Professional PHP

Well, I upgraded to WordPress 1.2 today. Things did not go without a hitch. The cookie format changed, so I had to remove my cookies before I could log back in to the admin section. My feeds were down for part of the day until I realized I had to update my .htaccess file. Looking at the WordPress support forums, these look like common problems. That and a magic_quotes problem. These were minor issues.

The biggest problem for me by far, though was that WordPress 1.0.2 supported BBCode, which I used for my posts. WordPress 1.2 does not. So after my upgrade, it looked like I had three options: restore my backup, edit my all my posts, or add BBCode support to WordPress.

Of course I added BBCode support to WordPress because that only took 10 times as long as editing all of my posts to use one of the other markup styles provided.

I started with PEAR:: HTML_BBCodeParser. Unfortunately some of its markup processing is brittle and the design could be better. I fixed its case sensitivity and changed some of the markup generated to pass the XSS filter that WordPress uses. I also de-PEAR-ified it, making it easier to distribute as a plug in.

I also had a problem with the WordPress plugin protocol failing to call one of my hooks at the right time, causing my BBCode not to be processed in my feeds. It took me a while to find and fix this problem. Sadly, there was nothing I could do in the plugin. The fix required modifying WordPress. But, hey, plugins are a new feature of 1.2. Unfortunately, my embarrassing broken feed was captured forever at artima.

When I first installed this software, I told myself that I wouldn’t even look at the code, I would just use it like Joe User would. That didn’t last.