First, the context of using Wordpress and Subversion jointly is typically in making sure that customer websites are fully versioned so that we can be accountable and transparent, and equally importantly so that we can roll back in a disaster scenario.

Second, some background on our approach. We believe that when using Open Source software for customers, it’s important to strike a balance between cutting edge features and stability. We typically accomplish this by starting the project at the head revision of the software we’re using – in this case, Wordpress.

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk www

Now we have a freshly checked out copy of Wordpress, and we’ll want to keep it this way. If you don’t feel comfortable with leaving a repository in a certain state there are a few options here – the most obvious would be for you to maintain your own copy of the Wordpress source tree (which can be useful in other ways too, for instance if WP’s subversion servers were to go down.) This can be accomplished easily using `svnsync`.

Assuming that you’re happy with your checked-out Wordpress, we now want to move all the User data to one place, so that we can version it separately to the Wordpress trunk. Typically, this is just the `wp-content` folder, but you may also want to version wp-config.php, .htaccess, and any other special files you’re using in the project webroot.

Your final decision on the path structure really depends on the scenario- you may want to separate out the theme directory from other ‘user content’ directories if you’re planning to open source your theme or host it elsewhere. In this case, you’d have a subversion repository containing the folders within wp-content, with a `themes` folder which will load your versioned theme(s) as an svn:externals entry.

Now, a couple of tricks – first, your uploads folder may want to be versioned. If not, you’ll want to svn:ignore it. If you do version it, you’ll probably want to svn:ignore some of it. For instance, WP2.5 onwards supports image resizing, and it uses the uploads directory also as a cache store for these thumbnails. We can ignore these thumbnails by setting the svn:ignore property on the uploads directory as follows:

[root@www uploads]# svn -R  propset svn:ignore "*[0-9]x[1-9]*"; .
property 'svn:ignore' set (recursively) on '.'

Note that if your uploads folder is structured by date, these ignore settings will not persist in new directories, so I’d recommend you do not use a structured uploads folder if you are versioning it (the option titled ” Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”).

It’s occurred to me how these very easy techniques seem inaccessible to many people, so I thought I’d post a few bits and bobs about some basic scraping methods.

Here’s a bit of code I wrote to use PHP’s DOMDocument class to treat a HTML page as XML and fetch, in this case, the incredibly useful current world population… fantastic!

<?php
 // where to find population data...
 $location['url']='http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html';
 $location['id']='worldnumber';

 // initialise a new document and prepare the data
 $d=new DOMDocument();
 $file = file_get_contents($location['url']);

 // get and print current world population
 $d->loadHTML($file);
 $e=$d->getElementById($location['id']);
 print $e->nodeValue;
?>

Sample output: 6,738,610,278

Additionally this shows how in two lines you can be notified of the scripts entire execution time using StopWatch.

<?php
include('StopWatch.class.php');
$stopWatch=StopWatch::getInstance();
$stopWatch-&amp;amp;gt;setFinishMessage('script executed in %01.2f seconds');
sleep(2);
?>

And here’s the source stopwatch.zip.

Too many times I’ve seen my code swell with foreach loops, looking for elements with a certain property, or to call a function of each object in an array. Additionally making sure the keys of an array match one particular property and stay in sink with them. So to try and side step all these I’m started Vector, I’m sure others have done similar, but reinvention is one of the fun things about being a programmer (and one of the few things which make it similar to being an artist).

So here’s how you use Vector currently:

<?php

require_once('Vector.class.php');
require_once('User.example.class.php');


//initialize a Vector and add a index that uses the username field of each object entered into the array
$users=new Vector();
$users->addIndex('username');


//add two objects of class User into the vector
$users->addObject($frank=new User('frank.n.stein','monster'));
$users->addObject($vlad=new User('count.dracula','vampire'));


//call the checkpassword method of the object whose username is count.dracula
if($users->exists('username','count.dracula') && $users->username['count.dracula']->checkPassword('vampire'))
{
echo 'password correct!';
}
else
{
echo 'password false';
}
?>

I hope to include more features later. But it’s a start.