On the 12th of February an Anonymous posted the following pastebin: Operation Global Blackout. In case the pastebin disappears here’s the plaintext: Operation Global Blackout Anonymous.
To protest SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun, On March 31, the Internet will go Black.
Looking good for WordPress 3.4, with 44% of tickets closed, and almost 200 and counting tickets open. However, no release date has been set yet. This week things haven’t been as interesting as last week, yet work has not stopped bringing the community closer to a WordPress 3.4 release.
Continuing into Command Line Android Development (last week I did a piece on Command Line Android Development: Basics), today I’d like to go over some of the techniques that allow for debugging applications from the command line.
I personally have a distaste towards IDEs, preferring lightweight solutions, with maybe less convenience. I addition to saving resources and having direct control over what happens and what doesn’t, I find that by doing things the low level way you begin to better understand how things work.
Sure, Eclipse will let you debug in 2 clicks, but what do you learn besides that you application has a bug? There should always be time to learn a thing or two about the underlying technologies. What if one day, you have to SSH into a server and debug a Java application right there and then? If you’ve never seen anything beyond Eclipse in your life you’re in for some hair pulling. So let’s learn some low level stuff.
I have had the opportunity to work with the WordPress Newsletter Plugin from Tribulant, a plugin that rivals the free MailPress plugin, but with its own twist (and its own pricetag of $54.99 single license, $274.95 unlimited).
The WordPress Newsletter Plugin copy starts out by shouting:
A WordPress newsletter plugin which will, without a doubt, blow your mind away with its feature set…
And it does, after you take a look at one of its core features that they’re proud of:
Both PHP, HTML, CSS and WordPress shortcodes can be put into themes.
Newsletters: Themes Documentation
See anything wrong with that?
With Release Candidate 7 available for download PHP is moving moving towards the final release of the much-anticipated (almost 3 years since PHP 5.3) 5.4 version. Here are a some things you’ll be able to enjoy or rant about.
WordPress is exceptionally flexible when it comes to changing existing behaviors and implementing new ones, and with aid of the multitude of API’s many things are possible.
When you start extending the default data structures in WordPress, most of the time you’ll be extending Posts, either default Posts (or Comments) or Custom Post Types, other times might be extending User objects. Extending would most of the time mean adding more data which you can query by and pivot around.
Code reuse is key to solid development. When developing large-scale WordPress plugins and themes you are bound to write helper functions to solve certain tasks. WordPress has around 10,000 functions in its core so the probability that a helper function that you’re about to write already exists could be quite high.
Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) allow your applications to receive notifications from PayPal on payments made. This means that your application can fulfill an order automatically upon receiving such a notification. However, when you get your second application up with its own IPN you suddenly find out that PayPal lets you set only one Notification URL.
Of course there’s the whole notify_url charade and counterparts for all of PayPal’s APIs, but, unfortunately, there are cases when you simply can’t get to set those:
For everything else, modify your forms and API calls to include the notify_url attribute.
The easiest and most straightforward solution would be to get multiple PayPal accounts, right? Right, BUT:
No Multiple Accounts. Should you register for more than one Personal Account, PayPal reserves the right to terminate all of your accounts and will restrict you from the system going forward. Users may register and hold one Personal Account and either one Premier or one Business Account.
…from PayPal’s Terms and Conditions
So unless you have a separate legal business entity (company) for each Business Account), you’re out of luck. However, there a simple and sweet way to overcome this single IPN URL business – receive IPN and broadcast it.
This week’s been very busy for the core contributors and developers of WordPress. Here are some of this week’s major changes in WordPress trunk.
