Category: php

WordPress 6.3 is incompatible with older versions of PHP

After installing WordPress 6.3, this site was broken because the new version of WordPress isn’t compatible with PHP 5.x.

I know WordPress has been complaining about this for a while, but PHP 5.x is the default version on CentOS 7, which is still supported until June 30, 2024.

I would expect that WordPress would, instead of encouraging the users on systems with old versions of PHP to apply the update, warn that applying the update will absolutely break the target website.

I’m exceedingly annoyed at WordPress. An absolutely terrible experience.

I currently have the site running on a temporary server that is a little fragile, it remains to be seen how stable it will be over the coming days.

Finally got GD working with PHP under osX

Since time immemorial, I have been having problems with the php installation that came on my powerbook, striving and straining to get any new modules installed, to make it work in the ways that even the most simpleminded linux install does out of the box, generally frustrated with it. Currently I have two for pay projects that require me to use the GD library, so I broke down and really attacked it today. After about three tries, I finally got something working… specifically I used the entropy install of php, and got it to actually work by converting apache2 from a fat file to a 32 bit only binary based on the instructions from the same site. These instructions were NOT easy to find, and several google searches didn’t turn them up at any point. I only found them after reading of the trials and tribulations that the blogger at #| had with the same problem.
The good news is that it’s done now, and I’m happy.

Selecting the newest row in one-to-many on mySQL

This one was quite a sticky wicket. So what if you have two tables in mySQL, with a one-to-many relationship (say a forum and comments in that forum), and each of the comments is dated. Now let’s say you want a result set containing each forum’s name, and with it the text of the newest comment in that forum.

The obvious way to do this is with a subselect, which mySQL doesn’t have. So how does one do it?

At first I thought that it might be impossible, but I have figured out the answer:

SELECT f.forum_id,
       max(c.created_on) as last_date,
       c2.created_on as created_on,
       c2.text
FROM   forum f
       LEFT JOIN comment c ON (c.forum_id = f.forum_id)
       LEFT JOIN comment c2 ON (f.forum_id = c2.forum_id) 
GROUP BY f.forum_id, c2.comment_id
HAVING created_on = last_date OR last_date IS NULL;

See, it’s pretty clever actually, though it leans on the “HAVING” option, which is sort of crappy. The trick is to join the comment table with the forum table twice. One of those joins gets grouped by forum id so that you can use the max function on it. The other doesn’t get grouped (by adding its primary key to the group by clause) so that you can still pull data out of it. Then you use the having clause to find only the row that has the max date.

I am also accepting values with a max value of NULL so that if a forum has no comments, it still comes back in the results.

Hope this helps someone, somewhere.
Happy Hacking

New Project, New Codebase, Urgent Timeline

I landed a new project about 5 days ago, and it had a 21 day timeline when I landed it. I’m the only developer on this project, but I do have a designer and, I’m going to recruit a tester as well. The money looks good for it, and the “client” is actually _another_ project manager who sits between us and the actual client. You may have remembered me bitching a lot about my last project (which turned into a horror show)

The idea is that I have walked away with several lessons from that, and that this project will be shorter and more lucrative (both!) as well as more fun to work on. I’m pretty happy with it so far, having finally found a place where inheritance was _really_ useful in site, rather than something I just sort of forced things to use for no good reason (other than a desire to be programming OO)

The codebase I inherited was, for a wonder, not a train-wreck (something that I was getting really sick of) Though I can see why they pulled the previous developer, based on timeline. (I would say he was about 10% done at the halfway mark on the schedual.) He does a lot of things diffrently from the way I would do them, but I can (almost) always repect his design choices while disagreeing.

I also got a chance to write a cool little 3 line javascript “form extender”. I have done this before in _much_ more complmicated ways, but I think I finally figured out the trick to it. Hopefully I will post a how-to as another post soon.

Weird little MySQL error.

So I just moved some code onto a new server, and I’m suddenly getting the warning:

mysql_query(): 14 is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in <bla bla bal> on line 47

A few other people seem to have gotten this error, but no one has posted a solution. (though one guy oh-so-annoyingly posted “I figured it out, so never mind” … Grrr. I mean, if you’re going to post a question, the answer should be in that thread if you ever figure it out….

So as soon as I figure out the answer I’m going to post it here.

