by James | Apr 13, 2012 | Writing
So I can’t believe it’s been a week already, things are getting pretty manic at work, even 25 hours teaching is more exhausting than you might think. Either way it’s gone and I have … Learnt and practised a lot of French (although I need to do more translation and writing work). Finished a course with a good friend Thierry, we are going to continue meeting for English/French conversation in the future I believe.
Furthermore, I have rediscovered Netbeans the IDE while this is more a programming thing than a life change it is a little exciting to find a decent PHP editor + Java Editor + Whatever I want editor that allows me to debug all the work I may want to do :). There are a few glitches on Ubuntu but I’m using a secondary install until the repositories update. I must admit to being fairly impressed with Netbeans I haven’t used it since my first programming job at applegate and it has certainly improved since 2005 ;).
I am going to hopefully finish all the CRUD operations for the Unit Tracker plugin tomorrow (woop!) Next up is fixing the blogger import plugin. Till Tomorrow then ;).
by James | Apr 11, 2012 | Software development, Unit Tracker
So I’ve created the tables for my Unit Tracker plugin and created some dummy data for an initial example Tracker. As nice as this is I’m not entirely sure about how I’ve designed the tables (read that as saying “if you think this is a mistake comment“). My assumption is as follows for the pure basics, you will need at least 2 tables;
Table 1 – Trackers
A table to store all the different units being tracked, there can be a number of different units tracked, or maybe even a set of units tracked in tandem for example body-fat % , weight and stomach measures.
- Name and Description of the tracker
- Link to a post/page further describing the details about the tracker
- A display Reference (something like a permalink) that can be used to display the tracker
- for example [:tracker-weight:]
- Validation, due to the fact that any unit may be added a validation key will be added here (regex?)
- Unit Measurement, because people might be measuring lbs, Stone (British measure), Kg, % or Quarks the unit of measurement is left blank and assigned by a user (but there will automatically be a suggested one in the form)
Table 2 – Tracker Values
A table to store all the values recorded by the user. This is so in the future we can use this data to map graphs, allow cvs downloads e.t.c.
- Value, this I have decided to store as a string, now I may well regret this but it seemed the easiest way to store data of any type including time (hours/days/months/years) weight can be stored in Metric and converted as necessary. The method of extracting and processing the data is based on the validation in the Tracker table. You can’t change the type after the Tracker contains data.
- Created, the date that new a new data value was added to the tracker
- Tracker Id the ID (primary key) of the tracker the data belongs to.
Of course this isn’t all, there will be probably options stored in the WordPress options database table to decide on appearance, widget placement etc, additional tracker values that show targets, method of display, change over a period of x, and many more…
First of all I’ll settle with the above as an Alpha 0.0.1 release and when this works I’ll add accordingly.
by James | Apr 11, 2012 | Writing
To celebrate Easter, I pretty much slept, which, while doing wonders for my mental state and giving me a huge burst of energy, wasn’t exactly productive. I did manage to get a few things done, but mostly this weekend was about chilling out. I have done some small programming work, but I’m way behind where I’d like to be.
On another note, I am plowing through the 4-hour body by Tim Ferriss, and while I take everything with a pinch of salt, I find his writing at the very least amusing. I’d also note I find it convincing enough (after some Google time) that I bought a kettlebell for home training, weighing scales, and a yoga ball for crunches. I’m leaving off the diet now, but I’m interested enough to attempt it for a few weeks to see what happens.
School is good (teaching English, that is), programming PHP is coming back strong and clear; I’m even thinking of adding Java work to my repertoire as it is my primary experience at work (and still the most sought after language). Presently, however, I’m putting my efforts into PHP, and my project list reflects this.
