PostgreSQL support via plugin

PostgreSQL support comes as a drop-in plugin rather than a core feature: we like to keep YOURLS core light and let people add features only if they need it. This plugin intercepts database queries at runtime and translates MySQL to PostgreSQL syntax on the fly – backtick quoting, AUTO_INCREMENT ? SERIAL, RAND() ? RANDOM(), and so on. Obviously this is all transparent to the user and the application.

What will work, what won't

Everything core does, ie shortening URLs, tracking clicks, letting you add or edit short URLs, will work. The vast majority of existing YOURLS plugins will work. The drop-in plugin sits at the database layer and catches everything that flows through it.

To make sure everything core works perfectly, I've made sure YOURLS passes all its unit tests with the PostgreSQL plugin activated, under 3 latest versions of PostgreSQL and latest PHP. This will be easy to check with all future YOURLS releases.

The edge cases would be plugins that execute raw MySQL-flavored SQL directly, bypassing YOURLS' own database methods, won't be translated. I haven't encountered such plugin in the wild but if you have made custom query code, that would be something to fix.

Requirements

You'll need YOURLS 1.10.4, which is coming soon-ish or the current master branch (which is always stable and passing all unit tests). Drop in the plugin, configure your PostgreSQL DSN, and you're good to go. There is even a migration script to transfer everything from MySQL (or MariaDB) to PostgreSQL.

If you've been waiting for this – and I know some of you have been waiting for a long time – it's finally here :)

Your typical Be'Lakor song: enough parts and melodies to make 5 different songs, yet all united in one harmonious masterpiece. I *LOVE* Be'Lakor.

In the meantime, here are my slides (in French) :

Plain old downloadable PDF: WordPress Plugin Unit Tests, or Slideshare stuff below.

The demo plugin and all its tests are on Github: ozh/plugin-unit-test-demo.

WordPress 4.2 Roadmap Wish: update those ugly smilies that have not changed since, wait for it, EVER (for real)

— Ozh Richard (@ozh) December 19, 2014

In my opinion those smileys are super outdated (they haven't changed since the very beginning of WordPress which, in internet times, is the equivalent of Pleistocene) and they suck for three reasons:

• they're ugly. Did I already mention that? :)
• they're too old to live on retina screens
• it's very inefficient to load one image for each and every emoticon, as Julio points out

Over the years a few people have proposed alternatives for core but this is unlikely to happen, as very nicely summed up by WP Tavern. You can find several alternative as plugins, like New Smileys, but they're just another batch of images.

In the short discussion my tweet sparked, Greg pointed me to his way of doing it and I thought it was wonderful: 100% CSS, no image loaded, ideally tuned and adapted for his theme.

https://twitter.com/ScreenFeedFr/status/546148719092314113

A coffee break later*, here is a sample plugin that replaces your smilies with pure and simple HTML markup that you can then easily style: Ozh' CSS Smilies. Hooo those super annoying cute animated little ghosts!

The plugin is just meant to be a start for those who'll want to style their own smilies. Feel free to use and modify to match your theme!

* yeah right. I took me like 90 minutes just to get that half ugly CSS working :/

So, I made this simple banner template as a Photoshop PSD file. Nothing genius but feel free to use. No excuse not to add some fancy eye candy to your best plugins!

1. Outdated stuff that are no longer maintained because I don't need them anymore
2. Simple stuff that don't require any maintenance because they just work and will probably work forever
3. Stuff that are still maintained because I still need them

That third group recently motivated me to move some plugins to Github so their dev will now happen there.

It was recently brought to my knowledge that my most popular plugin, Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu, causes 404 on dumb dashicons requests. That shall be fixed.

So. Anyone fancying a pull request and fix that now? :)

Four years ago to address this problem I made yet-another-Twitter-to-WordPress plugin, creatively named Ozh' Tweet Archiver.

Two years ago Twitter broke my plugin with their new API, requiring OAuth for every request, including reading public tweets. Fixing it has been since on my todo list but, hey, you know.

Two weeks ago @EHER sent me preliminary code to fix things, just what I needed as a motivation to fix things.

Two days ago I published version 2.0 of my super cool Tweet Archiver plugin. Fixed, dramatically improved, with new features. w00t.

TL;DR: from @ozh to planetozh.com/tweets with WordPress, #yay.

Go get it, install it, you'll love it. Or, as usual, 120% refunded!

What's wrong with PHP 5.2?

Nothing much, except PHP 5.2 was released in November 2006, and was maintained and developed till January 2011. This means that it's now considered an old release, rusty dusty code that's no longer improved, and should a new vulnerability be discovered in the 5.2 branch, it will remain unfixed.

In short: it's *old*. Any PHP library you'll find these days requires 5.3+.

Old but still everywhere ?

According to W3Techs, 33% of websites running PHP are on 5.2. That's a lot, but wait, there's worse.

According to WordPress, more than 50% of WordPress-powered sites are still on 5.2. Earlier this week @dd32 made a pretty graph showing that PHP 5.2's share is only slowly decreasing.

So what?

Dropping a platform running half of your user base would be crazy, right? For sure. Except I think the numbers are somewhat skewed.

As you may know, my pet project is a self-hosted URL shortener, YOURLS, which was released in its version 1.7 earlier this month. This new version comes with a phone-home feature to report the same kind of stats that WordPress is aggregating from its users, and particularly what PHP version YOURLS is installed on.

Of course, the YOURLS user base is nowhere near as important in volume as WordPress' market, but I think the average user is similar, so YOURLS figures should be relevant in some way.

What I've learned since the release of YOURLS 1.7 came as a surprise: I was expecting a similar share to what WordPress reports, but it turns out only 10% of YOURLS installs are running on PHP 5.2

What did I conclude from all this?

1. Old installs vs new installs

WordPress is old, it's been around for 10 years. The typical WordPress user installed WP 4 or 5 years ago, when 5.2 was still the standard.

YOURLS is much younger, it's been around for 4 years, but the project sort of picked up 3 years ago with YOURLS 1.5, released in November 2010. The typical YOURLS user installed YOURLS 1 year ago, when the default hosting setting on most host was PHP 5.3 or more.

I think that's the key of the skewed numbers : simply too many WordPress installs were around when PHP 5.2 was the default, and those users just did not upgrade their hosting. Well, why would they, it just works fine.

That would be exhibit A : newer users are on 5.3+, older are still on 5.2.

2. Deeper digging: who's running PHP 5.2?

Most host, if not all, still offer 5.2, even if you open an account today, but I could not find any which does not support 5.3+. All the major hosts (Dreamhost, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc…) have 5.3 by default.

And if there is a minor host where PHP 5.2 is the best you can have, then what's the point with signing with a smaller and lesser known company if they cannot provider better services than big ones?

Exhibit B: hosts can give you 5.3+

3. WordPress should lead

And that will be exhibit C: WordPress has the power.

WordPress runs on 20% of all websites in the world. That's huge. Moreover, it apparently has 60% of the CMS market, which is also very impressive.

Few organizations in the world have the power to say "we're moving to a newer version of PHP" and have a global impact ; WordPress is one of them.

With such an influence, WordPress should even go a step further and pro-actively announce end of support for PHP version and follow PHP's 3 year release process, instead of simply watching user adoption. PHP 5.3 will be maintained till July 2014, PHP 5.4 will be maintained till March 2015: I think WordPress should announce the same minimal requirement changes.

TL;DR

The day WordPress says "we require PHP 5.3", the whole web which is still running 5.2 switches to 5.3. Simple as that.