I’m back with the solution:

I got clued onto it from this page: http://bytes.com/forum/thread638479.html . The error is coming because mysql_close was being called by the destructor, and because I was in safe mode the same MySQL resource was being used for each instance. What threw me even more though was that the destructor was being called at all, because I thought I only _had_ one instance. Turns out that there is a spot in my code where I (accidentaly) passed my DB object by value rather than refrence. This made a new copy of the object, which ran mysql_connect again, because it was in safe mode it returened the _same_ refrence. Then the object got unloaded, the destructor ran and closed the refrence, even though there was another instance of the object out there still using the same refrence.

Icky!

The __ function in PHP

Recently I bumped into a function I wasn’t familiar with in PHP, It looked like the app I was working in was wrapping just about every constant that they used in the __ function. (Yes, that is two underscores.)

It turns out that this is actually an abbreviation for the gettext function, which is for allowing your application to support multiple languages. I think that this is a very clean way to support multiple languages (though admittedly, I haven’t read it very carefully yet), but I really do think that a better function abriviation could have been chosen. Oh, well, I suppose you learn something new every day.

Tottling around CakePHP

My research into CakePHP has, up to this point has been pretty positive. It seems to address most of the big issues I have had with other frameworks, and the code and tutorials all look good.

Because it was looking so good, I decided that I would go ahead and give it a whirl on an actual live project. I chose one that was small and urgent. (The urgent part may not have been wise, since for me personally cake is still unproven, but it seemed like a good fit) and I have been pounding out code for it since then.

So far I’m pretty happy with it, the code virtually never makes me cry, though I run into a lot of road-bumps almost all of them seem to be learning curve issues, and I haven’t actually gotten stuck on anything yet, just briefly derailed occasionally.

The Bake application that comes with cake, which is a small php script that lets you generate starting PHP code is really great for me, because it does cover a lot of gruntwork in a snap, though sometimes it crashes when I’m trying to generate specific models, but it’s probably good, for learning purposes, that I’m forced to write the occasional one by hand.

At the moment I still strongly prefer the smarty template engine to the way views are handled in cake, but the two are not incompatible, and it also may be just a case of me being set in my ways. Perhaps when I really get to know the helper functions a bit better I will be happier with this aspect of cake.

Oh, and the one thing that has caused me the most trouble so far is singular vs plural names. For some reason bake messes up the pluralizations when it is generating the rules for many to many models, and I don’t seem to have a feel for what should be singular and what should be plural.

Still, even with all the bitching I’m doing, I’m really happy with cake. I would say that development using it is going about on schedule, which is pretty good for the first time with a framework, and I feel like it is going to save me a lot of pain at the end with debugging and maintainability.

strike one against cakePHP

So I’m looking into the cakePHP framework, because, well why not. (for those not in the know cake is to php as rails is to ruby) Install is quite painless, but I’m still in the documentation, and I have already bumped into something that makes me cringe. The naming conventions require some classes to be singular, and some to be plural, and there is automatic translation between the the two. (I.E. you don’t declare where the singular class should look for the plural one, it just appends an s and goes to look for it) I’m sure some of you know that English is just not that regular a language.

This of course means there has to be a way to add exceptions

Cake’s naming conventions can be really nice – you can name your database table big_boxes, your model BigBox, your controller BigBoxesController, and everything just works together automatically. The way CakePHP knows how to tie things together is by inflecting the words between their singular and plural forms.

There are occasions (especially for our non-English speaking friends) where you may run into situations where CakePHP’s inflector (the class that pluralizes, singularizes, camelCases, and under_scores) might not work as you’d like. If CakePHP won’t recognize your Foci or Fish, editing the custom inflections configuration file is where you can tell CakePHP about your special cases. This file is found in /app/config/inflections.php.

In this file, you will find six variables. Each allows you to fine-tune CakePHP inflection behavior.

Ugg!! I can just imagine getting caught by this one as part of a learning curve and walking away from the whole damn framework because of it. But I guess this is one open manhole cover that I managed not to fall into.

Built a Tiny Module for phpShop

So I built a tiny new module for phpShop, for one of my clients. Honestly It would have been easier to just slap the code into an already present module, but I wanted to see what it was like to add one from scratch. It was pretty painless, though the permission structure is a little weird in some ways. (I’ll go into it in more detail if anyone is curious)

Really the only thing that caught me off guard with adding a new module, was that you need to register it, and any new functions that it supports in the database. (shockingly in the module and function table respectively) Other than that you basically just write the damn things. Pretty clean and easy.