Manipulate Wordpress generated content before it is displayed - wordpress

I'm a Wordpress virgin, thrown into something I don't know much about, just trying to help. I do know a few things about php.
I would like to know if somehow in wordpress (not via an update vulnerable hack) it is possible to see and manipulate the full page content, before it is displayed ?
I would like to check a few things in the page meta-data tags, cross reference that with data in the body on various places, make a few changes here and there if needed and THEN hand it over to Wordpress again.
Some sort of callback, at the last moment, with the full page's content in a php variable.
Maybe this is simply not possible ?
Hope to learn something. Cheers.

Related

How to insert html not from database and not using the iframe?

I wish basically to store my pages or product long descriptions in txt or html files in folders, not in database.
Is there any simple and easy way to do so, instead of iframe which does not work quite well and does not even display the content in the page code so it is not indexed by search engines as it should.
I've read about web components html imports but that seem to be so much complicated and does not really satisfy my needs.
I have not found any plugin to do so, maybe there is one.
I know I wish to make wordpress flat file cms, but maybe there is some new easy way to simply insert pages from anywhere but database might be via shortcode or just an url.
I put it in tags, should say more clear, it is about wordpress on host. As it stores all pages and data in database and I realized bigger database is slower it works. I use caching plugin but I also wish to speed up admin panel and dynamic uncacheble content. My idea is to slim down the database as much as possible and in my woocommerce store most of the data is long description. So the best way would be to inject the long description via shortcode that would take html content from anywhere else but database. I need html, not just some text to insert. This way I would cache these product pages anyway but the database would stay way slimmer and all the dynamic content would go way faster.
In PHP you can use the function file_get_contents, which will display the contents of a file (but not parse it as PHP, which is more secure for obvious reasons).
So you could try something like this if you wanted to account for a page not found message:
function example_get_content($file_url){
if(file_exists($file_url)){
return file_get_contents($file_url);
}
else{
return 'Sorry, this page could not be found'
}
}
And then in your template use
echo example_get_content('http://example.com/my_text_file.txt');

WordPress - add Database driven tables

I'm just trying to move one of my old php sites to wordpress. As part of the site I have 'top tables' e.g. top 10 cars, listing their features etc. At the moment that all comes from a database and the HTML is generated from the data.
So if a car soon gets a hybrid engine I just check that in the database and my web site table updates to reflect that.
This all works fine. I just don't know where to start when trying to implement something like this in wordpress. I want to keep the WP header, footer, nav... and put my table in to the content area.
Someone recommended simply copying the current generated HTML in to a new post and editing the HTML when anything changes, this sounds like a quick solution but there must be a better way of doing this.
Ideally I would want to keep my current data input pages (and separate database) for all of this 'table data' and present the out put as a post.
If anyone can point me in the right direction (key words I should search for, a guide) that would be great.
Depending on your usecase, you'll usually want to use a static page template:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Page_Templates
Or shortcodes:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Shortcode_API

Force drupal to return 200

Is it possible to link to a page that doesn't necessarily exists as drupal content and not get a 404 page not found.
Example:
link: example.com/search/projects?content="words"
There is no search/projects node or page so obviously it returns page not found although I can still run my queries inside that page.
Views would probably be a solution here but I sort of need more control on the outputted html and don't feel like going in to the views templates.
I guess my question is if it is possible to mimic views feature of creating pages which will aggregate content but don't have content theme selfs.
Is this possible at all? It seems pretty standard right? I have no idea ho to do it thought...
You can create a menu item for search/projects and return anything you'd like.
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/developer%21hooks%21core.php/function/hook_menu/6
should get you started.

