functions

New in PHP 5.5 is a group of functions that deal with password hashing and verification. This is such a common thing for PHP applications to do that it was decided to include it into the core of PHP. They effectively solve the problem of hashing and comparing passwords that just about every PHP developer has implemented at one point or another.

There are only a few functions available but they provide all of the functionality needed to create a hash value from a password, check if the hash is valid and to check if the password hash needs to be recreated.

To create a hash value from a password use the password_hash() function. The first parameter is the password string and the second value is the hashing algorithm to use. The value PASSWORD_DEFAULT here is a PHP constant that is currently set to the bcrypt algorithm and will be changed to better algorithms when and if they are found in newer versions of PHP.

If you are setting up a Wordpress blog the chances are that you will be looking into modifying the default theme to be something a little more customised to your site. Theme development can be as complicated or as simple as you want, or are capable of doing.

Wordpress themes are stored in the folder wp-content/themes/, each theme being stored in it's own directory.

The basic theme must contain two basic files, the main control is done from a file called index.php and a file called styles.css, which is also needed to allow you to display the theme within the admin section of Wordpress. If you don't want to use the styles.css file then this is fine, but it should be present and contain the following lines.

Wordpress has a neat little feature that allows you to write a post and then schedule it to display at some point in the future. This seems good, but it invariably doesn't work on some server platforms and rather than publishing a post Wordpress just counts the amount of time passed since it was supposed to go live. The basic solution to this is to go into the post and click on publish, which can be a pain if you are taking a couple of days off from blogging and want to leave it running.

The problem lies with the functions that convert a scheduled post into a live post which are kept in the file wp-cron.php in the root Wordpress directory. For some reason the Wordpress developers decided to call the scheduling functions using the fsockopen() function available in PHP. This essentially opens a browser session to the wp-cron.php file, just as you would if you browsed to the location using your web browser.

Sending multiple arguments to a function can be done using a parameter string. This is just like a URL that has data encoded into it. For example, if you wanted to send two parameters (called parameter1 and parameter2) to a function then you would use the following string.

parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2

To use this in the function you create the function as normal with a single parameter. This single parameter is the string that will contain all of your arguments.

function test($arguments)
{
}

You must run the parse_str() function on the arguments parameter to extract the data you need. You can then call the parameters by their names as variables.