Displaying 61 To 77 Of 77 Comments Comment_karma is a remnant. Much like post_category and link_category used to be. The only difference is that, until recently, there was no way to really get rid of it. However, now that we have comment meta system, I expect that the comment_karma field will go away. Probably not in 3.0 since we’re close to feature freeze. But probably in 3.1. It’ll likely be replaced by a comment meta of “karma” or similar. Plugins should start taking advantage of the comment meta now, as many of the comment fields are not really necessary any more and probably won’t live long. » Posted By Otto On February 26, 2010 @ 3:00 PM Also, anything dynamic that you put in an html attribute should be run through esc_attr() first. That will prevent it from having quoting problems and other such things. » Posted By Otto On February 25, 2010 @ 12:25 PM Donate To Plugin Developers Day – March 1st We need a Get a WordPress Developer Drunk day too. “I just spent all my donations on sweet, sweet booze! #GAWDD” :) » Posted By Otto On February 22, 2010 @ 5:26 PM Any plugin that attempted to add something to my footer or to my sidebar or basically anywhere on my front page without asking me first would get instantly deleted, regardless of what it does, regardless of how useful it is. Plugins should *never* add linking content to the front facing part of the site without asking. And IMO, good plugins won’t even have the option to do so. A plugin is not a vehicle for advertising your site. » Posted By Otto On February 23, 2010 @ 1:58 PM Ideally, you should put a message in the header of the PHP file itself that explains the license. This way, the license declaration travels with the file. I add this to the beginning of all my plugin’s PHP files:
Copyright 2010 Samuel Wood (email : otto@ottodestruct.com) This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify You may NOT assume that you can use any other version of the GPL. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, The license for this software can likely be found here: Simple, easy. You don’t really have to include the entire license. Specifying which license is valid and giving probable location is enough. It’s up to the user to find the terms and agree to them to gain the rights specified in the license. » Posted By Otto On February 11, 2010 @ 10:14 AM If you have lots of comments, you be better off paging them instead of disabling gravatars. Gravatar.com is blazingly fast, and while hitting it a lot does hurt performance, having a few hundred comments on a page hurts a lot more. Render time can get very high, very fast, on long pages. » Posted By Otto On February 8, 2010 @ 10:43 AM WordPress Dev Chat For 2-04-10 like_escape is a special function that handles making some of the database queries safe. In SQL, The “LIKE” keyword has special rules and so it needs special handling. If the handling isn’t done totally properly, there’s potential security implications. Problem is that the documentation and spec isn’t totally clear, so correctly implementing it means doing lots of tests and figuring out the rules. » Posted By Otto On February 5, 2010 @ 11:18 AM My Thoughts On WordPress Weekly Tuesday nights are my trivia nights at the bar, although last night I stayed home to watch Lost. Saturday from 1-3 is a decent idea, I think. That’s my badly-hungover time. Can’t speak for others though. ;-) » Posted By Otto On February 3, 2010 @ 1:47 PM Hard legal stance: If you take something from somewhere else and create something new based around that thing, then you have created a “derivative work” and you might be in violation of copyright because of that. Creating derivative works is a right reserved to the original copyright holder. Realistic stance: Technical people like ourselves like hard and fast rules. This is valid, this other thing is invalid. There are lines drawn in the sand, and you are one side or the other. Every question has an answer. Sadly, this makes us terrible at law. Why? Because the law is not black and white. Trying to define any set of hard and fast rules when it comes to legal matters is doomed to ultimate failure, because what is “legal” is really a matter of opinion. And it’s the judge’s opinion that matters. And you don’t know who that judge is in advance. And he may not be fully versed in technical matters. And he might not even believe you when it comes to those technical matters, because somebody else is on the other side of the fence arguing against you, perhaps using what you think are false statements. So there is no hard and fast rule for what is copyright infringement or not, and there never will be. All anybody can do is to give you guidelines. All anybody can do is to tell you what their personal opinion is. That opinion may be backed up by precedents, or it may not, but in the end it’s the judge’s opinion that actually matters, if it ever comes to that. And judges can decide any way they like. So… is taking a small piece of something and building around it copyright infringement? Technically, yes, if you don’t have permission. But, fair use might come into play, giving you an out. Or nobody might ever notice. Or nobody might ever actually care if the work is different enough. There’s no way to predict the future, and there’s no way to really predict the outcome of a trial on the topic. Safest bet is to make it yourself with