Oh Hai ?

 

Rohan Victor Pendergast, born 18:33 on 10/5/15.

Boy and Bear seemed to be what got him moving, so here they are now.

(PS: Should you ever find yourself in such a position, I highly recommend finding a hospital that gives the parents champagne for having a babby on Mother’s Day.)

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

Before 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!