I’ve implemented a neat feature on the front page of my other website: it calculates how long Julia and I have been married. Rather than this being one of those items I will certainly forget to update in the future, it uses a shortcode in the regular page text to calculate this value. The WordPress … Read more
I’ve built my very own shortcode in WordPress for the first time. Quite the adventure! It’s a very convenient and powerful way to call a function without resorting to writing code while you’re writing text. I needed to echo some text that would rely on something dynamic I wrote in PHP. In my post, all … Read more
We can access parameters passed via the command line in our PHP shell scripts. Those are stored as an array in the variable $argv. Consider this: #!/usr/bin/php
You may need to know which of your themes are child themes, or in fact if the current theme you’re using is a parent or a child theme. Here’s how you can test both options. The following code snippet will iterate through all themes that are currently installed and displays the title and if it … Read more
Handy Cheat Sheet for PHP File Operations – thanks to @davidwalshblog
One of my clients wanted to run a web application that required MySQL 5.5 instead of the default MySQL 5.1 that ships with Plesk at the time of writing. He needed it due to the better handling of UTF8 characters. I struggled to find clear instructions on how to do this – so here they … Read more
Did you know that you can run PHP directly from the command line? Here’s how: Running a command Let’s run a one-liner and see the output displayed in our console. We’ll use phpinfo() because we know it should generate a lot of text. We need to start our line with php, use the -r switch … Read more
The path to PHP is /usr/bin/php This is good to know if you need to setup a cron job which triggers a PHP file. Calling it from a web browser directly is not a problem, but if you have to call it from the command line or as a scheduled task you need to call … Read more
