WordPress formatting filters

Written at lunch time • Tags: WordPress, patches

I think WordPress needs dedicated filters to be applied on content and excerpt immediately when they are retrieved from the database, to be used by formatting filters such as Markdown.

I like Markdown, but I was having problems with how WordPress does not pass the complete article to it when the “more tag” is used, and when forming RSS descriptions. Markdown uses shorthand link tags that would normally be resolved with references placed at the end of the document. With the truncation, links were not being resolved, and what’s worse, Markdown notation was left in the resulting display.

I created a patch that fixes the problem for my current articles. However, I think multipage entries would still have this problem, so this patch is not sufficient. Also, I’m not sure if I’m causing undesirable side-effects by moving the the_excerpt filter further up in the code.

Before I start working on the filters to be applied on database retrieval, I’m waiting to hear back from WordPress developers about the approach, to avoid wasted work.

Reappearing on my home page

Written at evening time • Tags: WordPress, blogging, personal

It seems unbelievable that I have not written anything for almost eight months. Maybe it is not unbelievable to people who know me (or are waiting for an email from me), but I’ve certainly surprised myself. I must be good at self-deception.

I just got WordPress embedded to my site today. WordPress is quite flexible — I was expecting to have to modify the code, but as it stands today, there are no local modifications. The only “change” is that I’m calling the code from my custom index.php file, but that’s actually how the authors intended it to be used anyway. Once I get familiar with the new tools (such as sending in entries via email and blogrolling links) I hope to get back to more frequent updates.