I ran into an interesting “bug” in Twitter Tools last night that I traced back to http_build_query(). I expected that the query strings generated by this function used & as a separator for the key=value pairs, but on one of our test servers, the separator being used was &. This is a php.ini config setting,…

I’ve packaged beta 2 of the next generation version of Twitter Tools. Version 3.0 is a ground-up rewrite on top of the Social platform, with a few features included for backward compatibility. If you’d like to test the beta, grab it from GitHub. This version fixes several bugs that were found in our QA process,…

When using WordPress post formats, you’ll quickly start looking for a way to query WordPress content by the “standard” post format. This Trac ticket seeks to work on solving this. The implementation there handles URL-based requests: http://example.com/type/standard/ quite nicely. However the code in that patch doesn’t (yet) handle direct WP_Query calls. I was hacking on…

I wrote the Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress back in May of 2005. It had a good run, but that run is over. We are no longer developing or supporting Popularity Contest, and I recommend letting it rest peacefully. Why? It does too much, and too little at the same time. It does too much.…

If you’re doing serious development for WordPress you will quickly find yourself in a situation where you need to test a plugin in multiple installations. Using symlinks is a great way to make sure that you don’t end up editing in multiple locations, perhaps forgetting to commit a change, etc. However, there are some headaches…

The inline documentation for wp_publish_post() says that it will: Publish a post by transitioning the post status. and that’s exactly what it does. Moreover, that’s all it does. If you are creating a draft post via wp_insert_post() (or wp_update_post(), which calls wp_insert_post()), certain defaults will be set for you when the post status is set…

For years I’ve used custom fields (post meta) in WordPress as a primary storage area for misc. data about specific posts (including pages, custom post types, etc.). Recently, I’ve realized that I should be using custom taxonomies instead of custom fields in a variety of situations. Custom fields are still the right choice for misc.…

I talked to a number of developers about at this year’s WordCamp SF about where best to publish WordPress code as a developer. We definitely want to use the SVN repositories on WordPress.org so that released plugins can be easily available to the community, but there is very little developer community there. We’ve also used…

My team and I have been working on a plugin to enable a better UI for post formats in the WordPress admin (more on this later, but feel free to grab the code and play with it). One of the things we’ve done is standardize on some custom field names for various bits of data…

If you are customizing the GUID value of a post in WordPress, make sure you maintain the format of the GUID as a valid URL format. There are security checks on the value that enforce the URL format. If you pass in a UUID as the GUID value when creating a post, your value will…

If you hook in to get_the_terms and try to make a get_post_format() call within your callback without first removing your filter, you’re going to get an infinite loop (perhaps a seg fault). Good times!

If you want resulting oEmbed code to scale to a specific size (width) in WordPress, you can do this really easily by setting the $content_width global variable before calling your oEmbed processing. Example: global $wp_embed, $content_width; $content_width = ’600′; // set to desired width $string_with_embedded_content = $wp_embed->autoembed($string_with_oembed_url); I only recently ran across this feature (just…

When you want inject something into the WordPress admin, you might not think to account for pages that load inside lightboxes (plugin updates, media upload, etc.). Generally, you don’t want to add your JS/CSS/etc. to these pages. To check for this type of page load, you can check for the IFRAME_REQUEST constant. View the code…

Cribbed from the WP-Hackers list, the following sample code should give you a good way to test if the current “in the loop” action is within the main loop or a different loop: function main_loop_test($query) { global $wp_the_query; if ($query === $wp_the_query) { echo “main loop”; } } add_action(‘loop_start’, ‘main_loop_test’); Thanks Nacin and Konrad. This…