WordPress

A very basic guide to hooks, actions and filters for WordPress

I originally wrote this post in August 2015 and published it on Red Dragon Creative’s site. Subsequently, Riaan and I have made the decision to close Red Dragon Creative and for me to focus on WordPress development under my own name. I still believe that the information in this post is valuable, and so I have chosen to republish it here.

Part of WordPress’s power is the fact that it is so extensible. The tools in the WordPress toolbox to achieve this are hooks, actions and filters. But some of the documentation can be very intimidating, so in less than 200 words I will provide you with a basic guide to hooks, actions and filters.

Hooks simply refer to where your custom code will be executed.

There are two types of hooks: action hooks and filter hooks.
Action hooks do something in your code. (You can either add or remove actions using the very handy and intuitive code: add_action or remove_action)

Filter hooks modify something in the code, so instead of doing something entirely new or different…it simply changes your code. The very intuitive code to add a filter is: add_filter.

That’s it, a very basic guide to hooks, actions and filters for WordPress.

Being a woman in tech

Hello blog,

This is a difficult blog to write and I am not sure where to categorize it. I will probably file it under development, which is where it belongs but it touches on a lot of things.

I am the daughter of a developer and women in tech were a part of my life, where my father spoke of his female colleagues in the same way as he spoke of his male colleagues and work social gatherings included both men and women. So for me, women in tech were not unicorns, and as they were spoken of as being equally competent as men. The first time that I encountered hostility in tech was in a forum and in all honestly it shocked me to the core. Also, being me, it pissed me off, but I dismissed it as being an isolated incident and not a reflection of the general tech community.

For the most part I kept on with tech in the background and I did not pay attention to what was going on in the tech community. In 2015 I went to my first tech meetup hosted by WordPress Joburg. I felt safe and welcome, especially when I made a comment that my ability to attend a meetup on weeknight would depend on getting a baby-sitter for my son and was met with the response of “Bring him with”. I have been an active member of the WordPress Joburg Community ever since and now am one of the co-organizers.

<sidenote> Of course being a woman comes with a level of being aware of background misogyny, both the unintentional systematic misogyny that permeates the world and the deliberate and malicious misogyny that forms part of the day-to-day world. In this regard I have a few advantages, being a white woman from a middle class family who studied law and was warned by my principal in the first few days of my articles about the inherent misogyny of the legal profession and given some tips to ignore it, combined with a low-level of neuroatypicality meant that I generally was able to ignore the effects of misogyny until my thirties.</sidenote>

My first in-person encounter with misogyny in the tech world happened in 2016, where I was made to feel like a completely unreasonable, trouble-making bitch for daring to be anything other than a sycophant when I spoke up at a meetup. In a not atypical reaction I did ask a fellow attendee privately whether I was being oversensitive or whether there was genuine hostility, they too had perceived hostility.

It is against this background that I read the New York Times’s 2014 article “Technology’s Man Problem”. I have some specific thoughts and comments:

Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. They love the work and want to fit in. But then something happens — a slight or a major offense — and they suddenly feel like outsiders.

I never felt explicitly unwelcome in the tech community until the incident I described above, and that incident along with a collection of other comments and interaction made me consider walking away from the tech community 🙁

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.

“It’s a thousand tiny paper cuts,” is how Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech.

A thousand tiny paper cuts is an excellent description and if you raise these incidents in isolation you look like you are blowing things out of proportion and if you try to create context by speaking of them in a larger picture you are accused of holding grudges and being hysterical and generally being unreasonable.

“We see these stories, ‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and engineering?’ and there’s all these complicated answers like, ‘School advisers don’t have them take math and physics,’ and it’s probably true,” said Lauren Weinstein, a man who has spent his four-decade career in tech working mostly with other men, and is currently a consultant for Google.

“But I think there’s probably a simpler reason,” he said, “which is these guys are just jerks, and women know it.”

The choice for people who are uncomfortable with the “bro” culture is to try to change it or to leave — and even women who are fed up don’t always agree on how to go about making a change.

Firstly, yes #notallmen are jerks.
Secondly, I think that we should admit that there is unlikely to be one true way to make the change and should not overly stress about finding a homogeneous solution and be willing to support efforts to effect change even if they are not done the same way as we personally would have implemented them.

Writing code is a high-pressure job with little room for error, as are many jobs. But coding can be stressful in a different way, women interviewed for this article said, because code reviews — peer reviews to spot mistakes in software — can quickly devolve.

“Code reviews are brutal — ‘Mine is better than yours, I see flaws in yours’ — and they should be, for the creation of good software,” said Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and author. “I think when you add a drop of women into it, it just exacerbates the problem, because here’s a kind of foreigner.”

“I’m in no way saying that women can’t take a tough code review,” she added. “I’m saying that no one should have to take one in a boy-puerile atmosphere.”