Find every instance of a CSS id/class across a whole site

Before making a CSS change that might possibly have unintended consequences, what's a good way to find where else on the whole site (not just this page) that id or class is used? (It doesn't have to be exhaustive, and semi-manual processes are ok, too.)
For a bit of context, it's a Joomla-based site with a lot of content, and I'm not yet familiar with most of it. The id in question has a two letter name, and I have no idea where else it might be used. I don't have direct access to the server for any grep-like approaches.
The only technique I can think of is using Stylish to make an obvious change to that one selector, and browsing the site for a bit to see where it pops up.
The easiest way would be a local grep, but since you don't have access to the server, try downloading it locally using wget:
wget -r -l --domains=http://yourdomain.com http://yourdomain.com
That'll recursively retrieve pages from your domain to an infinite depth, but only following links to pages within your domain.
Once it's on disk, do a local grep and you're golden.
I use unused-css.com for this sort of thing. You simply put in your webpage, and it will look through the whole site (incl. login) and give you the CSS that you actually are using.
I've found it to be 95% correct - but it only doesn't pick up on things like some CSS browser hacks and some errors (ie. the CSS only displays after an error), so it should work fine for this.
You could also check the original template (assuming the template is a commercial one) to see where the id perhaps should be (they usually lay everything out in their demo template), but unused-css won't tell you exactly where it is used, only if it is or not. For that, I'd start with a view-source -> find on the major pages, and then try other mentioned solutions.
Get the whole site's source tree into an IDE like NetBeans or Eclipse and then do a recursive search for id="theid" on the root folder.
If this is not possible, how are you updating the CSS?
Assuming you don't want to do the grep approach:
Is the ID in question appearing in the actual content area of the page, or in the 'surrounding' areas? If it seems like it's not part of the content, but rather appears in a template, you could search the template files for it. As you're updating the CSS, I'm going to assume you can at least get a hold of the template files. Many text editors/IDE's will let you do a 'global search'. I'd load the template files in TextMate (my texteditor of choice) and do a "search in project" for the particular ID.
That will at least give you a semblance of an idea of where in the site that ID shows up. No, it won't be every 'page', but you'll know what kind of page it appears on (which, with a CMS, is really what you're after).
If the ID in question appears in the content, that is, it was hand-entered by content creators, you'll have to go another route. Do you have access to the database? If you can get a dump of the database (I think Joomla! is MySQL based), you can open the sql in something like Sequel Pro and do a search in the content records for that ID.
This is not actually as hard as it sounds. First place to look the index.php file for the template. This file should be pretty small without a ton of code unless the template is from a developer that uses a template framework. If the ID is in there, then it will show up on every page in the website since this is the foundation that every page is built on.
If you don't find it in there, then you need to determine whether it is displaying in a module position or in the component area. You should be able to tell the difference by looking at the index.php file from the template.
If it's in a module position, then the ID should only show up in instances of that particular module.
If it's in the component area, then it should only display in any pages being created by the component. That does leave the possibility of it affecting many elements you don't want changed. But there is a solution for that. you can use the page class suffix in a menu item to add a unique id/class to the page you want to change (depends on your template). With that unique suffix you can create a specific selector that will only affect the pages you want to change.

How to serve different cached versions of a page depending on a cookie in Drupal?

The task is relatively straightforward:
A Drupal website displays a list of articles with thumbnails. Some visitors would like to view it without images by clicking on a button/link and have that preference saved.
e.g. http://patterntap.com/collections/index/
The problem is all visitors are anonymous and given certain traffic, page cache is enabled.
My idea was to use some simple JavaScript to set a cookie, refresh the page and depending on the cookie values (or its presence/absence) display or hide the images.
Except Drupal serves cached pages quite early and the only quick way to modify the cached version that I could find is by hacking includes/bootstrap.inc and add a custom class to the body classes then hide the images with css.
A very wrong approach, I know. But I wonder if there is a way to save different versions of a page and serve the correct version?
Edit:
need to keep the same uri
the js to show/hide the images without reload and set the cookie is already in place
hook_boot() is not really called for cached pages, so can't do it via custom module
.htaccess mods?
Edit/solution:
In the end went with Rimian's suggestion. But it is possible to accomplish the task using our own cache.inc implementation as seen in the Mobile Tools module. Specifically, by extending cache.inc and updating settings.php to include
$conf['page_cache_fastpath'] = FALSE;
$conf['cache_inc'] = 'path/to/my/module/my_module_cache.inc';
So let me get this right. You wanna hide some images on a cached page if the user chooses to?
Why don't you write some jQuery or javascript and load that into your cached page with all the rest of the document?
Then, the client/browser would decide to run your script and hide images depending on some parameters you passed along with the request to that page or in the cookie? The script gets cached and only runs when you call it.
If you were hacking the bootstrap for something like that you'd really need to be rethinking what you were doing. Crazy! :)
Also take a look at cache_get and cache_set:
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes--cache.inc/6
I'm not sure I 100% understand what you are trying to do but here are my thoughts. One of your root problems is that you are trying to access what is essentially different content at the same uri.
If this is truly what you want to do, then Rimian's suggestion of checking out chache_get and chache_set may be worthwhile.
Personally, it seems cleaner to me to have your "with thumbnails" and "without thumbnails" be accessed via different uri's. Depending on exactly what you are wanting to accomplish, a GET variable my be an even better way to go. With either of these two options you would hide or show your thumbnails at the theme layer. Pages with different paths or get variables would get cached separately.
If you want the visitor to be able to switch views without a page reload, then jQuery and a cookie would probably suite your needs. This wouldn't require a page reload and switching back and forth would be quite simple.

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