From b2/cafelog fork to full-scale CMS giant, powering over 60% (and rising) of the top million websites (according to BuiltWith), WordPress has been there for us for almost 9 years now; from those of you who got to download the first 0.70 version and those, who are downloading WordPress today (version 3.3.1) for the first time ever.
Have you ever had to debug WordPress email problems, like mail not being sent, without any apparent reason? The wp_mail function is usually used to send emails from within WordPress code. This is a pluggable function and, thus, resides in wp-includes/pluggable.php.
Its default behavior prevents it from returning anything but false when sending fails for one reason or another. And that often times poses a problem when trying to debug wp_mail issues.
I was going through some simple coding puzzles yesterday night and became fascinated by this seemingly interesting function:
int CountBits (unsigned int x ) {
static unsigned int mask[] = {
0x55555555,
0x33333333,
0x0F0F0F0F,
0x00FF00FF,
0x0000FFFF
};
int i ;
int shift ; /* Number of positions to shift to right*/
for (i = 0, shift = 1; i < 5; i++, shift *= 2)
x = (x & mask[i]) + ((x >> shift) & mask[i]);
return x;
}
the_content is one of the most known WordPress template tags. It wraps itself around the get_the_content tag (a little lower in the source) and applies the the_content filter to it.
the_content filter applies at least 10 default filter functions to the content before displaying it. WordPress post content is usually just altered here and there, not too drastically (except shortcodes, of course), and sometimes you just have to know what to expect when displaying filtered content.
With the week almost over let’s look back into the happenings inside the WordPress trunk. Many of the features described in the series will probably end up in WordPress 3.4. Check out last week’s post if you haven’t.
Many of you may have already met the WordPress Command Line tool called wp-cli by @scribu, the man who eats WordPress for breakfast, but my first encounter with the tool happened a couple of days ago. I don’t know how in the world I had missed its announcement 4 months ago.
The WordPress Command Line tool provides a command line interface for administrative control and management, and even installation of WordPress. The tool is written in PHP and makes use of the highly flexible and powerful PHP Command Line tools library. It requires PHP CLI SAPI to be installed on the machine, which will almost always be available if you’re running WordPress on the server.
This is our dog Polyushka (translates to cinnamon roll from Russian). Decided to have a shower today, after a long walk. She doesn’t like to have pictures taken, especially after a shower, but she says hello 😉
I have been having car problems recently. However, these inspired me to dig a little into the car ECU. ECUs (engine control units) are able to give out a myriad of information, like systems’ fault codes, real-time RPM, air-flow, fuel consumption, voltage, exhaust state, and lots more. Most modern cars tap into this information and display it on the dashboard via on-board computers.
I finally received the long-awaited OBD II (OBD 2) (on-board diagnostics) interpreter based on the ELM327 chip yesterday and all I can say is that it’s been a long night.
In a previous post we looked at 7 Overlooked WordPress Helper Functions. Today I’ll dig deep and find more helpful undocumented functions that WordPress uses internally that can be of help when developing plugins and themes. Leveraging code that is already available in the core, is maintained and simply works can save you quite a bit of coding and debugging time.
I have read dozens of “How to secure your WordPress” articles, and one common “tip” among others is getting rid of the “generator” tag in the HTML head, for additional security through obscurity.
WordPress uses the meta “generator” tag to “disclose” its version. The paranoia surrounding this fact is unbelievable, and they think that by removing it they harden WordPress. And that is absolutely not true.