I came across a bug today where despite the fact the Reading settings were set to the latest posts, that the Front Page setting was still affecting the menu structure of wordpress.

Notice in the following images that “About” page is absent from the breadcrumbs, and is marked as excluded from the navigation.

The fix is simple. Just update the Front Page setting to the empty option and the menu correct hierarchy is restored.

I came across a bug in an rails app I wrote today. This thing was driving me crazy. I was generating a random 10 digit number for my model, however about one-third of the time in production the number was getting set to the same thing, 2147483647.

I wrote some specs but couldn’t reproduce the behavior. I was pretty frustrated. I logged into the server and went into the console to test it out, and it was failing. I’d update the number, save it, reload the instance and there to my dismay was the haunting 2147483647.

What was it? Locally I was using sqlite to run the test, while on the server I was using mysql. 2147483647 is the largest 32bit signed integer. I was overflowing the column, however mysql was silently accepting the larger number, and truncating it to 2147483647.

I would have assumed that trying to set a value greater than available would have raised an exception. Sadly, this wasn’t the first time mysql has silently failed on me. It probably won’t be the last. Still goes to demonstrate the frustration that can result from unexpected behavior.

I was importing posts into wordpress and messed up. It’s not uncommon. I normally have a couple failed attempts, before I get everything zeroed in with a new csv template.

I’ve learned my lesson in the past so I always set the post author to a distinct user to easily bulk delete posts based on the post_author with sql.

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DELETE FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE post_author = 50

However, this leaves trash in the wp_postmeta table so now we just clean that up by deleting everything without a entry in wp_posts.

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DELETE FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE post_id NOT IN (
  SELECT id
  FROM wp_posts
)

Now that there is no trace of my failed attempt I can reprocess the file, hopefully successfully this time.

Want to use shortcodes in your text widget? Just add this snippet to your functions file.

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add_filter('widget_text', 'shortcode_widgets');
function shortcode_widgets($widget_text) {
  ob_start();
  do_shortcode($widget_text);
  $captured_content = ob_get_contents();
  ob_end_clean();
  return $captured_content;
}

Here is a great technique for adding a timestamp to your the javascript and css for your theme using enqueue_script and enqueue_style. The benefit is you can set a far future expires header and maximize the caching benefit without having to worry about cache invalidation. This technique should be familiar to any Rails devs as it’s baked in.

The magic is that the one of the optional parameters of the enqueue_* functions is a version. We can use php’s filemtime function to get the last modified time of the file as a timestamp and use it for the version. Wordpress appends the version to the end of the url like “http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/your-theme/style.css?ver=1265429348”. Now you don’t have to worry about serving stale data since every time you edit the file the url will be updated.

Here is some example code:

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function theme_assets() {
  $stylesheet_url = get_bloginfo('stylesheet_url');
  $stylesheet_path = TEMPLATEPATH."/style.css";
  $stylesheet_mtime = filemtime($stylesheet_path);
  wp_enqueue_style("my_theme", $stylesheet_url, false, $stylesheet_mtime, "screen");

  $javascript_url = get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory')."/my_theme.js";
  $javascript_path = TEMPLATEPATH."/my_theme.js";
  $javascript_mtime = filemtime($javascript_path);
  wp_enqueue_script('my_theme', $javascript_url, false, $javascript_mtime, true);
}

add_action('template_redirect', theme_assets);

I recently was asked the definition of missions. Here is my attempt to sum up it’s essence into an apt statement.

Missions is the duty of the church, in which we as the redeemed in gratitude and love get the privileged to announce the riches of our redemption to those who are lost as we once were. That the Holy Spirit chooses to work in, arresting the heart of men and granting them the gift of repentance unto life.

This afternoon I ran into a problem. I was working on adding in some new form fields on an edit screen. The fields were for an associated model. I was using fields_for in the view and accepts_nested_attributes_for in the model. Everything looked great, but my specs were still failing. The form just wasn’t updating the association.

I desk checked the code. I tried it in script/console. I checked the controller logs. I tried everything I could think of. I struggled for an hour or so before I called in for help. By then end of the day, neither a more experienced developer or myself could figure out why it wasn’t working. We were ready to blame plugins, rails, or anything else. Looking over the code, everything looked correct.

Calling the @my_model.my_association_attributes= worked, but the controller was never calling it! Can you guess what the culprit was? The model had attr_accessible set!

So is the moral of the story to add the association_attributes on models with attr_accessible? Not exactly, see I didn’t solve the problem at my desk. I solved the problem on the way home from church about two and a half hours later. I wasn’t even thinking about the problem when it popped in my head.

Sometimes the right course of action is to just step away from the problem for awhile, and let our mind work on it. A week or so ago, I had struggled for a couple hours trying to figure out how to solve a particular problem cleanly. I had about half a dozen ways to solve it, but thinking of actually implementing any of them made me feel dirty. I knew there was a good way to solve this problem.

How did I come up with a solution? I slept. When I woke up, brushed my teeth, and fired up textmate the next morning in my head was a elegant (and obvious) solution to the problem at hand. Sometimes our minds just need a break.

Next time you get frustrated, step away for a bit. Let your mind relax and refresh. AFK isn’t as bad as it sounds, and sometimes it’s medicinal.

While listening to a talk from Ruby Conf 08, I heard Joe Martinez mention the say command in OS X. I figured I’d pop open my .autotest file and wire it up so it’d give me some motivation for when my specs go red.

Here is what I added:

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Autotest.add_hook :red do |autotest|
  `say -v "Good News" "You're doing it wrong"`
end

A client contacted me that the custom home title had stopped working with their install of the All in One SEO Pack. The site was using a home.php file to provide a custom home template. The problem was that in the reading settings “A static page” was selected even though no front page or posts page was selected.

Once updated to “Your latest posts” it worked correctly. Hopefully this will save you some time if you run across the same issue.