Ahh the joys of 11/11/11

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So over the past couple years I have seen the number 11 everywhere all the time. 11:11 on my phone, on my computer. It seems like very time I look at a clock I will see that number. So my girlfriend jokes that she does not want me to do, or go any where on 11/11/11 as we think something might happen to me. So I did expect something to happen today.

Thank god so far nothing has happened to me be, but, server did go down today for Mojo Themes. And we have discovered that we will be switching our hosting provider.

I have never liked VPS.net in the first place but their lack of response, which is only via email ( no phone number available ), has been the last straw. Good bye terrible customer service.

We’ll release more info about our new services. But right now our major goal is to just get the site back up and running.

Adding code to the head tag in WordPress

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When you want to add code into the head tag of a WordPress blog the best way of doing so, especially if you are a theme builder, is to use the add_action() function that WordPress provides.

Actions are there to allow you to attach functions or classes to a specific part of WordPress’ output. So when you are coding in the functions.php file you can create a function that will output a meta tag into your head without going into the template files and manually adding this.

This is perfect for when you are developing a WordPress theme for sale.

We start with the add_action() function and use the value of ‘wp_head’:

add_action ( 'wp_head', 'my_custom_function_name' );

The first value of ‘wp_head’ is the name of the WordPress action we want to attach a function to. The second value ‘my_custom_function_name’ is the name of the function we are creating to output code.

Below is the function we will be using to insert a meta tag into our head tag.

function my_custom_function_name()
{
    echo '<meta name="author" value="Will Ayers">';
}

And there you have it. The author meta tag will now show up in your head tag as long as the theme has the function wp_head() inside the head tag.

PHP arrays to Javascript

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How do you get a php array into a javascript array/object? You use json! Below is a simple way of doing so.

Here is our php array.

$player = array( 'id' => 24, 'first_name' => 'kobe', 'last_name' => 'Bryant' );

Here is how we turn it into a json string.

$json_string = json_encode ( $player );

Now when grabbing that string with javascript you can simply call the JSON.parse method like so.

var player = JSON.parse ( my_php_encoded_json_string );

You can now access that php array in javascript by either array or object.

player.first_name; // Kobe
player['last_name']; // Bryant

WordPress: Get Url Of Featured Image

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There is a very easy way to display the featured image of a post or custom post type, but what about getting just the url? Had some trouble finding any documentation about finding a solution to this. Then I came across some code that worked for me. Here is what I got to work.

In this example I am echoing out the url to the screen. This will actually return an array. See Edit #1 below.

<?php echo wp_get_attachment_image_src ( get_post_thumbnail_id ( $post_id ), 'single-post-thumbnail' ) ?>

EDIT #1

The above code was wrong where it was echoing out the result. It actually returns an array. So below is the how to get the url:

$image = wp_get_attachment_image_src ( get_post_thumbnail_id ( $post_id ), 'single-post-thumbnail' );
echo $image[0];

WordPress: Attaching a function after a comment is saved.

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I had previously been trying to attach a function to a filter called “comment_pre_save”. Below is the solution I found.

I needed to add an entry into a table in the db everytime someone added a comment. I tried running "comment_pre_save" filter to no avail. I did some more research today ( as it was around 4:30 am when I originally set out to solve this ) and found another filter that works perfectly. "comment_post".

I don’t know how I missed this but I am glad I found it. Here is an example of how to get a function called when someone posts a comment.

add_filter ( 'comment_post', 'new_comment_added' );
function new_comment_added(){ die ( 'You just added a comment.' );}

I did a simple die command to let me know that it was working.

WordPress Comment Save Filter

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Since I can not sleep tonight, I am working on a project in WordPress. I am attempting to add a filter or a hook to attach some code to run when a comment is saved to the database. I have searched through WordPress’s codex and have found a filter called “comment_pre_save”.

WordPress does not have any documentation on this filter so I am left in the dark on this one. We will see how this goes. I will post a solution if when I find one.

Update #1:

I have found a solution to this here.