Since we at Saturn provide wordpress as a CMS, and have more than a handful of experienced Wordpress customizers, and themeres we have handled several challeges related to Wordpress. The latest one being that the client was offered a facelift, and they wanted to preview the progress of integration. I searched the plugin repositories and blogs, found a lot of solutions, which include theme switchers, theme preview, and even suggestions to have a local copy. Well with our client, we could not think of a local copy, since the database dump itself was about 320GB and the images and videows was a whopping 1200 GB. Well after reading through the source of get_option, a wave struck me.
function new_theme_preview(){
if(isset($_COOKIE['ShowNewTheme'])){
return 'myNewTheme';
}
return false;
}
add_filter('pre_option_current_theme', 'new_theme_preview', 1, 0);
I added the above to the end of an active plugin, then created two files newtheme.php and oldtheme.php, containing code to set and remove the cookie. The files were put into the top level folder. Once I am done with the theming, I could remove all these manually.
// newtheme.php
setcookie ( 'ShowNewTheme', '1');
header("Location: ./");
//oldtheme.php
setcookie ( 'ShowNewTheme', false);
header("Location: ./");
Wordpress Plugins php snippets, wordpress
Yet another challenge, mostly like all other developers, ours at Saturn too believed that scheduled jobs could be run to the lowest frequency at every minute. This stands true if the job is handled only by *nix cron or by windows scheduler. For even further control one should write a Sleep-And-Run. I used to do this in shell script for most of my requirements. Just the other day some one challenged me to get done with one similar in php.
The outcome is a crude one, ServiceManager, which runs based on a configuration file and its run frequency. Best not to change the frequency or your configuration would never support anything less than the frequency as well as will only support multiples of the frequency. The configuration file is the famous ini file format with item names in square brackets, with configuration on two lines. The sample attached ServiceManager.ini should give an idea.
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PHP cron, php cron, php snippets
For sending status mails, with varying from addresses, for several of our projects at Saturn, we were using the phpmailer which uses our smtp server with authentication. Well our smtp host had a limitation of 250 emails per day. When our requirements grew out of this limit, mails started to pile up. Sure I could install exim4 or sendmail on my boxes, and that is what I did for immediate resolution. But here comes a new requirement, that the mails sent should be marked as such, and those which failed should be marked with the exact response of the receiving end mailserver.
At this point I thought about an SMTP direct to mail box Delivery system. My favorite language being PHP, and primary library being Google, I tried all possible ways, according to me, and they were not the right ones as I came to know later. All these did not get me in the right direction. And finally thought about writing one. Here too, being lazy, wanted to have the code from some ones work to ignite me. Okay I found the phpbb’s smtp.php referred on the net, and the function smtpmail from the same was the right choice.
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Code Snippets, PHP, Tips direct mail, php snippets, smtp
I was looking for a optimize table script and finally stumbled upon some code which could be salvaged into a shell script. The full code is reproduced here for future reference.
#!/bin/bash
#-- I usually add the root username and password to the ~/.my.cnf
MYSQL_CMD='/usr/bin/mysql '
$MYSQL_CMD -e "SELECT concat('OPTIMIZE TABLE ',TABLE_SCHEMA,'.',TABLE_NAME,';') as cmd FROM information_schema.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA NOT IN ('information_schema','mysql') AND Data_free > 10 AND NOT ENGINE='MEMORY' INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/cmd.sql'"
$MYSQL_CMD < /tmp/cmd.sql
rm -f /tmp/cmd.sql
Linux Shell, mysql cron, Linux Shell, mysql
For a long time I have been using the image captcha with random characters, and got fed up. I had seen numeric computational captcha or Mathematical captcha where one has to calculate the answer of an equation with simple arithmetic and supply the result for verification. Last night I was pondering over this while watching a movie on the TV. Well the out come is obvious.
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Code Snippets, PHP, Tips captcha, php snippets
I was digging through my old codes to get this, still could not find. Hence when I wrote it, just made a note here such that later it wont be difficult to find atleast for me.
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Code Snippets, PHP, Tips php snippets, php tips
At Saturn in the development labs, we restructured the development mysql by logically splitting out or combining projects and spread it across four instances of mysql running on a dedicated server. Later we felt that the weekly backups of mysql data folder was not sufficient for some of our projects. And for these we decided on having a rotational backup. The backup plan was to have a full backup of data and structure every Sunday and then difference of the database from last sunday to every other day, rotate the backups every fourth week. The structure backup was decided to be taken with mysqldump and the options –routines –triggers –no-data –compact. Whereas the data backup was to be taken as tab-seperated-values, using select into outfile. We had specific reasons to decide these methods as well as to take data and structure seperately.
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General Articles, mysql mysql
Recently in a discussion on linkedin PHP webservice – Logging Requests/Responses, Roy de Kleijn had asked “how can I print the XML in XML structure, in stead of a single line of text”, which triggered me a thought. This may be trivial for veterans, and still a new information for newbies.
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Code Snippets php snippets, php tips
This is not any new thing and may be discussed at different other places. But just as I came across like any other things, I just wanted to make a record of this.
When selecting datetime to be displayed in a JavaScript ui library, select the unix_timestamp * 1000 from the sql.
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Javascript, PHP, Tips, mysql MSSQL, mysql
Today I was pondering over how to coax mysql (and mssql) to automagically select local time if a session variable was set with the required timezone. Well we arrived at a conclusion that we could not do that on DateTime fields in MySQL. Alas we were having varchar(19) in the equivalent field in MsSQL, which was the outcome of an import from MySQL using a connection string and a procedure. We were at a dismay, and admitted defeat. Later while having lunch, I got enlightend about using the built in functions to do the methodical conversions.
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General Articles, mysql MSSQL, mysql
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