Call to undefined function get_user_meta()

WordPress codex tells us this function get_user_meta is not available in WordPress until version 3.0. It is replacing the now deprecated function get_usermeta which is available for earlier versions of WordPress. So I came up with a little hack to get the OpenID plugin running again for my ancient 2.9.2 version of WordPress.

Simply add these lines at the top of the plugin files admin_panels.php, server.php and server_ext.php:

/**
* Hotfix for WordPress 2.x
*/
if ( !function_exists('get_user_meta') ) {
function get_user_meta($user_id, $key, $single = false) {
if ( $single == false )
return array(get_usermeta($user_id, $key));
else
return get_usermeta($user_id, $key);
}
}

This code defines a new function get_user_meta in case it is not existing already. The new function calls the deprecated function get_usermeta and returns the result so the plugin is working as expected again.

I chose the long weekend at Corpus Christi, which is 11th to 14th of June this year. In case you don’t have anything better to do and a software or hardware project in your mind you always wanted to realize (or at least start to), drop me a line. Of course I’d love to see an appetizer in the comments.

Suggestions for a supporting programme are welcome as well.

To get TinyMCE running again, get a fresh copy of the config file and overwrite your flawed one with it. If you need to edit the config file try a different editor. WordPad did the job for me. Just to make sure you are not running into the same problem again, check the edited file with a hex editor of your choice and see that it’s not starting with EF BB BF.

So I had to rewrite some of the code to match it Zooomr’s API and to my honest surprise it worked quite well. The plugin reached sort of a first stable alpha and although not all features supported by WordPress Flickr Manager are working, the most important of them do. This is a feature matrix of WordPress Zooomr Manager:

Because I’m a bit short of spare time right now, I’m gonna release the modified plugin in it’s current state. I’d LOVE to see someone improve it or – even better – integrate both Flickr and Zooomr support into Trent’s WordPress Flickr Manager. If you need further information on the modified code or the Zooomr API, I will happily provide it for you as far as I can.

Download WordPress Zooomr Manager

Well, I managed to get it done and here it is:
http://threewheeler.feeds.kochs-online.net/jzr-threewheeler.xml

I hadn’t finished the work on this, when Adrian came up with the next task for me. He wanted to have a news feed to follow all recent posts at simsonforum.de. This was a way easier job to accomplish. Message board software does follow strict rules when compiling the pages so parsing them is quite easy because you don’t need to take all kinds of exceptions into account. So a set of simple rules is sufficient to process all the data. Using the board’s search function my PHP script downloads a list of all recently changed threads and generates the feed based on it. Because this produces quite heavy load on both involved servers (the forum’s and mine) results are cached for at least an hour before an update is made – another script using the caching code.

You can find this feed here:
http://simsonforum.feeds.kochs-online.net/simsonforum.xml

I tried to make it as compliant as possible, but lacking most of the sellers/buyers e-mail addresses and being reluctant to publish mine to all those spambots out there, the feed isn’t completely valid. Maybe I’ll come up with a solution to that problem someday.

An optional “items=” URI query string may be used to define the maximum number of feed entries to be generated.

Well, now there is. I wrote a little parser that converts all news entries into a nice, (almost) well-formed RSS 2.0 feed. You can find it under http://kuttner.feeds.kochs-online.net/kuttner.xml. Using the optional query string “items=” you can specify how many of the latest news items the feed should contain. Default is 10.

Finally I discovered a very elegant way by myself: Because WordPress stores all settings of a blog – including articles, comments and users – in the MySQL tables defined in the file wp-config.php, it would be sufficient to use different configuration files depending on the used subdomain. So I modified the wp-config.php to simply evaluate the used subdomain and load a configuration based on the result. Which looks like this:

<?php
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'blog1.example.com')
{
require('wp-config.blog1.php');
}
else if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'blog2.example.com')
{
require('wp-config.blog2.php');
}
?>

The files wp-config.blog1.php and wp-config.blog2.php are just standard WordPress configuration scripts without a single line of extra code. Using different prefixes for the MySQL tables it even would be sufficient to have a single database to store all blogs. As simple as it is, as low-maintenance it is too, because WordPress updates don’t overwrite the new wp-config.php or the newly created configuration files. At the same time all blogs benefit from the update, of course.

[Update: It just caught my eye, that you might run into difficulties if you are running multiple blogs with the same plugin. If an upgrade of that plugin requires an update of the plugin's database table, you have to pay attention to update all of those tables (for every blog using the plugin)!]

The installation is quite easy as well, if you follow the given instructions. A bit more of a hassle was the internationalization of the WordPress Theme Dust 3.17 I use. Every language needs to have a separate file translating all the text shown. PHP functions inside the code of themes or plugins replace this text with the translated text in a language the reader can choose. In case you have to add these functions by yourself, the Language Switcher plugin page provides instructions for this task, which allowed me to internationalize the Quotes Collection plugin you can see to the right. In a few days I’m gonna send the changed to code to the plugin’s author Srini who I already contacted last week, so he can publish an internationalized version of his great plugin.