development

svn diff -x "-bw --ignore-eol-style" is your friend when somebody decides to change the end of line style and strip all trailing whitespace from the files in your repo.

Plugin Development

Will Norris‘ talk at WordCamp PDX introduces WordPress coding standards, common functions, and constants to would be plugin developers (and smacks those who’ve already done it wrong). Also notable: functions, classes, variables, and constants in the WordPress trunk.

Custom Installations

Just as WordPress has a number of hooks and filters that plugins can use to modify and extend behavior, it also has a cool way to customize the installation process.

Extending The WYSIWYG Editor

TinyMCE, the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress has a rich API to allow adding buttons and stuff, but the docs are hard to get into. We can get a jump on that by looking at how it’s implemented in other WP plugins. This code creates the buttons, while the function that responds to the button click and does the work is defined within the plugin. The TinyMCE plugins in core are also informative.

Ozh’s tutorial explains the details, but the short story is that we’ll soon get WP_CONTENT_URL and WP_CONTENT_DIR constants. And this is more than just convenience, 2.6 allows site admins to put those directories anywhere they want, so the constants will be the only reliable way of finding that info.

I announced the bSuite 4 public beta not long ago, now I’ve just posted a new version to SVN that addresses some of the bugs and fleshes out some of the features. I have yet to update the bSuite page, but here’s a preview of what’s new or changed:

• Additional stats reports
• WP2.5-style tag input tools on the Page edit screen*
• WP2.5-style category selector on the Page edit screen*
• WP2.5-style excerpt input on the Page edit screen*
• For multi-author sites: ability to grant edit permissions by role for each page (with a configurable default)
• An “include” shortcode that makes it easy to show content from one post or page on another.

About the new shortcode, use it like this:

[inclu``de post_id=“1234” url=“a url to a post or page in your blog” field=“post_excerpt”]

One of post_id or url is required; field is optional and defaults to post_excerpt first, then to post_content if there is no excerpt.

*Why would you want to input tags, set categories, or add an excerpt to a Page? They help readers find and explore our content. What’s so wrong with that?

I’ve been following WP2.1 development, but Aaron Brazell’s post in the development blog wrapped up a lot of questions all at once.

The short story is that 2.1 is going to bring some really good changes that will allow more flexibility and better optimization of WPopac. Of the four changes Brazell names, the last two, the addition of the post_type column and a change in usage of the post_status column, are where the money is.

I’m awaiting the final release of 2.1 before building the necessary changes into WPopac, but the benefits will be worth it.

• memcached, a “highly effective caching daemon, …designed to decrease database load in dynamic web applications,” and the related PHP functions
• pspell PHP functions related to aspell and this pspell overview from Zend
• http_build_query, duh?
• current connected mysql threads * unix load average = system busy; reduce operations when $system_busy > $x