For a site I’ve been working one I wanted to automatically include a gallery of all the images attached to a post, and I wanted it to display exactly like a standard WordPress gallery would look.  The HTML is modeled after the gallery code from Twenty Thirteen.

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<?php
$args = array(
     'numberposts' => -1,
     'orderby' => 'menu_order',
     'order'=> 'ASC',
     'post_mime_type' => 'image',
     'post_parent' => $post->ID,
     'post_status' => null,
     'post_type' => 'attachment'
);
 
$images = get_children( $args );
 
if($images){ ?>
     <h2>Photos</h2>
 
     <div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-10 gallery-columns-4 gallery-size-thumbnail'>
          <?php foreach($images as $image){
               $image2 = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $image->ID, 'thumbnail'); ?>
               <dl class='gallery-item'><dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>
               <a href='<?php echo $image->guid; ?>'><img width="150" height="150" src="<?php echo $image2[0]; ?>" /></a>
               </dt></dl>
          <?php } ?>
          <br style='clear: both;' />
     </div>
<?php } ?>

On a WordPress site I’ve been working on I’m using SlideDeck as a feature article slider on the homepage.  The only problem was I have additional articles populating underneath it and the articles from the SlideDeck were showing up down there as well.

We didn’t want that behavior so I researched how to filter out SlideDeck posts from the post loop.  At this time, it’s apparently easy to filter for content that has a custom meta-tag, but you can’t easily filter for content that doesn’t have a custom meta-tag applied to it.  It’s because when a post doesn’t have a custom met-tag attached to it that custom meta-tag doesn’t come up as “null” or “0”  it simply doesn’t come up at all.  So there’s no way to use query_posts to filter out SlideDeck posts, you have to make custom database query and use $wpdb->get_results.

This post from SlideDeck’s customer support website did most of the heavy lifting for me in putting together the exact query I needed to filter out only SlideDeck posts.  The only problem was that this gave me no insight as to how I could paginate the posts.  Thankfully google came to rescue once again and I found this post and this post which helped me piece together the script.  I posted my findings on SlideDeck’s customer service website, but I’m posted it here as well so I can easily find it again if I need it.

So for the code, inside loop.php before have_posts() I put…

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if(is_home()) {
    //query_posts(array( 'meta_key' => 'slidedeck_post_featured') );
    global $wpdb;
    $ppp = intval(get_query_var('posts_per_page'));
 
    $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
    $offset = ($paged-1) * $ppp;
    $sql = "SELECT p.*
        FROM {$wpdb->posts} AS p
        LEFT JOIN {$wpdb->postmeta} AS pm
        ON pm.post_id = p.ID AND pm.meta_key = %s
        WHERE p.post_status = %s AND p.post_type = %s AND pm.meta_value IS NULL
	ORDER BY p.post_date desc
        LIMIT $offset, $ppp";
    $posts = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare( $sql, '_slidedeck_post_featured', 'publish', 'post' ));
}

if(is_home())  will make it so it will only filter out SlideDeck posts on the homepage, and apparently the have_posts() works exactly as it normally does even when I change the loop using $wpdb->get_results, which means I don’t have to do much to the rest of the page in order for this to work.  WordPress, you rock <3

This will paginate the posts according to the number of items I have set in the WordPress settings, but for some reason when I did this on the last page it printed out empty posts to fill out that page.

For instance, say I only have 7 posts left on the last page, but I have it set to show a maximum of 10 posts per page – it would print out 3 empty posts on that page.

To combat this I put the following code inside have_posts() so it wouldn’t print anything if the post ID was null.

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if(get_the_ID() > 0) {
    //html for posts
}

Pretty straight forward and everything has been working great so far 🙂

References

http://support.slidedeck.com/slidedeck/topics/wp_query_a_list_of_posts_not_featured_in_the_slide_deck?from_gsfn=true

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/custom-loop-pagination
http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2011/02/23/wordpress-pagination-woes-solved-i-hope/

For a project we wanted to bring in outside links and display them in a box on the homepage.  Instead of building out a whole custom system to handle the link, I suggested posing them through Facebook.

So in order to be able to style the feed however we wanted I put together a simple Curl code in PHP to pull in the Facebook Page RSS feed (every page has a feed it’ll be formated like this => http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=245091913103&format=rss20).

