One of the sites I am working on has three top level pages which will form three distinct sections of the site. I decided that it would be good to show different sets of widgets within these sections and therefore had to concoct a way to determine from any page it’s top level parent page. The function below simply returns true or false if the first argument is a child of the second. It also returns true if the first argument is the same as the second.

The Function

function page_has_parent($current_page, $target_parent=0) {
	global $wpdb;

	$return = false;

	if ($current_page == $target_parent) {
		$return = true;
	} else {
		$sql = 'SELECT post_parent
			FROM ' . $wpdb->posts . '
			WHERE ID = ' . $current_page;
		if ($parent = $wpdb->get_var($sql)) {
			if ($parent == $target_parent) {
				$return = true;
			} else if ($parent) {
				$return = page_has_parent($parent, $target_parent);
			}
		}
	}

	return $return;
}

The Usage

The following is a Wordpress example of showing one sidebar or the other based on page

$this_page = get_the_ID();
if (page_has_parent($this_page, 7)) {
	dynamic_sidebar('Sidebar2');
} else if (page_has_parent($this_page, 11)) {
	dynamic_sidebar('Sidebar2');
} else ....

The wp_comments table doesn’t have support or scope to store comments with an associated user (as opposed to post). At this juncture I would have inserted a null (or 0) value into the post_id column and added a row into the wp_commentmeta table with the user ID it refers to. However, I didn’t write the core code for the project so I simply updated a neat little system written by Dan Wellman. Dan’s system is pretty good and uses AJAX and JSON to add comments to a new database table with two fields (author and comment). It was what I would call ‘a good start’ as DB details were required in a number of different files and the database had room for improvement. I have a few more plans for the code but for now have changed a couple of things and bundled it into a Wordpress plugin for you.

In my version the database table is created for you, it has several more fields including a primary key (!), timestamps and room for additional information (not currently utilised) to be stored. The Wordpress database class is used now so no duplication of the connection details is necessary.

Take a look at the plugin and comments and suggestions for additions are very welcome.

Download
SB Author Comments (1.84 KB)

Usage
Upload and activate the plugin as normal. Then add the following code to your author.php theme template making sure to edit the $author_id variable as appropriate.

<?php
if (function_exists('sb_ac_comment_form')) {
echo sb_ac_comment_form($author_id);
}
?>

Credit
Once again credit goes to Dan Wellman who detailed the integration into his site on his blog

So… first, a bit of logic

Logically speaking a standard layout web page can be split into four distinct areas as follows:

• Header
• Footer
• Sidebar(s)
• Content

And as such Wordpress uses different theme files to render the appropriate sections. We need to split our HTML page into those different files. There are, however, lines of code that Wordpress needs you to put into each of these files and so tbe best way todo this without missing anything is to recycle another theme. So… go to your Wordpress install and visit /wp-content/themes/ and…

1. Duplicate the directory called ‘default‘
2. Open style.css in a text editor and edit the name of the theme and any other information you feel like
3. Either remove or replace screenshot.jpg from the theme directory so it looks different in the theme menu

That’s it, you now have a skeleton to work from and it’s time to make it look like your site. Let’s assume you have a simple brochureware site and, therefore, don’t need any blog type pages. Largely these sites have a standard consistent layout on each page (often except the home page but that difference is for another tutorial) and Wordpress uses this consistency to slot in the appropriate information for each page. We do this by…

1. Choose a short yet typical page from your site and view the HTML source
2. Open 4 separate text files from the new theme directory in your favourite text editor. They are: header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php and page.php
3. From the HTML source take the top section of code (usually as far as the content and sidebar code inclusive of a menu assuming you are using a top horizontal bar navigation) and place it into header.php making sure to preserve the obvious dynamic sections of code (anything between <?php and ?> can be assumed to be dynamic)
4. Do the same with the footer into footer.php (the section below the content and sidebar that often contains SEO links and copyright notices)
5. The remaining block should contain the content and sidebar code… simply cut out the sidebar code into sidebar.php
6. Finally split the content code into the bit before the text and the bit after the text (ie: layout code stripping out the text itself). Then paste these sections around the ‘while’ loop within page.php.
7. (optional) copy your stylesheet into style.css making sure to preserve the comment at the top of the file as this is used by Wordpress to define the theme and without which will not pick up any of the code.

