Bluetrait

I had a play around with PHP 5.3. The main new feature is namespaces. I am looking forward to using this in future.

Unfortunately PHP 5.2 isn't very common so using namespaces in my code will need to wait.

This is a good website if you want to learn about how namespaces will work in PHP 5.3

I've made public the search plugin I wrote for this site.

It can be downloaded from here and is under the "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License".

The plugin requires Bluetrait 2 and MySQL.

It probably won't be any use to anyone as Bluetrait 2 isn't even in Beta yet ;)

The problems with PHP

To enable php:

1. open terminal
2. cd /etc/
3. sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini
4. cd /private/etc/apache2/
5. sudo nano httpd.conf
6. uncomment the two modules: php5_module and fastcgi_module. They were at line 114 and 115 for me.
7. Use ctrl and o to save
8. reload apache (can be done from system preferences).

After hacking my ipod, I installed Apache and PHP. I was successfully able to install the sqlite version of Bluetrait 2 onto my ipod!

There were some small bugs, I haven't yet pin-pointed them down yet but I believe it may have been due to the setup of PHP.

So yeah that was pretty cool, pointless but cool :)

Bluetrait Event Viewer has been updated to support WordPress 2.3

Josh created a custom index.php way back in WordPress 1.5 days that removed the RSS feeds on the WordPress dashboard.

Up until now it wasn't really possible to this with a plugin nicely. WordPress 2.2 has added an API hook that although not relevant to the Dashboard it is in the right place!

So I've created a simple plugin, which you can download here, that removes the RSS feeds. Please note it requires WordPress 2.2.

I just read an interesting post here about what data is sent to the Akismet servers. A surprising amount, including the whole $_SERVER array!

I wouldn't be too happy with that myself. Bluetrait's implementation of the Akismet client sends the following information:

Comment Author
Comment Author Email Address
Comment Author Website Address
Content of Comment
Author's IP Address
Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)

Bluetrait's implementation sends the following information:

Comment Author
Comment Author Email Address
Comment Author Website Address
Content of Comment
Author's IP Address
Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)

Plus the $_SERVER array with the following information removed:

'HTTP_COOKIE',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST',
'HTTP_MAX_FORWARDS',
'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SERVER',
'REDIRECT_STATUS',
'SERVER_PORT',
'PATH',
'DOCUMENT_ROOT',
'SERVER_ADMIN',
'QUERY_STRING',
'PHP_SELF' ;

Unfortunately this is more than I first stated, I'm going to review the data being sent. It shouldn't contain any extra data that is personal.

EDIT: Some more info here. Looks like Akismet sends the all cookies that are from that domain. i.e anything the client (the person posting the comment) is logged into. The post is a bit old (2005) so this behavior may have changed.

EDIT2: I just checked the source code from WordPress 2.1.2 it looks like cookies are no longer sent, everything else still is.

BTEV now has a WordPress plugin page

Sorry I broke the server for a bit while upgrading to PHP 5.2. It is all working now. :)

Nup it is still a bit broken. *goes to fix*.