Reference

Downtime

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Hi, everyone. I’m sorry to say this site had some downtime in the past week. (24-Nov-2022 to 27-Nov). Thanks for your patience.

SQLite3 in php — some notes

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I’ve been working on the SQLIite Object Cache plugin for WordPress, so I’ve had to figure out a few things about using SQLite itself and php’s SQLite3 extension. Here are some notes. There are various versions of the SQLite software around. It’s possible for more than one version to access the same database at the … Read more

Get started with WordPress Development

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Someone asked how to get started developing with WordPress. Here’s my take on it. You gotta learn to use it first. These are steps to getting power-user skills. Hosting Buy an account on a budget hosting service. ~US$10 per month is a reasonable cost. It MUST support multiple WordPress sites. Sometimes these are called “subdomains” … Read more

A birthday song

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Here’s a song my brother Barney Jones composed for my recent birthday. I am lucky to have such a talented family. Thanks, Barney! Most of the material on this site is Creative Commons licensed. This isn’t. It is Copyright (c) 2023 Barney Jones. All Rights Reserved.

Names in WordPress settings API

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To plugin developers WordPress offers the Settings API. It lets us define settings pages, sections within those pages and fields within the sections. WordPress Settings API We use WordPress options to store configuration variables for our plugins. The settings API lets us create pages in the WordPress back-end dashboard to allow users to enter and … Read more

“Fatal Error” Adding Keys

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Sometimes the Index WP MySQL For Speed plugin for WordPress generates errors when you use it to add keys. These can look like this or similar: What can you do about this? Don’t panic. This (usually) does not mean your site has been corrupted. It simply means your MariaDB or MySQL server was not able … Read more

Get back Windows 10 functions in Windows 11

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Microsoft, when they rolled out Windows 11, made some changes to their File Explorer that slowed me down as a developer. I needed to restore the Windows 10 behavior. The Windows 11 task bar always combines icons from multiple instances of the same app into one. To find the instance you want you have to … Read more

Install an old MariaDB version on Ubuntu

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Do you need to install an old version of MariaDB on Ubuntu? Maybe you need to do some testing. Here’s how. Visit https://mariadb.com/downloads/ and choose your package and OS. You’ll download a tar fie. Extract the tar file with tar xf mariadb*.tar. Change your working directory to the extracted directory. cd mariadb*debs Set up your … Read more

Reindexing tables with bad dates

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Sometimes, upon adding indexes to MariaDb or MySQL tables with columns with zero-default dates you’ll get an error message like this: This happens because your server’s default sql_mode includes the NO_ZERO_DATE value. It is prevalent when working on WordPress indexes using phpmyadmin or some other MySQL client program. To prevent it, change the sql_mode before … Read more