Tag Archives: PHP

When working on a plugin or theme, have you ever went to your browser to test some changes, only to be greeted by the dreaded blank white screen? Sometimes the bug in your code is immediately apparent, but what about the times when it’s not? Wouldn’t it be useful if you could see the PHP errors, instead of a blank screen?

The good news is: you can. Just add this simple constant to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', true);

Be aware that it’s a bad idea to do this on a production server, as some errors may betray dangerous information, such as system paths or database credentials.

What if you need to see errors on a production server, or you need a record of the errors? You can have them output to a log file (wp-content/debug.log).

define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);

You can use either statement alone, or both at the same time.

WordPress has a convenient function that can create a new post: wp_insert_post(). Suppose that you wanted to create a plugin to automatically create weekly roundups of your social media activity. You could gather your Delicious bookmarks, Twitter posts, etc. with SimpleXML, mash the data up into a coherent post, then publish the post.

The function syntax is along these lines:

global $user_ID;
$new_post = array(
'post_title' => 'My New Post',
'post_content' => 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...',
'post_status' => 'publish',
'post_date' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s'),
'post_author' => $user_ID,
'post_type' => 'post',
'post_category' => array(0)
);
$post_id = wp_insert_post($new_post);

One thing I find particularly interesting is the post_type argument. You could change it to “page” to create a page instead, or you could combine wp_insert_post() with the (as of yet ill-documented) custom post type API to create new admin panels for your post types.

You can edit a post by passing a post ID in the appropriate argument, select multiple categories in the array, or do pretty much anything you can do from the Write screen. After creating the initial post, you can even use the ID that is returned to add custom fields. The full list of parameters for wp_insert_post() is available in the Codex.