As I have not worked in an environment with formal code-reviews, I cannot comment. But on anecdotal evidence and based on conversations with both men and women in tech my thoughts on this are:
1. Initially getting used to code reviews is tough. Learning to take any kind of constructive criticism is a skill, and considering that coding is an act of intellectual labour that is often accompanied by strong emotions, it is natural for coders to feel sensitive about feedback.
2. The biggest challenge in any code review is ego and preconceived notions.
3. Some men are intensely threatened by women and resent any feedback them. And I have heard guys say that they are much harsher in their reviews then some of their female colleagues and get far less grief about it.
4. People need to reframe code reviews from being threatening and personal attacks to being a form of mentorship and improvement. (Honestly, has any code not looked at some of their past code and gone “What! Why did I do it this way. I am much better now”

But the debate isn’t over. In fact, Ms. Shevinsky now finds herself in another argument. This time, however, she’s on the defensive with other women.

A prominent feminist in tech told her that she was doing a disservice to women by accepting Mr. Dickinson’s apology and working with him again. The conversation, Ms. Shevinsky said, was “hateful.”

Ms. Shevinsky says that she judges Mr. Dickinson “on his actions, how he is with other people in the company and with me,” and said that there was no contradiction in both working with Mr. Dickinson and supporting feminism in tech.

By virtue of being human people are going to make mistakes and be insensitive and possibly, unintentionally misogynistic. I believe that we should allow people to move on from their mistakes. As I stated above I also believe that we should allow women to have their own agency and allow for a diversity of approaches to women in tech.

Lea Verou, an incoming Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering and computer science at M.I.T., wrote in a much read essay that women-only conferences and hackathons “cultivate the notion that women are these weak beings who find their male colleagues too intimidating.”

“As a woman,” she wrote, “I find it insulting and patronizing to be viewed that way.”

I strongly disagree with this view, and find that these environments allow for a different form of collaboration and openness, and to find it to be an environment that counters systematic, unconscious misogyny as well as outright hostility.

Love and (lots of) thoughts about being a woman in tech,
Trisha

New Year’s Day Technical Trouble: Fixing the White Screen of Death caused by WordFence

Hello Blog,

On New Year’s I decided to write my new year’s wish, and when I came to visit my site it gave me the white screen of death (WSOD). (For the blessedly uninitiated, the white screen of death refers to the empty browser window filled with white instead of your WordPress installation). My reaction was along the line of: “Seriously! Exactly two years ago my site was down like this. I am through with [REDACTED hosting company name]”. New Year’s day is a difficult day for me, being the anniversary of my dad’s death. But, unlike two years ago I felt that I could do my own technical support. I settled in to fix my blog. Step zero was making a complete backup of the server.

My first port of call was to start a technical support chat with the hosting company’s technical support. (Based on issues I have had along the way with them I was not entirely unconvinced that they had messed up. Spoiler: they hadn’t) So, the helpful guy on the other end of the chat had a quick look and came back with the verdict that it looked like WordFence was causing issues on my site.

It is definitely prudent to run a Web Application Firewall (WAF) on any WordPress site at the moment, but I admit my frustration that my site’s downtime was caused by the very thing that is meant to protect it. I have neither reached out to WordFence, nor looked through their documentation, in order to see whether I was just particularly unlucky or there is a known issue that was causing the particular crash.

Once I established that WordFence was the issue I went into my cPanel (you can just as easily do it through an FTP client) and began renaming the plugin folder. This gave me some progress, instead of getting a WSOD I instead got the error message:

Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 
Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 
Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required '*/wordfence-waf.php' (include_path='.:/opt/cpanel/ea-php70/root/usr/share/pear') in Unknown on line 0

This meant that I had something to Google which led me to find that WordFence adds some php to the user.ini file, and that I needed to delete:
php_value auto_prepend_file '/home/public_html/wordfence-waf.php'

from it. Thank you to wfasa for her reply on a ticket in the WordPress.org support thread which allowed me to figure this out.

That should have taken care of the initial error, but when I tried to access my site again (even after clearing my browser’s cache) I got that same error. Between myself and the support agent, we figured that W3TC might be presenting the cached error messages instead of the site. And so, next step in this mission was to disable W3TC without having access to the /wp-admin dashboard.

This was where things got slightly more technical. Firstly, because I needed access to the .htaccess file I needed to change my control panel’s settings to view hidden files. My Google-fu took me to a helpful post by Journal Xtra on how to remove W3TC manually. I was battling to get his fix to work with my wp-config.php permission set to 755 so I decreased the permissions to 644 (I don’t have sufficient server side knowledge to know if this was a bizarre quirk, something related to the cPanel issues I was having due to my Firefox preferences of opening links in a new tab (eventually I was doing the technical things in Chrome), or something unrelated that got tweaked along the way). After permissions were set to 644 and I had deleted:

w3-total-cache-config.php
db.php
advanced-cache.php

I edited my .htaccess to remove the blocks of code inserted by both WordFence and W3TC. This was made easy and stress free by the fact that I had done a complete backup of the files on the server before I started tinkering and that the code inserted into the .htaccess by both plugins was clearly commented out.

