I code, therefore I am... a software engineer.

Dump A MySQL Database To YAML Using PHP

The Problem

I was recently working on a project that is built on WordPress / BuddyPress. I built up some content using the CMS features of WordPress in my development server and then I transfered the WordPress content to a beta server using the export/import functionality. That kind of stinks having to do that every time I want to push updates to my beta server. So I looked into using Doctrine to generate data fixtures which I could repeatedly run against the different database. Doctrine supports YAML files, which are extremely easy to edit by hand, so it seemed like a good idea.

So what’s the problem? Well, I didn’t currently have any of my data in YAML files. I didn’t want to had edit them or do some sort of copy and paste madness. So, I wrote a script in PHP to dump my data into a YAML file.

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Upgrade Time : WordPress 2.9 and MySQL 5

WordPress 2.9 was release somewhat recently and so like a good WP minion I logged into my site and clicked the update button. Error… uh oh. Apparently WordPress 2.9 requires a more recent version of MySQL (>= 4.1.2). My host installed MySQL 5 ages ago but I’ve never bothered with migrating to the new version because I didn’t have a reason to. Now I do. So here’s how my upgrade went.

First I made a full backup of both the web content and the MySQL database. The MySQL database backup was just a mysqldump command like so:

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How To Manually Merge WordPress Tags

With the advent of “tags” in the WordPress blogging platform there have been several very good plugins introduced which can handle management of your tags. This includes merging tags. Why Would I Want To Merge Tags? One word… duplicates. In my case I created a tag for my Friday Song Of The Day posts. The …

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