A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

My PHP fu is predictably pitiful. I need to extract text from a free standing block of html and make sure I exclude stuff that’s text inside an anchor tag.

Now, to do so with significant alacrity do I invoke a “real” parser? Or do I just play regex games?

Meh.

So I’ve been grinding on the WordPressWikiPlugin and it’s in pretty good shape.  In fact, it’s in such good shape that I’m going to use this post as the documentation page for a while and see how that works out.

Currently the feature set (meager as it is) looks like this:

The WordPressWikiPlugin is a rendering time filter.  It scans the content of a post looking for WikiWords (two or more words capitalized, jammed together, no consecutive caps.)  When it finds them it does two important things:

1. Scans the database for posts with a title matching that WikiWord and replaces that text with a link to the post in question.
2. IF the page does NOT exist and a blog author is logged in, it uses the original WikiWiki convention of placing a link with the text ‘?’ after the WIkiWord.  If that link is clicked it takes you to the CreateNewPost page with that title filled in.

It doesn’t do any additional formatting, since WordPress handles that relatively well.  I will probably add some complex external linking stuff as time goes on.

CurrentIssues:

• There is a perfect lack of documentation of the “User Level” field of the user data structure.  So the “if an author is logged in” is a bit wonky at best.  It DOES detect if someone is logged in and if their user level is 10.  But I think that’s the admin level.  Tough to tell with no documentation.  I’m going to have to experiment with this.

And no, it’s not uploaded to this site just yet.  I have a bit more testing to do on my local installation before it’s ready to be released into the wild.

UPDATE: Ok, I’ve activated it on this blog (dogfooding and all) but I don’t have so many things linking back and forth yet, so it’s a little sparse. That’s ok. Notice that the link in the first line does indeed bring you to this post though. When I look at it, the missing links do have the “page does not exist” question mark link, which works really well. So I’m pretty happy with that so far.

I’m trying to decide what the path between here and public release is. There’s not really so much I want in the 0.1 version that’s not there now. I have to fix the user level thing. But it might be ready to go after that.