Finally, when I refreshed my site and was greeted by my WordPress installation. I then eventually, hours after I had planned to was able to write my post).

[Sidenote: When I rename files or folders like this I literally append _renamed to the folder or file because it changes the path and makes it super easy to find what you have changed. When you are doing this type of thing you really should keep track of what you are changing for two reasons, one so you can replicate the fix in the future and two so you can undo the fix in the present if you mess something up. ]

Love and fixing my own stuff,
Trisha

Anxiety sucks #WCCT2017

Anxiety sucks. It sneaks up on you. It spirals out of control. It’s the one little thing in the morning that tries (and often succeeds) to eat up the rest of the day. It is the thing that causes you to believe that everyone cares about the insignificant things that you have messed up. It’s a bizarre dichotomy, simultaneously believing that no-one really cares about you and believing that they are picking apart every little thing that you have done and interpreted it in the worst possible way.

Anxiety is what strips away your ability to focus in a workshop that you have been looking forward to for weeks. It gives you a brain fog which it weaponizes to call you names like “Stupid” and “Fraud” and tells you that you don’t have any right to be sitting in a room among your peers.

Anxiety sucks. But it is not all powerful. Anxiety can be calmed by trusting the people who tell you that you are allowed to be where you are. That it’s okay not to know everything. That it’s okay to breathe. It can be calmed by being brave and trusting the community that has welcomed you.

Right now, I am sitting in “Sass to the reCSSue” at WordCamp Cape Town 2017 and I am not going to let anxiety win. My battle cry is pushing publish and giving myself the time to reset my day.

WordCamp Johannesburg is happening!

Hello friends,

WordCamp is a global but community organized conference about all things WordPress. WordCamp Johannesburg is happening on Friday 18 November and Saturday 19 November 2016 at the BON Hotel in Midrand.

A WordCamp is a great opportunity to connect with other people who use WordPress. At the moment about a quarter of website’s on the Internet are powered by WordPress. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that WordPress makes publishing accessible to the masses and has removed the barrier of technical knowledge to running your own website.

WordCamps are for everyone who uses WordPress whether you simply have a toe in the water by just starting a blog or are a high-end developer contributing to the core software that makes WordPress great.

I was lucky enough to attend WordCamp Cape Town this year (I will blog about it yet) and it was a wonderful experience to meet members of the community and I learned a great deal.

If you can’t make it for both days, at R250 a ticket (including food) is still worth coming for the one day! I would love to meet you at WordCamp.

Love and WordCamp Johannesburg,
Trisha

If you would like to read more about WordCamp you can have a look at:

The Turtle Moves

Hello Computer 🙂

The WordPress ecosystem works with an interaction between three components. The WordPress core, themes which change a website’s appearance and plugins which modify functionality.

At WordCamp Cape Town I attended a workshop presented by Jonathan Bossenger on writing your first WordPress plugin, and I set myself the deadline of 30 September to write my first plugin “The Turtle Moves” which is going to populate the end of posts with a random quote from Sir Terry Pratchett from a pre-defined quote collection. (Upon reflection I decided that the end of posts meant the very end after the loop has finished, and after the comment section.)

To start with I started reading the Codex’s documentation on Writing a Plugin and looking through Matt Mullenweg’s Hello Dolly code.

A WordPress plugin needs only one PHP file with a specifically formatted DocBlock. The Header requirements are handily listed in the WordPress Developer Plugin Handbook. The only requirement is to have the plugin name.

So, I started off by writing the header comment, in a file that I named the-turtle-moves.php I saved it in a local website in the plugin directory. As a plugin is a collection of PHP scripts, I opened my file with a <?php tag.

I adopted the approach that if I was not familiar with the function included in the plugin I hit the PHP manual docs, and so I also learned about mt_rand and explode as built-in PHP functions.

While my end goal was to have the plugin add a quote at the end of a post I decided that for the purpose of testing the initial functionality I was going to mimic Hello Dolly and have the quote echo on the admin screen. This was a good decision because it allowed me to copy some of Matt’s code directly, and when I got parse errors that prevented me from activating the plugin it kept me on an even keel without going down an anxiety spiral. Both parse errors that I encountered were caused by missing semi-colons, and I am grateful to the helpful contributors to Stack Overflow which pointed me in the right direction to debug.

After resolving those issues the biggest challenge that I had was finding the correct filter to use to insert the quote into the site. A problem that I had a couple of times is by using the filter I ended up removing other WordPress functionality, (e.g. the actual post content or the entire comments section). The moral of the story is that I need to learn more about WordPress action and filter hooks.

Once I figured out that the correct code was an action hook onto “after_loop” it was smooth sailing. I then zipped up my plugin and loaded it onto a different local test site where it worked as intended. I am proud that I got this plugin done. It is nothing spectacular but it was a very good first step into plugin development and getting an understanding of how plugin development works. If you are so inclined you can check out The Turtle Moves on GitHub.

Love and plugins,
Trisha