This will check if there’s a link inside the body of the status update and use that, but then default to the link to the status message in Facebook if that doesn’t exist.

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<?php
        $curl = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=245091913103&format=rss20");
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3");
        $xmlTwitter = curl_exec($curl);
        curl_close($curl);
 
        $xmlObjTwitter = simplexml_load_string($xmlTwitter);
        $tempCounter = 0;
 
        foreach ($xmlObjTwitter->channel->item as $item) {                    
            if ( $tempCounter < 9 ){
                preg_match('/(http|https|ftp)(.*?) (id|target)/i', $item->description, $matches);
                $matches[0] = str_replace('" id','',$matches[0]);
                echo '<li><a href="'.($matches[0] ? $matches[0] : $item->link).'" target="_blank">'.$item->title.'</a>
                <div>'.date('F jS, Y',strtotime($item->pubDate)).'</div></li>';
            }
 
            $tempCounter += 1;
        }
 
        echo '</ul>';
?>

So, I’ve just spent the last half hour tracking down this annoying bug in WordPress 😛

I’m really glad I use an outdated theme (or at least one without custom header support) so I could track this puppy down.

I have been working on building a theme that is a child theme of good ‘ol 2010 (2011 wasn’t out when I started building :()

I uploaded a portrait image and noticed it got cut off in the image editor like so:

The editor’s will really need to be able to adjust that thumbnail image, so I went digging around and found that a theme called “Modfolio” had this exact same problem.  So, I figure, it’s gotta be something with the theme.  Especially since I didn’t get a whole lot of results…if it was a core issue and everyone was seeing this then I would assume there would be a lot more complaints.

I switched around from my child theme, to 2010, and even 2011, but the same error kept popping up :/  Then I figured I’d check it out in my blog here.  I’m currently using a slightly modified version of Uchilla theme – which hasn’t been updated in ages.  And lo-and-behold the image is coming up fine and dandy in the editor.  I could be wrong on this, but I believe the only file in a theme that can mess with the admin side of things is the functions.php file.  So I just kept hacking away at it until I found the bit of code that was causing me grief.

It’s lines 117 & 188 in the functions file for 2010:

define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH', apply_filters( 'twentyten_header_image_width', 940 ) );
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', apply_filters( 'twentyten_header_image_height', 198 ) );

That was somehow adding a constraint to the editor preview and for me simply commenting out those two lines did the trick 🙂  I did have to re-upload all the affected images though…

I don’t know what effect that might have on the custom headers…I’m not using them myself so it wasn’t an issue for me.

I recently added in a way for admin users to download a backup of the database to a CMS I work on.  I came up with something between this solution and this one.  Add this little snippet after a database connection and change “table_1” and “table_2” to whichever tables you’d like to output, and add as many tables as you need.

What I like about this script is that it doesn’t save a copy to the server so folks can’t nab it if they know the entire URL, but it can be easily integrated to a web based interface.  It also uses “create table if not exists” which was missing from the other two scripts.  I think a backup should create tables in case you loose the table structure, but it shouldn’t delete the existing data.

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<?php
function datadump ($table) {
    $result .= "# Dump of $table \n";
    $result .= "# Dump DATE : " . date("d-M-Y") ."\n\n";
    
    $row2 = mysql_fetch_row(mysql_query('SHOW CREATE TABLE '.$table));
    $result .= "\n\n".str_replace('CREATE TABLE','CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS',$row2[1]).";\n\n";
    
    $query = mysql_query("select * from $table");
    $num_fields = @mysql_num_fields($query);
    $numrow = mysql_num_rows($query);
    
    for ($i =0; $i<$numrow; $i++) {
        while($row = mysql_fetch_row($query)) {
            $result .= "INSERT INTO ".$table." VALUES(";
            for($j=0; $j<$num_fields; $j++) {
                $row[$j] = addslashes($row[$j]);
                $row[$j] = ereg_replace("\n","\\n",$row[$j]);
                
                if (isset($row[$j])) $result .= "\"$row[$j]\"" ; else $result .= "\"\"";
                if ($j<($num_fields-1)) $result .= ",";
            }
            $result .= ");\n";
        }
    }
    return $result . "\n\n\n";
}
 
$content = datadump('table_1').datadump('table_2');
 
$file_name = "database_backup.sql";
Header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
Header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$file_name");
echo $content;
?>