Space Babies » wordpress

Tour Top 100

joost — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:24:03 +0000

A new addition to the Space Babies stable today: Tour Top 100. This is a list of 100 Tour de France-related songs. You’ll see classics from Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour.

It’s a small website in WordPress 3.2. On the one hand, I love that WordPress gives editors great tools to work with their content. On the other hand, WordPress (and PHP) is pretty messy in terms of code. Hundreds of functions everywhere, no classes, no namespaces. “The loop” is also a pretty monstrous thing.

That being said, creation of this website took mere days and it is seeing a great number of visitors, who are very happy that these songs are given center stage. So, with happy people all around I am not complaining. The HTML templating on this one was done by SliceCraft. Great guys who delivered fantastic semantic HTML5. Check the source to see for yourself.

Radiolab: experimental radio

joost — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:16:38 +0000

This week I launched radiolab.nl: a website about experimental Dutch radio. Radiolab is a series of new formats on Radio 1, allowing the makers to test the waters and play with new ideas.

This year marks the third season and boasts formats about controversial topics such as death and religion.

Technically, I built the site in WordPress using the Multisite feature. I did this to retain the previous years, which were also done in (regular) WordPress. The conversion to Multisite went fine.

The responsive template was done by XHTMLized in HTML5.

Expedition Chemistry

joost — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:07:42 +0000

This month I finalized the construction of Expedition Chemistry: a website for children with a lot of (chemical) experiments.

Since it’s a Dutch website, here’s the description in Dutch:

Op deze website vind je heel veel verschillende proefjes! Bijvoorbeeld: Hoe je een ei doorzichtig kan maken, hoe je de beste bellenblaas maakt, of je hoe een fontein maakt met mentos en cola. De proeven doe je met materialen die je thuis al hebt of koopt bij de supermarkt of drogist.

WordPress: exclude child categories

joost — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:34:51 +0000

Sometimes the simplest things can take hours to discover. This is especially true for WordPress, whose documentation can be atrocious. I wanted to exclude all child category posts from a category page.

For the life of me I could not discover how with a quick Google search. It took me checking out the source code before I saw a one-liner that would do the trick. Here tis:

 array($cat))); ?>

WordPress 3

joost — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:00:27 +0000

I am not only an Apple fanboi, and a Rails fanboi, but also a WordPress fanboi. Version 3.0 came out recently and I am very excited. WordPress has merged with WordPress Multi-User and the result is something amazing; you can run one blog just as easily as one thousand. Or ten million. Wow. The new theme is great too, looks like I will be able to use it instead of a customized one.

If you have nothing to do for just over an hour, consider this keynote from Matt:

SQL query logging in WordPress

joost — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:35:13 +0000

After doing Rails development for so long, it’s ….. interesting to develop for other platforms once in a while. I am talking about WPMU, a pretty fantastic multi-blog platform. The lack of documentation is aggravating though, as is the absence of all my Rails tools like the console and the log. Well turns out you can have a sql log for WordPress as well! This post tells you how, and it works.

Fysiodeurloo restyle live

joost — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:26:32 +0000

Tis the time of year for lotsa restyled websites! Yes, I have been keeping busy. My aunt’s physical therapy shop Fysiodeurloo is the first to kick off this year’s round of fresh new websites. It’s a pretty standard WordPress-as-a-CMS website, but does its job very well and is a huge step up from the previous website. If you have aching bones and live in Tholen, go there!

There are many more websites under construction, some very close until launch indeed. So keep watching this space.

PHP massive security FAIL

joost — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:34:14 +0000

A security vulnerability was discovered in WordPress 2.8.3 recently. If you look at the flaw in question, I can’t believe people are still using PHP to publish websites. If you still do, you should be beaten with a stick. Let’s gloat about why Ruby (on Rails) is better, point by point.

Tom Ritter has posted an excellent analysis of the flaw. To me, it seems PHP is mostly to blame with it’s insane global namespace and perverse functions that take any kind of input.
If you think about it anyone still using PHP should be shot, really. With this insight I can probably write a bot to take down a PHP site in ten minutes or so. So here we go:
1. $key (which is a variable) gets created from URL parameters. This has always been the Achilles Heel of PHP. I am assuming register_globals is off, so they are creating this variable somewhere else. Baaaaaaddd. In Rails you would use params to fetch the URL parameter and then pass the value around in your methods.
2. value is filtered using preg_replace which also takes an array. Barf! Why on earth? I know! Because it’s convenient. Convenience trumps security every time with PHP. In Ruby this could not happen because there is no global preg_replace function. You would call gsub on a String.
3. wpdb-prepare happily accepts an array with an empty string for a string value. Major fail here. Because WordPress has to mimic proper prepared statements, they are using nonsecure PHP code instead of robust database-level code. In other words, array with empty string again becomes empty string instead of blowing up and raising an exception.
4. Only at this stage does any kind of logic fault come into play. The WordPress developers store the admin user without a user_activation_key apparently, because they didn’t foresee this problem. Still a PHP fault in my opinion, since automated integration testing is impossible.

I ~~hate~~ love to say it: using Ruby on Rails would have prevented this flaw at every step of the way. So would other sanely designed programming languages.

As web developers we all think IE6 is bad. I think PHP is the IE6 of web development “languages” (term used extremely loosely).

Friendly Alien Space Takeover

joost — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:12:03 +0000

I couldn’t help but notice this podcast of Future Vintage, a show on Radio 6. With titles like Space Invasion, Sirius Space Party, Interstellar Low Ways, When Planets Explode, Tales from Outerspace and Distant Planet you can’t go wrong! Download the MP3 now!

If you would rather listen online, you can do that too.

New design, whoopty doo

joost — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:13:32 +0000

What better way to inaugurate WordPress 2.6 than with a new template? This one is quite nice, not as emo as the last one. More, uh, “professional”. ‘Coz we are, like, extreme “professional” here at Space Babies HQ, m’kay?