your own images and code, or to use freely licensed images and code. And if you want to “steal” a large piece of work to mess around with, get permission first. » Posted By Otto On February 1, 2010 @ 3:59 PM Write For People, Not For Spiders I both agree and disagree with this sort of thing. SEO “tricks” are crap. On the other hand, using sensible markup to describe content correctly is not crap, and actually works. Quick example: Often I see people using a series of DIV elements with some class for some common set of things. Like a sidebar, for example. This is bad mojo and should be avoided. Instead, use an unordered list. If you don’t like that it gives you bullet points, you use CSS to turn them off. Markup should be used as a means to describe the types of content it contains, CSS should be used to define the layout and look of that markup, and content-descriptive classes and id’s should be used to connect the two. And yes, this will help your SEO value, tremendously. If you think Google doesn’t pay attention to what is inside header and paragraph tags and such to assign relative importance values, then you’re nuts. » Posted By Otto On January 29, 2010 @ 1:57 PM Core Plugins Are Just An Experiment @Andreas Nurbo – I’m flattered to be included in that list, but haven’t you worked this out yet? I have no real connection to any of those people. Never met ‘em. Hell, I’m basically just making this shit up as I go along here. :) So if you take anything I say without a heaping bowl of salt, then you’re making a serious mistake. I’m just stating what I think, that’s all. I have no idea what other people think unless they have posted it online and I read it. I’m generally pretty good at reading between the lines, but other than that, I know about as much as you do. There’s no inside info here. » Posted By Otto On January 12, 2010 @ 5:34 PM Should WordPress Change The Blog Nomenclature Within The Backend? @David Coveney – I think it’s a bit different when it’s in person, because I always give the same kind of unfiltered opinion when asked IRL too, and people don’t tend to get as annoyed as when I do it online. Maybe it’s because I tend to smile while telling people why they’re wrong (and should be committed into an insane aslyum until such time as they find a cure for idiocy).. Could soften the blow a bit, I suppose. :) » Posted By Otto On November 5, 2009 @ 1:55 PM No, absolutely not. This is a worthless bikeshed issue that just causes argument. It won’t have any actual impact in the real world. If somebody wants to make a translation file with better text, then let them do that first, and we’ll see how much traction it gets among the “it’s a CMS” crowd. My prediction: It won’t get any, because it’s a stupid issue and only stupid people care about it. Yes, I mean you. :-P » Posted By Otto On November 5, 2009 @ 12:37 PM Top 5 WordPress Security Tips You Most Likely Don’t Follow @Luffer – It looks in the root or in one directory above the root. Nowhere else. » Posted By Otto On August 19, 2009 @ 3:10 PM The most common cause of spam injections is being on a poorly configured shared server. Some other site on the server gets hacked, the hacker runs a script on the server that searches for and auto-hacks anything it can find, done. A properly secured shared server won’t have this problem. Hacking one site on the server will not give the person access to the whole of the server. A server that uses suPHP is a good first step towards this. So, my advice would be to find a webhost that actually knows what they’re doing when it comes to security. Oddly enough, one that I’ve found happens to be GoDaddy. Their shared web servers may be slow and overloaded, but they are indeed secure. I guess when you stick 3k users onto a box, you have a sudden need for real security. ;) » Posted By Otto On July 1, 2009 @ 9:34 AM New User Features in WordPress 2.8 Actually, for the GMT ones in the dropdown, it is indeed using the same PHP5+ adjustment code as the rest of it, using the deprecated “Etc/GMT+whatever” zones. The reason we left it in there is that it’s possible to envision an edge case where somebody gets all ticked that they can’t specify a timezone manually. However, because the timezonedb built into PHP uses GMT +/- in the opposite way everybody else uses them (GMT+3 instead of GMT-3, for example), the signs get reversed for display purposes, so as to not cause user confusion. So if you choose GMT+5, you’ll get what you expect. The only difference with these is that they don’t account for daylight savings. The rest should, more or less (this depends on how up-to-date your PHP version is.. The Olson timezonedb file does get updated from time to time, and you’d have to keep your server up to date to get those adjustments). The code running the new timezone functionality is not substantially different than my Automatic Timezone plugin was. Indeed, I stole a large chunk of the code directly from it for the patch. :) » Posted By Otto On June 22, 2009 @ 11:51 AM I think that the actual *need* for the ID’s needs to be removed. Any code that needs an ID but doesn’t have some other equivalent that can be used (like, say, slug) needs to be examined and perhaps a new function should be written to use that information instead. » Posted By Otto On June 28, 2009 @ 11:46 PMComments Posted By Otto
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