The only thing I need to work on more is French; I intend to really start focusing on that after I get my Unit Tracker plugin up and running, procrastination? Maybe… But I want to measure a lot of what I do, and if I can do that and make my need into a project, it’s probably worth it.
by James | Apr 8, 2012 | Software development, Unit Tracker
I have been having great fun, and when you read ‘fun’ realise that I mean ‘endless-irritations’, trying to get my plugin for WordPress to cleanly remove all of it’s stored options and items recorded during it’s usage. So here’s a quick explanation of how to create a WordPress plugin that plays nice and truly uninstalls everything upon deletion. N.B. It’s not that the information wasn’t available to do this, I found lots of previous tutorials, but they weren’t really as clear as I would I have liked.
Why bother with an uninstall method?
Good programming practise usually recommends that there is an undo button that lets us take back an undesired action. It also should allow a user to uninstall and remove a plugin without the worry of having leftover data or tables resting in their system clogging up their database schema. Thankfully this functionality has been available in WordPress for some time, although it is woefully underused. Probably due to the lack of articles that tell you how to implement it. The WordPress Codex lists the detail on the Uninstall hook is located at https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_uninstall_hook
How do you implement it?
This is simplicity itself, all you need to do is place a file named uninstall.php in the root directory of your plugin. All your logic for removing the the plugin data will be written here, therefore your plugin should start with something like the following;
- /plugin-name/
- plugin-file.php
- uninstall.php
Nothing needs to be added to the main plugin-file.php to activate the process, it is automatically searched for when the user agrees to delete the plugin.
When is the uninstall.php run?
It is important to realise that the uninstall.php is not actioned when the user disables the plugin, if you wish to remove all stored data on plugin disable there is a separate hook that can be called from the main plugin file. The uninstall.php is actually run when you confirm the deletion of the plugin. This is probably cleaner and safer because a programmer may well disable plugins to track errors in a WordPress install and unknowingly remove all the database entries. When someone is deleting a plugin permanently one expects that all data related to the plugin will be deleted as well.
What do we put in the uninstall.php?
The first thing we need to add to the uninstall script is the following if statement to check for WP_UNINSTALL_PLUGIN:
if(defined( ‘WP_UNINSTALL_PLUGIN’ )){
… uninstall code here
}
The reason for this is to stop malicious attacks on the site using the plugin by directly accessing the uninstall file (by using the url www.mydomain.com/wp-content/plugins/plugin-name/uninstall.php). This would allow an attacker to drop tables and remove saved options depending what was contained in the removal script.
The two main possibilities that a plugin would want to remove are saved options and database tables with data. This would be actioned in the following manner. In the case of the WordPress options:
delete_option(‘my_option’);
and in the case of removing a database table:
global $wpdb;
$table = $wpdb->prefix . ‘name_of_table’;
$wpdb->query(“DROP TABLE $table”);
Conclusions
It is a good idea to create a plugin that can be removed as reliably as it is installed, cleanly deleting all the tables and options stored by WordPress. The system is easy to implement and with the inclusion of uninstall.php and only takes a few short minutes to reverse what work you’ve already done in your main plugin class.
When I have finished the UnitTracker plugin I’ll add a link to download the source code here so you can see how I implemented the uninstall.php in a real life context.
by James | Apr 5, 2012 | Software development
So I have had my parents here for a week, which has been fantastic! Very nice having them around but my Mum suffered a fall and went home feeling awful, she actually it turns out had mild concussion but thankfully is now resting and doing well :(. I’m lucky that that’s all she had falling down a flight of concrete steps. Thus, April has not started very well.
Obviously, I’ve been somewhat behind on my to-do list; However, now that my parents are back home I have created and installed Unit Tracker on my local machine and have made it so that it appears on the admin menu, can be removed e.t.c. Next step is getting the plug-in to create and drop the database tables on install and removal. I have the tables planned and will do a post on my logic once that’s up and running.
Aside from that I’ve been looking at getting a Kettlebell for my fitness training, practised a lot of French speaking and have generally been incredibly busy. I do need to do more though if I want to keep my 4 pages of translation, fitness levels and everything else by the end of the month. I think I need to get myself up and out of bed earlier and writing a list of things to do “today” and a Google calendar for timetabling my work wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Right, talking of work off to teach a lesson on reported speech.
