Archives for June 2004

I just got my first attempted comment spam since moving to WordPress. I was hoping I could go without implementing a CAPTCHA, but that may just be wishful thinking. This comment spam was caught by WordPress because of the number of links it contained (I have WordPress set to hold on queue any comments with 5 or more hyperkinks), but spammers may become warry of this restriction and start limiting the number of hyperlinks placed in spam comments.

When I get back home, I’ll start working on a CAPTCHA plugin for WordPress. It’ll likely require modifying a line or two of a WordPress file, but I’ll do my best to keep it as simple as possible.

As more and more people switch over to WordPress, they are wanting some of the features they enjoyed when using Movable Type. Rest assured, there are people working overtime writing plugins. I’ve just now installed a “Subscribe to Comments” plugin by Jenn from ScriptyGoddess (which is in beta right now… keep your shirt on), and I just wrote up an article over there about how to do Show/Hide Comments.

The whole thing is quite lengthy, as I went into detail as to what code you should change, but for people who have a stronger understanding of PHP, I can give you the short version.

Basically, we’re going to harness a variable, $withcomments, that is used as a switch for RSS feeds. It really isn’t used in your main templates, but it suits our purposes here. Since your entire wp-comments.php file is wrapped in an if($single || $withcomments){ conditional, all you have to do is go in and separate code chunks into the stuff that should be shown on an $single page, and the stuff that should be shown on a $withcomments page (dropdown comments, that is.) Any code chunks that should be in both, leave alone.

What you need to do in your index.php template (besides making the links to expand the comments), is set up code near the top that will designate certain types of pages as $withcomments. The simplest form would be this:

if(!$single){
$withcomments = TRUE;
}

So every page that isn’t $single will be $withcomments. As you can imagine, you can get much more complex if you like. This was merely an overview of the basic approach. Maybe you’d better just go read the whole thing.

As much as I love the dynamic nature of WordPress, sometimes dynamic is not the best way to go. Take for instance, my “recent entries” section (currently at the top left). This was being done by using Nick Momrick’s Recent Posts plugin (with some slight modification as to the way it is output). But this was being done dynamically every time someone loaded a page. Each time it had to connect to the database and pull out the list of recent entries. I’m not posting once every 5 minutes here, so I didn’t see any need for this data to be dynamic.

Good thing WordPress has a great new plugin API. It is insanely easy to create a plugin that is only executed when a post is published, edited, or deleted. So all I did was make a plugin that writes to a file the list of the 20 most recent entries every time I publish, edit, or delete a post. It happens in a heartbeat, and I cut the number of database queries I was making on my main page from 50 down to 29. Now, I just include the static text file that is dynamically updated. Remember dynamic and static aren’t meant to be exclusive. Sometimes it makes sense to cache things statically, and sometimes it makes sense to pull it dynamically from the database.

Here’s the code I am using. I just edited Nick’s plugin to suit my needs. I did it this way because if you have a plugin that calls another plugin, you have to make sure that one is defined before the other.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Recent Posts Static
Version: 1.0
Plugin URI: http://wiki.wordpress.org/index.php/Recent%20Posts
Description: This will return titles of the most recent posts with a permalink to the actual post itself<br /><br />The default options will display the 5 most recent posts
Author: Nick Momrik and Mark Jaquith
Author URI: http://mtdewvirus.com/
*/

function get_recent_posts($no_posts = 5, $before = '<li>', $after = '</li>', $show_pass_post = false, $skip_posts = 0) {
    global $wpdb, $tableposts;
    $request = "SELECT ID, post_title, DATE_FORMAT(post_date, '%b %d') AS post_date2 FROM $tableposts WHERE post_status = 'publish' ";
        if(!$show_pass_post) { $request .= "AND post_password ='' "; }
    $request .= "ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT $skip_posts, $no_posts";
    $posts = $wpdb->get_results($request);
    $output = '';
    if ($posts){
    foreach ($posts as $post) {
        $post_title = stripslashes($post->post_title);
        $permalink = get_permalink($post->ID);
        $post_date = stripslashes($post->post_date2);
        $output .= $before . '<span class="entrydate">' . $post_date . '</span> <a href="' . $permalink . '" rel="bookmark" title="Entry: ' . $post_title . '">' . $post_title . '</a>' . $after;
    }
    }
    return $output; // return it, so we can save the output to a file
}

// function to save the recent entries list as a file by Mark Jaquith
function wp_static_recent_entries(){
$filename = '/home/txfx/www/www/includes/wp_recent_entries.txt';
$fp = fopen($filename, "w");
$string = get_recent_posts(20);
fputs($fp, $string);
fclose($fp);
}

add_action('publish_post','wp_static_recent_entries',9);
add_action('edit_post','wp_static_recent_entries',9);
add_action('delete_post','wp_static_recent_entries',9);

?>

You’ll want to modify the output to suit your tastes… as you can see I have the entry date shown alongside the link… but this should be enough to set you on the right path toward creating dynamically updated static data chunks.