De nieuwe website voor Nederland Open in Verbinding (NOiV) staat live. Tezamen met het Utrechtse bedrijf Eend heeft Burobjorn de website van NOiV op basis van Wordpress Mu ontwikkeld. Hierbij was Burobjorn verantwoordelijk voor het opzetten van Wordpress Mu inclusief de structuur, het ontwikkelen van op maat-gemaakte functionaliteiten zoals een filter systeem en het omzetten van de door Eend aangeleverde HTML en CSS (conform de Webrichtlijnen) tot Wordpress templates. Het ontwerp van de site is door Maaike de Laat ontworpen.

I just released version 1.0 of bbwp2utf8 plugin on the wordpress plugin directory.

If you have issues with your blog with strange characters appearing due to a MySQL database Character Set not being UTF8 in combination with Wordpress, then this might be the solution for you:

bbwp2utf8 will attempt to convert a wordpress or wordpress mu database with content in whatever character set to utf8. It uses the information provided by this guide on the wordpress codex site.

This solves the issue with weird characters due to UTF8 encoding issues as seen in the screenshot below.

Development for this plugin is made possible by VPRO Digitaal and started after encountering numerous solutions including other plugins and none providing a 100% workable solution. If you need any help with this plugin, do not hesistate to contact me. My company is available for hire

Note: Keep in mind that this plugin has been tested thoroughly for wordpress mu, but only minimaly for wordpress. Please contact me if you encounter any issues with Wordpress, patches are always welcome.

Visit this link http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbwp2utf8/ to download the plugin or to get more detailed info.

Make sure to have a working backup of your wordpress (mu) database before using this plugin!

I’ve been working on a wordpress mu tagging plugin, which will be released under the GPL license . It might seem useless with the upcoming changes in Wordpress MU where tagging will probably become is part of the core, but for those using older versions this might be useful. It’s been tested on WP MU 1.2.1.

I still need to iron out some quirks here and there with the generated documentation and (lack of) usage examples (do I hear templates), but as the saying of free open source software goes: ‘release early, release often’ . So consider this version to be the pre-official release of my Wordpress Mu tagging plugin. If you need any help with this plugin, leave a comment and I’ll try to help you out.

This plugin was made possible by the generous support of VPRO Digitaal.

Download bbMutag, a tagging plugin for WP MU

Ok, the title is a bit long, but hopefully people looking for more information about it will have an easier time finding these notes than if I had used the title: “Installing geek stuff”

More after the jump. (more…)

With the function mkdir() one can create direcotories in php. According to the manual the default permission for the mkdir() function is 0777 (NB: the zero in front means its in octal!) which means read/write and execute permissions for the owner, group and others. So the directory will be wide open. Wrong!

Most of the time – at least in my experience – the umask used on Unix/Linux systems is set to 0022. This means that the mode of the directory will be changed using this umask. This change can be calculated – as far as I understood – using this rule of thumb to calculate the permission of the directory created:

permissions mode - umask = permission of directory created

Or

0777 - 0022 = 0755

So in practice most of the time the directory will be created with the permissions set to 0755. This is kind of confusing when using mkdir() as I would understand that when I set the mode for the creation of a directory would be taking into account the current set umask.

My solution is to create a directory using mkdir() and after the succesful creation I use chmod($created_directory, 0777) to set the permission to whatever I want them to be.

Finally the php developers announced the end of PHP4. This means I can finally start using the features PHP5 offers without having to worry about making it compatible with PHP4. Now, I do hope that with the introduction of PHP6 it will be a lot easier to use two version (ie PHP5 and PHP6) on the same server without resorting to ‘hacks’. Please PHP-dev team keep this in mind!