Step 6 will likely be the most difficult to do as there are three or four important lines of PHP code in there. Firstly the line that reads <?php get_header(); ?> is the code that calls header.php. Likewise <?php get_footer(); ?> and <?php get_sidebar(); ?> call their appropriate namesakes. Make sure that they are in the correct logical positions for the page to render in the right order.

The Loop

The hardest section is what is called ‘the loop’ by Wordpress bods. This is the section of code that shows the post(s) from the database relative to the page you are looking at. The Loop often falls into the following form:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
 <div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
 <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
 <div>
 <?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>

 <?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>

 </div>
 </div>
 <?php endwhile; endif; ?>

You shouldn’t really need to change any of the code itself but you might need to edit the encapsulating HTML to make your styles fit in. For example if your page titles are not in H2 tags then you need to change it to suit etc etc…

Testing it!

This will always be a case of trial and error until you know what you are doing so don’t worry if it all goes pear shaped. That’s what the undo button is for!

To test that your theme is working properly then you need to visit your sites back end at /wp-admin and click the link on the left hand side called ‘appearance‘. The themes page will appear and to activate your theme you simply find it in the list and click ‘activate’. Then view the front end of the site and see what it looks like.

At this stage you might be confused because the home page looks different to the rest of the site. This is because, by default, Wordpress uses the index.php file from your theme directory to generate the home page. To change this visit the settings -> reading page from the left menu and use the dropdown box to choose an appropriate page to be used for the home page.

What’s next?

Ok so your theme looks like it did before you spent hours making the them for the Wordpress site… why on earth are we using Wordpress at all you ask! Well if you were to create a new page for your old site then you would have to duplicate an HTML file, trawl through code (or look at Dreamweaver or another WYSIWYG) to find the sections to replace before uploading to your site and updating the links in the various menus as appropriate. With Wordpress you just add a ‘page‘ using the nice admin system and it’s all done for you.

I always tell my clients to go and have a look at the Wordpress plugins directory for ideas and things to ad to their site. A word of warning though, some plugins conflict with others and too many plugins might slow your site down considerably. Over time you will get used to a core few you know and trust.

Feel free to ask me any questions about Wordpress, PHP or other and hopefully I will be able to help you decide what’s the best direction for your site to take. Expect a lecture about how good Wordpress is though!

The  code at the bottom of this post is the raw HTML file I wrote. I obviously made it into a Wordpress plugin as well. see below example.

Example

Yes, it’s basic but it works well for demonstrative purposes.

Usage

write sb_countdown in square brackets in a post or page and you will get the above example. If you want to edit the text or style it then just open the plugin file and right near the top is a few defines to get you going. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it so didn’t create an admin page. I may well do in the future though.

The Download

Raw HTML Version

<html>
 <head>
 <title>Countdown Timer</title>

 <style>
 body {
 font-family: tahoma;
 }

 #countdown_div {
 font-weight: bold;
 font-size: 56px;
 }

 #body_wrapper {
 padding: 10px;
 margin: 20px;
 }
 </style>

 <script>
 function do_countdown() {
 var start_num = document.getElementById("value").value;
 var unit_var = document.getElementById("countdown_unit").value;

 start_num = start_num * parseInt(unit_var);

 var countdown_output = document.getElementById('countdown_div');

 if (start_num > 0) {
 countdown_output.innerHTML = format_as_time(start_num);
 var t=setTimeout("update_clock(\"countdown_div\", "+start_num+")", 1000);
 }

 return false;
 }

 function update_clock(countdown_div, new_value) {
 var countdown_output = document.getElementById(countdown_div);
 var new_value = new_value - 1;

