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Attending WordCamp Austin 2013

Texas has been on my list for a while now and Austin sounds like a great place to start. Looking forward for some sunshine, good company, great food and an exciting WordCamp Austin 2013. Maybe even a roundhouse kick to the face.

On $matches in preg_match functions

I’ve seen many people define an empty $matches variable before using it in preg_match and preg_match_all functions in PHP. I’ve done it myself, and I was quite surprised to learn that you don’t really have to — even if there’s no match, you will not get an undefined variable notice.

The Great Firewall of Russia

It’s a shame that the Russian “consumer watchdog” Rospotrebnadzor, the Ministry of Justice, and the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (or Roskomnadzor) were “smart” enough to block access to over 20 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com because three of them contained suicide, drugs, and...

WordPress Community Summit

I’m attending the WordPress Community Summit next Monday in Tybee Island, GA. If you’re on the list of participants (unfortunately, it’s an invite only event) make sure you come say hi. I’ll be staying in Tybee until Friday.

Speaking at WordCamp Sofia 2012

I’ll be travelling to Bulgaria and speaking about the Settings API at WordCamp Sofia this weekend. There are still tickets available if you’re willing to come.

The Moscow WordPress Meetup is this Saturday

The Moscow WordPress Meetup is this Saturday. If you’re in Moscow, come join us for a few hours of geek talk about WordPress. We have several presentations scheduled, as well as good coffee, stickers and buttons. Despite the Moscow weather recently, I feel that Saturday will be a great day.

Favicon Support in WordPress Themes

I think that although related to appearance, favicon support should not be part of a WordPress theme. You’ll probably want to take your favicon with you, no matter which theme you use. Conclusion: favicons are plugin territory.
Agree? Disagree? Why?

Github’s Asking for my Password

“Why is Github asking me to input my username and password when I try to push changes to a repository I own?” I asked this myself a couple of times before I figured out I had cloned it the wrong way: git clone . As opposed to: git clone git@github.com:kovshenin/publish.git . Where the former will use the HTTP protocol, and thus require basic authentication (username and password), and...

Tip: get_posts will suppress_filters by default

I was wondering why my posts_where filter was not being executed on my WordPress query and after a bit of poking around, I figured out that get_posts sets suppress_filters to true, unless specified otherwise, making WP_Query skip a bunch of SQL filters, including the posts_where I was trying to set. So learn the easy way — get_posts will suppress filters by default. Hopefully this...

Nonces on the Front End is a Bad Idea

Here’s a tip! Don’t add nonce fields on the front end of your site for logged out users. That may cause trouble with page caching plugins, which will serve HTML from cache with the nonce field, even if the nonce has expired. Also, nonces don’t really help prevent spam in contact forms, etc., especially for anonymous visitors. Nonces are used for security.