Creating and reading Excel spreadsheets
If you've ever needed to automatically read or generate Excel spreadsheets in PHP, there's a fantastic library called PHPExcel which will help you with these tasks. It supports Excel 2007…
WordPress 3.0.4 released
WordPress 3.0.4 has been released today and contains an important security update. Everyone is strongly advised to upgrade as soon as possible. More information about the vulnerability can be found…
PHP Akismet library
I've recently released a PHP library for Akismet, the comment spam detection service. There's already a plugin available for WordPress, but the integration is so tight that you can't easily…
Twenty character limit on WordPress custom post types
456 Berea Street has a new post on the fact that names of WordPress custom post types must be no longer than 20 characters, which may be useful to advanced…
WordPress stuck in maintenance mode
Earlier this afternoon, I attempted to upgrade one of my WordPress blogs using the automated option, rather than copying all the files across manually (my usual approach). After about five…
MySQL named locks
Until recently, I've only run PHP sites on single host setups, which has kept things reasonably simple. However, I've moved one project to a load balanced solution, which randomly sends…
WordPress end of life for PHP 4 and MySQL 4
The WordPress developers have announced that PHP 4 and MySQL 4 will no longer be supported as of WordPress 3.1, due for release later this year. Part of me is…
Updated PHP Coding Guidelines
Several years ago, I wrote an article entitled PHP Coding Guidelines for evolt. It received a reasonable number of comments and positive feedback, and was my first foray into the…
Hello World
It's customary to begin programming with an example which prints 'Hello World', so I thought I'd do the same with this blog: <?php echo 'Hello World'; ?>
Special characters in passwords
Recently I moved our website at work from one hosting provider to another. As we have several instances of the site (testing, demo, live etc.), each with their own separate…