Web

If you didn’t know already, this blog is not the only thing that we work on — we also take on clients to work on website and web-related projects for them. Recently, we worked on a website project where we had to code a custom WordPress post type into the custom theme we made for the client (yes we make those).

This custom post type (which shall henceforth be called Articles — what we named the post type) was supposed to serve a purpose similar to the default WordPress Post — it was meant to go into a blog section for the website, and the client wanted to be able to assign categories to individual articles. All of this is pretty standard fare when it comes to WordPress customisation, as you can easily figure out how to do it reading official guides and documentation from WordPress:

• Adding custom post types: developer.wordpress.org/plugins/post-types/
• Adding custom taxonomies (e.g. categories): developer.wordpress.org/plugins/taxonomies/
• register_post_type() documentation: developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/register_post_type/
• register_taxonomy() documenation: developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/register_taxonomy/

We needed something a bit more though, as we wanted to customise the permalinks (i.e. auto-generated URL) of our Articles such that they are:

1. Preceeded by the article slug, e.g. example.com/article/my-article-title
2. Display the year and month before the post title, e.g. example.com/article/2021/03/my-article-title
3. Display a list of articles posted on the specified year and month if it was specified in the URL, e.g. example.com/article/2021/03 would show all the articles posted in March 2021.

Want to find out how we did it? Then continue reading.

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been tinkering with PHP’s gettext to set up internationalisation for one of my web apps (i.e. getting it ready for translation into different languages). Even though there were many step-by-step guides and Stack Overflow topics on the web, all detailing a similar set of instructions, following them did not work things out for me.

After some frustration and a lot of time tinkering, it turns out that these guides were missing some pieces of information. If you are tearing your hair out troubleshooting PHP gettext, this article might be just what you’re looking for.

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If you host a website on one of those shared web hosts with cPanel installed, such as those offered by GoDaddy, Bluehost or Exabytes, here’s a snippet of .htaccess code that can be useful for you.

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /your-subdirectory/$1 [L]

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If you manage a Unix-like server, every now and then, you might get an email from the server notifying you of important errors that occur in your server. Here’s one that I got earlier today from an Ubuntu 18.04 server of mine:

Cron <root@terresquall> test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts –report /etc/cron.daily )

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
error: error running shared postrotate script for ‘/var/log/apache2/*.log ‘
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1

Mail sent at 06:39

It’s never fun to receive server admin emails like this, because it means that your server has issues, but the message tends to be really ambiguous, so it’s really hard to figure out what the issue is. Obviously, I didn’t know what the issues were, so I had to do some research.

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