workblog » Wordpress

Accessing cforms Data Directly

Ian — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:04:36 +0000

I’m using the cforms plugin on one site at the client’s request, and I needed to access some of the form’s data. Their API didn’t have what I needed, so I thought I’d just query the database directly. But when I looked at the database I didn’t see any tables for it. I thought that was kind of odd, but figured maybe they just used a bunch of wp_options fields, but I didn’t notice anything when I skimmed through the table. Then I thought maybe they were writing out to an XML file, so I looked through the file system, but found nothing. Kind of frustrated, I started skimming through the code to try and figure out where hell it was storing it’s data. I Didn’t find anything solid, so I searched their forums and on Google, and found nothing.

I came back a few days later and skimmed through the code again and eventually figured out that it was using the wp_options table, but only one field. All of the global settings, form settings and form data are stored in a single field, in a serialized format that only an MIT grad on crack could parse by hand.

I added a post to their forums to help anyone else in my position, and also to mention that maybe their approach wasn’t the most intuitive, organized or standard. After a couple of days I checked back to see if anyone had left any comments on it, but it was gone. Lame… How petty and insecure do you have to be to censor criticism?

So anyway, in the end all you really need to do is use get_option() to get an associative array of all of the data.


$cforms = get_option('cforms_settings'); // get the data
echo ''. print_r($cforms, true) .''; // output in readable format

Home page posts missing when using Pretty Permalinks for Wordpress on IIS

Ian — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:12:47 +0000

I’ve been working on a problem recently with the Pretty Permalinks solution for Wordpress on IIS. I was migrating a working Wordpress blog from one server to another and once it was on the new server the front page would come up w/ the theme, but instead of the default posts it would say “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” If I reverted to the default ?p=id permalinks everything worked fine, but not with /%postname%. With the %postname% permalinks, any sub pages would work, just not http://example.com/blog. http://example.com/blog/index.php would work, though. I think the problem is because the site was using PHP’s ISAPI module instead of FastCGI. The server I was moving to only had CGI and ISAPI, so instead of using FastCGI I just created a /blog/index.html and set IIS to redirect it to http://example.com/blog/index.php

Protecting Contact Forms From Spam

Ian — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:27:23 +0000

I’ve had several clients complain about getting spam through their contact forms. Initially, I tried checking the referrers to make sure the comments were being submitted from a browser rather than just a bot, but that didn’t help enough. Luckily, many people have created libraries for Akismet, the anti-spam service that Wordpress uses. I setup the contact form to use Bret Kuhns’ PHP4 class, which submits the comment to Akismet’s service and lets you know if it’s spam or not. There are several other libraries available, including ones for PHP5, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails and .NET2.

Blank Page when using IIS Permalink hack

Ian — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:44:13 +0000

I use Pretty Wordpress Permalinks on IIS when I need to install WP on a windows server, but on one host I ran into a problem where I would get a blank page if the post didn’t exist instead of the theme’s 404 template. But for some reason it works fine if I just echo something in wp-404-handler.php. I echoed out an HTML comment so it wouldn’t disturb the layout. Here’s my new version of the file:


";
	$qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
	$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, strpos($qs, ':80')+3);
	require_once('index.php');
?>