Tag: WordPress

Somewhere around version 2.8.4 or something, WordPress introduced a "feature" to focus the username form and wipe the username. I dont want to type my username every time again and again and again. So what can we do to kill wp_attempt_focus? There is no hook available to disable that part of the code, but we can use some dirty tricks:

I created the following 'plugin' to get rid of it:
function kill_wp_attempt_focus($in){
return preg_replace('/function wp_attempt_focus/','function wp_attempt_focus(){} function wp_attempt_focus_killed',$in);
}
if($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]=='/wp-login.php'){
ob_start('kill_wp_attempt_focus');
}

It grabs the output of /wp-login.php, renames the original wp_attempt_focus() to wp_attempt_focus_killed() and creates a new empty function to prevent errors.

WordPress has this great filtering system which allows you to write plugins. Yesterday, I was writing a plugin that has the ability for other plugins to change it's behaviour.

For the particular functionality, it would be very nice to use two parameters, which should both be changable.

Standard PHP

In standard PHP, you could do:

function doit($in, &$var2){
    $var2=true;
    return $in+1;
}
 
$changed=false;
echo doit(1,$changed);
echo $changed;

Pass by reference: Not working with WordPress

The WordPress apply_filter and add_filter functions do not allow variable passing by reference. Therefore, the following code will not work.

function doit($in, &$var2){
    $var2=true;
    return $in+1;
}
 
add_filter('myfilter','doit',10,2);
$changed=false;
echo apply_filters('myfilter',1,$changed);
echo $changed;

Dirty solution

You could use $GLOBALS to overcome this problem. I would not recommend this method, as it's not flexible, not safe to re-use and requires the function and the main code to be synchronized.

function doit($in){
    global $changed;
    $changed=true;
    return $in+1;
}
 
add_filter('myfilter','doit');
$changed=false;
echo apply_filters('myfilter',1);
echo $changed;

The good solution

The correct solution to this problem, is to combine all variabled in one array, and use this array as the first variable.

Example 1: For a few parameters

function doit($in){
    list($in,$var2)=$in;
    $var2=true;
    return array($in,$var);
}
 
add_filter('myfilter','doit');
$changed=false;
list($in,$changed)=apply_filters('myfilter',array(1,$changed));
echo $in;
echo $changed;

Example 2: For more complex situations

function doit($in){
    $in['changed']=true;
    $in['in']+=1;
    return $in;
}
 
add_filter('myfilter','doit');
$changed=false;
$in=1;
extract(  apply_filters('myfilter',compact('in','changed'))  );
echo $in;
echo $changed;

This last method may impose a security risk if you use third party plugins.