Hacking at 0300

Well, that was easy. The Classic Editor plugin restores the old editor, with all my custom buttons.

And installing it with the command line interface was just

wp plugin install classic-editor

Nearlyfreespeech.net has been great, but their security settings make it hard to update WordPress automatically. I just discovered that WP now has a command line interface that works fine over SSH.

  wp core update
  wp core update-dp

And done!. You can do wp db export to back up the database first.
And updating plugins (for those that can auto-update) is just wp plugin update-all.

My biggest complaint with WP 5.5 is the new post editor. It's a new, simpler editor but all my custom buttons are gone. I suppose I'll have to figure out how to restore the old editor.

I've put an Amazon Wishlist Widget for WordPress on my github site, that uses the techniques described before. You can see it running on the sidebar here.

Amazon long ago elminated its API for getting wishlists. 4 years ago I made a screen-scraping WordPress widget to display my wishlist. Unfortunately, as happens with screen-scraping, Amazon changed their format and URL's. And now I can't seem to get the ItemLookup API to work either.

doitlikejustin has a vanilla PHP wishlist scraper, but PHP 5 now has it's own HTML parser in DOMDocument, so I implemented my own.

The wishlist page has a simple structure, and all links to Amazon products have as part of the URL "dp/{ASIN}", where {ASIN} is the Amazon ID number, and all the individual items are contained in <div>s that have an id that starts with "item_", and the title is in a link that has an id that starts with "itemName". The image and author list are in consistent positions relative to those. Other advertisements for Amazon products that you see on the page are added with Javascript, so they won't show up when we grab the page with PHP.

Images URL images have the format "http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/{idcode}._SL{size}.jpg" (with possibly some extra parameters before the "SL"). I just
pull the relevant idcode out and create my own URL with the desired size.

function wishlist($listID){
	$size = 100;
	$ret = array();
	$wishlistdom = new DOMDocument();
	// ignore parsing warnings
	@$wishlistdom->loadHTMLFile("http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/$listID?disableNav=1");
	$wishlistxpath = new DOMXPath ($wishlistdom);
	// I want to be able to limit and rearrange the list, so I turn it into an array
	$items = iterator_to_array($wishlistxpath->query("//div[starts-with(@id,'item_')]"));
	// filter $items as desired, then pull out the data
	foreach ($items as $item){
		$link = $wishlistxpath->evaluate(".//a[starts-with(@id, 'itemName')]", $item)->item(0);
		$href = $link->attributes->getNamedItem('href')->nodeValue;
		if (preg_match ('|/dp/\w+|', $href, $matches)){
			$href = "http://amazon.com$matches[0]"; // simplify the URL
		}else{
			$href = "http://amazon.com$href";
		}
		$title = $link->textContent;
		$author = $link->parentNode->nextSibling->textContent;
		$image = $wishlistxpath->query(".//img", $item)->item(0)->attributes->getNamedItem('src')->nodeValue;
		if (preg_match ('|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/[^.]+|', $image, $matches)){
			$image = $matches[0]."._SL$size.jpg";
		}else{
			$image = "http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-site/icons/no-img-sm._SL${size}_.jpg";
		}
		$image = "<img src='$image' alt='$title'><br/>";
		$ret[] = "<a href='$href'>$image$title<br/>$author</a>";
	}
	return ret;
}

Now this only gets the first page (25 items) of a wish list. I modified it to allow finding all the items on a wish list.

I use the WordPress HTML editor exclusively, with the Text Control plugin with no formatting, so the posts contain exactly the markup I want. The editor comes with "Quick Tag" buttons, that let you insert HTML tags with one click, and allows you to add custom buttons. So, for all my code samples, I want to have a <pre> button, I just create a javascript file (say, called quicktags.custom.js):

QTags.addButton('pre', 'pre', '<pre>', '</pre>\n');

And include it with the following PHP either in a plugin or my theme functions.php:

if(is_admin()){
	// it's an admin page. Add the custom editor buttons
	wp_register_script('customeditor', plugins_url('quicktags.custom.js', __FILE__), array('quicktags')); // this script depends on 'quicktags'
	wp_enqueue_script('customeditor');
}

And now I have a button that inserts <pre></pre> pairs. But there's much more you can do.

Michael Tyson had a cool idea: instead of the search results page showing an excerpt of the first words of the post, show an excerpt that contains the search terms and highlight them (say, by making them bold). I thought his method was too complex—it requires replacing your theme's search.php with a custom page, and it shows the context of every occurrence of the search terms. I thought it would be more straightforward to use the existing search page, which should be using the_excerpt to show an extract of the found page, and use the existing filters to change the text. Also, there's no need to show every occurrence of the search terms; the first ones should be fine.