JSON Encoding in WordPress 4.1

Earlier in the year, we noticed a problem with JSON in WordPress. The JSON spec very explicitly notes that it only supports UTF-8, whereas WordPress can use any character set that MySQL supports. So, for sites that didn’t use MySQL’s utf8 or utf8mb4 character sets, this generally presented itself as json_encode() returning false; which resulted in either invalid JSON being returned from an Ajax request, or a JavaScript error in some embedded code.

To fix this, WordPress 4.1 now includes a shiny new function that we recommend for all plugins and themes:

wp_json_encode()

Usage for wp_json_encode() is identical to json_encode(). It works by trying a json_encode(), then checking if that encoded properly. If it failed, wp_json_encode() will go through whatever lump of data you passed to it, convert it to UTF-8, then return it as JSON.

Have fun with WordPress 4.1, and see you next year for new and exciting functionality coming to a WordPress install near you!

Let’s have a chat about Reddit

Reddit AlienBefore I start, I should warn you that I’ll be commenting on some of the awful things that Reddit implicitly condones, which include sex crimes, animal abuse and what can euphemistically be described as “disrespectful” behaviour towards the dead. I know these topics can be traumatic for people, so if you’d prefer to avoid reading them, please close this window.

Continue reading “Let’s have a chat about Reddit”

The Next Adventure

Over my past few years at Automattic, I’ve worked on a bunch of different teams and projects – VideoPress, the WordPress iOS app, various Social projects, and most recently, o2. I even took a few months to work on WordPress core, helping build the auto-update functionality that we now see rolling out security updates within hours of their release.

The few months I spent working on WordPress core made me realise something – there’s a lot more I have to contribute. So, with the WordPress 4.0 RC out the door, I’m super excited to be moving to my next project – working on WordPress core full time!

Automattic naturally puts a lot of people-hours into WordPress, with over 30 of us contributing to WordPress 3.9. I’m looking forward to being a bigger part of that, and giving more back to WordPress community!

My Media Server

Over the years, I’ve experimented with a bunch of different methods for media servers, and I think I’ve finally arrived at something that works well for me. Here are the details:

The Server

An old Dell Zino HD I had lying around, running Windows 7. Pretty much any server will be sufficient, this is just the one I had available. Dell doesn’t sell micro-PCs anymore, so just choose your favourite brand that sells something small and with low power requirements. The main things you need from it are a reasonable processor (fast enough to handle transcoding a few video streams in at least realtime), and lots of HD space. I don’t bother with RAID, because I won’t be sad about losing videos that I can easily re-download (the internet is my backup service).

Downloading

I make no excuses, nor apologies for downloading movies and TV shows in a manner that some may describe as involving “copyright violation”.

If you’re in a similar position, there are plenty of BitTorrent sites that allow you register and add videos to a personal RSS feed. Most BitTorrent clients can then subscribe to that feed, and automatically download anything added to it. Some sites even allow you to subscribe to collections, so you can subscribe to a TV show at the start of the season, and automatically get new episodes as soon as they arrive.

For your BitTorrent client, there are two features you need: the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed, and the ability to automatically run a command when the download finishes. I’ve found qBittorrent to be a good option for this.

Sorting

Once a file is downloaded, you need to sort them. By using a standard file layout, you have a much easier time of loading them into your media server later. For automatically sorting your files when they download, nothing compares to the amazing FileBot, which will automatically grab info about the download from TheMovieDB or TheTVDB, and pass it onto your media server. It’s entirely scriptable, but you don’t need to worry about that, because there’s already a great script to do all this for you, called Advanced Media Server (AMC). The initial setup for this was a bit annoying, so here’s the command I use (you can tweak the file locations for your own server, and you’ll need to fix the %n if you use something other than qBittorent):

Media Server

Plex is the answer to this question. It looks great, it’ll automatically download extra information about your media, and it has really nice mobile apps for remote control. Extra features include offline syncing to your mobile device, so you can take your media when you’re flying, and Chromecast support so you can watch everything on your TV.

