file.txt

Doing this will open the file in gedit but will not allow you to do anything in the terminal window until you close gedit. To open the file but still keep the terminal window active use the & symbol at the end of the command. This will run the proceeding command in the background.

gedit file.txt&

To run a file copy in the background do the following.

cp file.txt file.txt.bak&

Note that this command shouldn't be used for all commands, especially those that produce some form of output. For example, running the following command

Removing the last line from a file is an easy process and can be done in just a few lines of code.

XML data extraction can be a common task, but to work directly with this data you need to understand how PHP parses XML. There are various different functions involved in parsing XML in PHP, all of which work together to extract data from a XML document. I will go through each of these functions and tie them together at the end.

xml_parser_create()

This function is used to create the parser object that will be used by the rest of the process. This object is used to store data and configuration options and is passed to each of the functions involved.

$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();

xml_set_element_handler()

Next we need to set up the functions that will be used in the parsing of the script. The xml_set_handler() method takes the following parameters:

Whilst creating a small plugin on a Wordpress site I decided not to use the media library as I just wanted to add some small stub images to the content. I created some boxes on the post page using add_meta_box() and added a file input box to them. The only thing is that the post form in Wordpress doesn't have the enctype="multipart/form-data" attribute and so it won't pass file to the $_FILES array in PHP.

It is not possible to add the enctype into the form declaration via Wordpress as there is no hook or action to do this. So the only alternative (rather than hack the source code) is to add the attribute using JavaScript, and as we have JQuery already loaded we can utilise that.

When moving a Wordpress install from one place to another there are a number of things you must be aware of. If you have created your templates properly you will have used calls to bloginfo('home') rather than using static links, but you will need to update these links to make your Wordpress install work properly.

Once the files are in place, the database connection details have been edited and the database created there are a number of things to alter in the database to make your Wordpress install work.

The most important changes are in the options table. There are two references to your URL in this table that must be altered to stop Wordpress redirecting back to your old site. This must be done via database access as Wordpress will redirect you when you try to login to the stie.

Changing the text of a submit button when clicked can be useful if you are writing an AJAX application or you know that there will be some sort of delay. Providing the user with some form of feedback is a useful way of letting them know they they have done something.

First, we need a form to work with, so I built a quick one here. Notice that the submit button has an onclick action associated with it, this will be used later to enable us to alter the text of the button.