Monthly Archive for February, 2009

WordPress and basic authentication, problems with WP Cron and file uploads

Published on February 21, 2009 in Work. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I have a Google ego search on my name, so I can keep track of what the Internets is saying about me behind my back. The other day the ego search summary email arrived and included was one of my development sites. Which was annoying because I don’t want people browsing around my development, it might be broken or confuse people by looking like a live site (but not contain proper content). So I did what I should have done from the beginning and enabled Basic Authentication on my development sites. (Basic Authentication protection provides those “popup passwords” you see around the place where a little, usually grey, dialog pops up asking for a username and password before you can go any further.)

Basic Authentication is as old as the hills in internet terms, and while it’s not the most sophisticated protection it’s a reliable and simple way to prevent any old Tom, Dick or Harriet poking around where you don’t want them. I’ve used it before for client sites which are hosted on the open internet, but where we only want a small selection of people to see it… add Basic Authentication and bosh, job done. Continue reading ‘WordPress and basic authentication, problems with WP Cron and file uploads’

Adding GET params to a URL in WordPress with add_query_arg

Published on February 13, 2009 in Miscellaneous. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I am finding myself using this function a lot now, and I constantly forget the function name:

add_query_arg();

It allows you to pass in some additional parameters, and a URL, and receive back the URL with the query string params added. For example:

$some_url = "http://simonwheatley.co.uk/?stuff=whatever";
$params = array( 'wp_siteurl' => "http://www.example.com" );
$some_url = add_query_arg( $params, $some_url );

This will result in a url something like this:

http://simonwheatley.co.uk/?stuff=whatever&wp_siteurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com

Pretty cool, huh? So now you don’t need to worry about what parameters are already in the URL, you can just hand all that hassle to add_query_arg.

Update: See also remove_query_arg.