The Filebot command above will automatically tell Plex that a new file has arrived, which is great for if you choose to have your media stored on a NAS (Plex may not be able to automatically watch a directory on a NAS for when new files are added).

Backup

Having a local server is great for keeping a local backup of things that do matter – your photos and documents, for example. I use CrashPlan to sync my most important things to my server, so I have a copy immediately available if my laptop dies. I also use CrashPlan’s remote backup service to keep an offsite backup of everything.

Conclusion

While I’ve enjoyed figuring out how to get this all working smoothly, I’d love to be able to pay a monthly fee for an Rdio or Spotify style service, where I get the latest movies and TV shows as soon as they’re available. If you’re wondering what your next startup should be, get onto that.

WordPress and UTF-8

Update: WordPress 4.2 has full UTF-8 support! There’s no need to upgrade manually any more. ?

For many years, MySQL had only supported a small part of UTF-8, a section commonly referred to as plane 0, the “Basic Multilingual Plane”, or the BMP. The UTF-8 spec is divided into “planes“, and plane 0 contains the most commonly used characters. For a long time, this was reasonably sufficient for MySQL’s purposes, and WordPress made do with this limitation.

It has always been possible to store all UTF-8 characters in the latin1 character set, though latin1 has shortcomings. While it recognises the connection between upper and lower case characters in Latin alphabets (such as English, French and German), it doesn’t recognise the same connection for other alphabets. For example, it doesn’t know that ‘Ω’ and ‘ω’ are the upper and lower-case versions of the Greek letter omega. This creates problems for searching text, when you generally want to match characters regardless of their case.

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With the release of MySQL 5.5, however, the utf8mb4 character set was added, and a whole new world opened up. Plane 1 contains many practical characters from historic scripts, music notation and mathematical symbols. It also contains fun characters, such an Emoji and various game symbols. Plane 2 is dedicated to CJK Ideographs, an attempt to create a common library of Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters.

For many websites, being able to use Emoji without installing an extra plugin is an excellent reason to switch your WordPress database to utf8mb4, but unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. MySQL still has a few more limitations that cause problems with  utf8mb4.

Without further ado, here’s how to configure MySQL, so that WordPress can use utf8mb4. If you don’t have the ability to configure your MySQL server directly, you should speak to your host. If they don’t want to, it’s probably time to look for a new host.

Upgrade MySQL

You need to be running MySQL 5.5.14, or higher. If you’re not already running at least MySQL 5.5 (ideally 5.6), you should be doing that anyway, as they provides significant performance and stability improvements over previous versions. For help with upgrading MySQL, check out the MySQL manual.

Configure MySQL

Before we convert your tables, we need to configure MySQL correctly.

In your my.cnf file, add the following settings to the [mysqld] section. Remember to double check that you’re not duplicating settings in your my.cnf file – if any of these options are already set to something different, you’ll need to change that setting, rather than add a new setting.

You’ll need to restart your MySQL server after adding these settings.

Use InnoDB

Next, convert your WordPress tables to InnoDB and utf8mb4:

You’ll need to run these two queries for each WordPress table, I used wp_posts as an example. This is a bit tedious, but the good news is that you’ll only ever need to run them once. A word of warning, you should be prepared for some downtime if you have particularly large tables.

Configure WordPress

Finally, you can tell WordPress to use utf8mb4 by changing your DB_CHARSET setting in your wp-config.php file.

And there you have it. I know, it’s not pretty. I’d really like to add this to WordPress core so you don’t need to go through the hassle, but currently only a very small percentage of WordPress sites are using MySQL 5.5+ and InnoDB – in order to justify it, we need to see lots of sites upgrading! You can head on over to the core ticket for further reading, too – login and click the star at the top to show your support, there’s no need to post “+1” comments. 🙂

Oh, and a final note on Emoji – Chrome support is pretty broken. There’s an extension to add Emoji to Chrome, but it interferes with WordPress’ post editor. If you really want to use Emoji in your posts, Safari or Firefox would be better options.