 if (new_value > 0) {
 new_formatted_value = format_as_time(new_value);
 countdown_output.innerHTML = new_formatted_value;

 var t=setTimeout("update_clock(\"countdown_div\", "+new_value+")", 1000);
 } else {
 countdown_output.innerHTML = "And... Stop!";
 }
 }

 function format_as_time(seconds) {
 var minutes = parseInt(seconds/60);
 var seconds = seconds - (minutes*60);

 if (minutes < 10) {
 minutes = "0"+minutes;
 }

 if (seconds < 10) {
 seconds = "0"+seconds;
 }

 var return_var = minutes+':'+seconds;

 return return_var;
 }
 </script>
 </head>

 <body>
 <div id="body_wrapper">
 <form id="countdown_form" onsubmit="return do_countdown();">
 Countdown from: <input style="width: 50px;" id="value" />
 <select id="countdown_unit">
 <option value="1">Seconds</option>
 <option value="60">Minutes</option>
 <option value="3600">Hours</option>
 </select>
 <input type="submit" value="Go" />
 </form>
 <div id="countdown_div">&nbsp;</div>
 </div>
 </body>

</html>

I have been in a coding mood today so thought that I would bash together a tiny little PHP script to emulate the same thing. Yes it’s basic but works from two text files which are defined in the first few lines of the file itself. It’s not the most elegant bit of code I have ever written but if you know anything about PHP or have a web server then why not have a fiddle and see what you can make it do?

Consider this… it doesn’t have to be learning events. Why not use it as a kind of ‘What shall we do tomorrow?’ kind of thing. eg: ‘Do a 5 mile run with a friend dressed as a horse’ or ‘Do go out and get a bit merry’.

The Code

<?php

$cwd = getcwd();
$outcome_source = $cwd . '/' . 'activities.txt';
$method_source = $cwd . '/' . 'methods.txt';

$outcomes = file($outcome_source);
$methods = file($method_source);

$outcome = trim($outcomes[array_rand($outcomes)]);
$method = trim($methods[array_rand($methods)]);

echo 'Do ' . $outcome . ' as a ' . $method . '.';

?>

The Download

The file is available as a download here: Learning Event Generator (1.23 KB)

References

The original idea is available on the following website and is credited to John Davitt

I, for one, don’t really care what the quality is in the file name and would prefer it to be readable. I spend a lot of time removing this extraneous data so decided to make a short PHP script to remove certain strings on mass.

See the following code which can be run from the command line using the following format:

php -f <filename> <text_to_remove> [int live_mode=0]

Code

#!/usr/bin/php

  [int live_mode=0]';
    exit;
} else {
    $remove = $argv[1];
}

$live_mode = (int)$argv[2];

if ($dir = scandir($cwd)) {
    foreach ($dir as $file) {
        $path = $cwd . '/' . $file;

        if (!in_array($file, $ignore)) {
            if (!is_link($path) && !is_dir($path)) {
                if (strpos($file, $remove) !== false && $file != $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] && $file != $remove) {
                    $output .= 'Renamed "' . $path . '" to "' . $cwd . '/' . trim(str_replace($remove, '', $file)) . '"' . "\n";

                    if ($live_mode) {
                        $new_path = $cwd . '/' . trim(str_replace($remove, '', $file));
                        rename($path, $new_path);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }

    if ($output) {
        $output = ($live_mode ? 'LIVE':'TEST') . ' MODE' . "\n\n" . 'Text to remove from filenames was "' . $remove . '"' . "\n\n" . $output;
    } else {
        $output = 'There were no matches by your criteria: "' . $remove . '"';
    }    

    echo $output . "\n\n";
}

?>

Download

To download the code in file form click the following link: File Rename Script (783 bytes)

Here goes..

