This morning I woke up to announcements of a security upgrade (3.0.4) for WordPress. It is highly recommended that everyone upgrade their installs.

I set to the task of upgrading this and a couple of other websites I look after. All of my sites are on 3.0, but not all of them have seen an update since. Nevertheless I know that upgrading is usually a one click job, and even if you have a more complex setup with massive plugins or theme frameworks like thematic where the order of updating can be important, it usually goes pretty smoothly.

Have you ever had a minor developmental nightmare and needed quick access to a Plesk backup? Lost some data or needed a reference point and just wanted to get at a database’s SQL without having to do a full restore? Perhaps you’ve just wondered what a Plesk backup was & what is in it?

Have you ever stumbled across the issue where wp_list_pages isn’t spitting out the text you define for link_before and link_after? I came across this some time ago: one minute my lovely pipe bars ‘|’ where there, the next they weren’t. It turns out this is due to the EXTREMELY popular All in One SEO Pack plugin (if you’re not using this you should be!).

Have you ever tried to parse, process or preg_replace some HTML? Ever tried to do it when the HTML is UTF-8 encoded? Getting rid of white space can be tricky, here’s a few tricks I’ve learned.

Earlier this week I received an email requesting some help with a WordPress install that had been hacked. The site was almost 3 years old and was still running WordPress 2.2. It was quite funny getting to see and play with retro WordPress again, but it had to go.

When working with large and complex datasets in Symfony, there comes a point where the ORM layer (Propel or Doctrine) causes more problems than it solves. Sometimes it’s necessary to debug large SQL queries built using the ORM layer, and at other times it’s appropriate to bypass the ORM layer entirely.  The following snippets come from projects using Propel, I realise a lot of folks will have moved on to Doctrine but I hope there may be one or two useful things for that here too.