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PHP Code Get Most Recent WordPress Post

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:25:32 +0000

PHP Code Get Most Recent WordPress Post

This is a quick example using only vanilla PHP. There are more dynamic ways to do this using RSS classes built into PHP addons, which I won’t go into detail here. Instead, we will just use vanilla PHP, and parse the XML by hand.

On to the code, I take 3 arguments here, number of posts to return, the RSS URL, and an optional max number of characters to return.

^?View Code PHP

//get most recent rss
//get most recent rss
function recent_rss($display=0,$url='', $description_limit = 0) {
	$itemArr = array();
    $doc = new DOMDocument();
    $doc->load($url);
 
    foreach ($doc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
        if ($display == 0) {
            break;
        }
 
    $description = $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue;
 
    //if limit passed in, truncate string
    if($description_limit > 0) {
		$description = substr($description, 0, $description_limit)."..."; 	
	}
 
        $itemRSS = array (
            'title'       => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
            'description' => $description,
            'link'        => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
            'pubdate'     => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue
        );
 
         array_push($itemArr, $itemRSS);
 
        $display--;
    }
    return $itemArr;
}
 
//example use
$recent_post = recent_rss(1, 'http://houseplansblog.nelsondesigngroup.com/index.php/feed/', 0);
var_dump($recent_post);

Now, Here is a quick and dirty XHTML example showing how you might implement this on a page. (Note the use of the preg_replace to get rid of weird characters that get into the RSS sometimes)

^?View Code PHP

<div id="rss_container" style="width:250px;">
 
	<div id="rss_title">
		<a href=''>
			 echo  preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $recent_post[0]["title"]);?>
		a>
	div>
 
	<div id="rss_pub_date">
		 echo $recent_post[0]["pubdate"];?>
	div>
 
	<div id="rss_description">
		 echo $recent_post[0]["description"];?>
	div>
 
div>

New fluid, near image-less WordPress theme for CCM

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:34:57 +0000

First Draft
I thought it would be neat to explain my thought process and show my progress as I went through creating the new CCM theme. I knew I wanted to make the theme have a console feel to it, but still be modern. I am NOT a designer, but I tried ;(.Things I knew from the start, I wanted to use ASCII art, I wanted MINIMAL graphics, and I wanted a fluid layout.

Second Draft
Sample data is in, I have a twitter feed pulled in the top, and I am getting the CSS set in place to be able to modify all the links and hx tags.

Third Draft
I felt like the solid green color was too.. well.. too terminal. Too much green.. I wanted to have a little bit of color. I tried an orange…

Fourth Draft
I tried more colors.. I just threw everything I had on there and went to ask @steventrotter what insight he could give me into choosing some colors that worked with what I wanted.

Fifth Draft
This is where I got my first thought of layering a low 5-10% transparent color on top of the 70-80% transparent black that I was using.. You can see this on the comments background. Still have a long way to go here….

Sixth Draft
I was beginning to mellow out the colors a little more…. I felt like this is where I started to move in the right direction.. but I just wasn’t quite there yet.

Final Draft
This was where I really felt like I took the colors in the right direction, and I also used the layered transparent PNG files to their fullest here.

Beta
Added the footer in, cleaned up the markup, added a few links here and there… tested live on the blog and fixed a few things. I really like the look at this point and am happy enough with it to replace the old theme.

Beyond Beta
This turned out great so far.. it is really fluid.. scales out really well, it only has one real image (the background) and 5 or so 10x10px transparent png files. It loads quickly, it looks good for something a programmer made, more importantly it was what I WANTED it to be.

I need to look at adding a few extras in, blockquotes, and changing up some of the hx tags. I also see it breaks when you make it too small.. though it does scale out really well.

First Draft	Second Draft	Third Draft
Fourth Draft	Fifth Draft	Final Draft	RC1

ie6 non-secured elements on thickbox modal window

admin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:58:43 +0000

I recently had a chance to use thickbox, and I have to say it did exactly what I need to do: created a modal window with jquery and make a simple ajax call. I spent quite a bit of time trying to track down why ie6 was giving a security warning when pulling in ajax content. I had all the links relative.

I decided to give fiddler a try, and as I thought, I was not making a single non-https request. Everything was on 443.

After testing and retesting and checking code, I finally got the right google query in and came to this lovely page:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WICKET-855

The really important part of the whole page was this little section:

Internet Explorer shows this warning because ModalWindow uses an tag without an ‘src=’ attribute.

So, I went out to the thickbox javascript code, and did a search for

This was such a hassle that I hope anyone else looking around for this problem finds this page.

mod_rewrite to move one domain to another

admin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:07:52 +0000

There may come a day when you need to move one domain’s content to another. This can easily be done with a little mod rewrite trickery in apache.

Note the ^/ on the RewriteRule line, I have that because my server automatically adds the trailing slash, and if I don’t put this it will add two slashes on the rewrite. This just says, take everything after the first slash. If your server dosen’t do this, then you can omit the / and make it like: RewriteRule ^(.*).

^?View Code LANGUAGE

1 2	RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301]

Mod_Rewrite Canonicalization Avoids Duplicate Content

admin — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 23:42:32 +0000

Apache’s mod_rewrite has been the bane of many. I think it is mostly the use of regular expressions that is the bane of many instead, but you get the idea.

I want you to take a look at the following URLS:

domain.com
domain.com/
www.domain.com/
www.domain.com
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com/index.html

Do they all look the same to you? Well they are not the same to big G. In fact, big G may just decide that you have duplicate content because it can see content on domain.com and domain.com/.

Now I don’t want to get into the dub dub dub vs non dub dub dub (also titled The Great Dub Dub Dub Debate by Jeff Atwood).

But what I will tell you is to pick one, and stick to it.

I found a great set of examples and want to pass them along, I have the basic gist of everything listed below, if this link ever goes down, but It is also worth reading the rest of the info on the page as well.

You can find the examples here:

^?View Code HTML

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
 
### re-direct index.html to root / ###
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
 
### re-direct index.htm to root / ###
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.htm$ /$1 [R=301,L]
 
### re-direct index.php to root / ###
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]
 
### re-direct default.html to root / ###
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/default\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)default\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
 
### re-direct home.html to root / ###
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/home\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)home\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
 
### re-direct IP address to www
 
### re-direct non-www to www
 
### re-direct any parked domain to www of main domain
RewriteCond %{http_host} !^www.example.com$ [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc,L]
####
 
############################ from here ########################################
 
###### This group will not be needed by most websites - try without it first
### add a missing trailing slash to end of domain name or folder name
### ONLY in case the server does not compensate for it
### ONLY use it if needed - othewise remove this block of directives.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1/ [L,R=301]
 
############################# to here ##########################################