MySQL tables, like any other, have an auto increment value to determine the next in line when inserting new data. How do we preempt this data though? How do we get the next insert ID before we insert the data? I can almost hear you now reeling off the following code:

SELECT MAX(id)+1 FROM table1;

You are wrong… What happens if you have 100 rows in ‘table1′.. the next insert is 101 right? wrong. We don’t have enough data to make anything other than an educated (and usually correct) guess.

Let me explain… What happens if you inserted a row by accident. This is easily done when the programmer doesn’t use single use tokens on insert queries. You then have to delete that row. What then would the next insert value be? 102 is the answer.

There is a MySQL command to allow you to get a list of table information within which is the Auto Increment value as follows:

SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'table1';

There are two downsides to using this method..

1. Your host might not allow you to use SHOW on your database meaning it would either result in an access denied or no recordset.
2. The data is not sortable or filterable. This means you need to use some PHP logic to get the actual Auto Increment value from the recordset.

It isn’t that bad actually getting the data out of the recordset using PHP. See the following example using Wordpress database calls:

$sql = 'SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE "wp_nmv_version"';
$status = $wpdb->get_row($sql);
echo $status->Auto_increment;

So if knowing the correct Auto Increment is vital to your system bare this article in mind before proceeding.

If anyone has any idea how to tidy this process up a bit to remove the PHP element from the filtering process then I would be glad to listen.

As you well know I work with Tim Nash over at CNMS and between us we develop and sell the Your Members plugin. The plugin protects blog content based on member levels and then provides the means to pay for access using a variety of methods. </plug>

It’s pretty standard stuff. However… What happens if you want to add some sort of streaming media to the protected section in a blog post?

It doesn’t work is the answer! Ever helpful Wordpress scans the post for the presence of certain HTML strings and adds post custom fields if it gets a hit. This is the case for podcasting and flash type plugins. Normally this would be a good thing, however, not when the Object in question is supposed to be protected. A pretty bit security hole in any content protection plugin.

At the most basic level the protection can be restored using the following code…

function delete_enclosure(){
    return '';
}

add_filter( 'get_enclosed', 'delete_enclosure' );
add_filter( 'rss_enclosure', 'delete_enclosure' );
add_filter( 'atom_enclosure', 'delete_enclosure' );

The code should be put into either a new plugin or more simply your functions.php file within your theme. Dead easy!

If you understand it, the code simply picks up on any filters and removes them. Problem solved.  For YM, the next step is not to remove the enlosure if the user should have access. Additionally we don’t want to remove the enclosure if the object is outside of the protected content area. However the function above will suffice for now

If, like me, you store your currency values in your database as integers (don’t ask why, I just do) then you need to multiply by 100 on the way in and divide by 100 on the way out.

The obvious problem (or maybe not so obvious) is that when multiplying a number 100.1 is different to 100.10 and therefore the former needs to be converted to 100.10 for the resultant number to be correct.

The following function simply does that whilst checking for the occurence of a decimal place and concatenating .00 in that situation.

function convert_to_currency($num) {
    if (strpos($num, '.') == false) {
        $num = $num . '.00';
    } else {
        $num = sprintf("%01.2f", (float)$num);
    }
    return $num;
}

This should reliably format the number ready to be manipulated for either a database or to be directly output.

After a short Google search I came across a Microsoft article that told me exactly how to do it. Here are the steps I took:

1. Close any Microsoft Office Applications
2. Open the registry (Start -> Run -> regedit)
3. Find the appropriate office installation key under  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Microsoft\Office followed by your version
   • Office XP ->…\10.0\Registration
   • Office 2003 -> …11.0\Registration
   • Office 2007 -> …\12.0\Registration
4. In one of the subfolders you will see a product name field. Select the subfolder with your Office name in it (IE: Microsoft Office 2003)
5. Delete the following key names:
   • DigitalProductID
   • ProductID
6. Close the registry (no need to look for a save button, there isn’t one!)
7. Open up any Office Application and you will be prompted for your product key and then to activate.

Thanks to Microsoft for writing a clear and concise how-to for a change without referring you to various knowledgebase articles. I used the following site for reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895456