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

PHP

Dump A MySQL Database To YAML Using PHP

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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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Modify PHP CLI Include Path Dynamically

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I was working with an application platform that I had just downloaded today. I just wanted to check it out and play with it a bit. In the application framework was an executable script that provided some command line utility. I fired up the script and received an error like “PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required…”. Of course non of the files from the downloaded archived were in the include path for my system, but I didn’t want to just go adding it to my php.ini file just to play around with it short term. What to do.

Command Line Options

First I wanted to see if there was a command line option that I could pass to PHP to tell it what include_path to use for just this one execution. If you execute the following you’ll see the usage:
php --help
There is no include_path command line option, but there is the -d foo[=bar] option which allows us to modify any of the INI entries by key/value.

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PHP Init Style Status Message

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Yesterday I talked about created SUCCESS and FAILED status messages in a Bash script (Bash Script Init Style Status Message). Well, on occasion I use PHP for shell/system scripting and of course I thought it would be nice to incorporate my new status messages in those scripts as well. Turns out that it was quite …

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Writing A WordPress Filter To Modify Post/Page Titles

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I was recently working on a new WordPress theme when I had need to modify the title of pages before output. The style I was attempting to use involved wrapping <span> tags around the title (inside of the href tags). The wp_list_pages() function returns pages (which are basically the same as posts) and has several …

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