Right…I must have forgotten to install sendmail, because mail wasn't working for WordPress. First, to verify that sendmail wasn't working I ran this PHP script (thanks to phpeasystep.com)

<? // send e-mail to ... $to="me@localhost"; // Your subject $subject="Test"; // From $header="from: your name <your email>"; // Your message $message="Hello rn"; $message.="This is testrn"; $message.="Test again "; // send email $sentmail = mail($to,$subject,$message,$header); // if your email succesfully sent if($sentmail){ echo "Email Has Been Sent ."; } else { echo "Cannot Send Email "; } ?>

That confirmed it. And the fix was easy:

apt-get install sendmail
Doing this exposed a flaw in my hosts file and ZYXware.com had the answer

sudo gedit /etc/hosts
…
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.1.1 zyxware01.localdomain zyxware01
…
If you have a static IP you can replace 127.0.1.1 with your static IP.
…

So, now mail works from php and, more importantly, WordPress.

[EDIT]
Sheesh…Ubuntu is picky. Here's (almost) exactly what I have for the top half of my hosts file
127.0.0.1 myhostname localhost.localdomain localhost ::1 myhostname localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 127.0.1.1 myhostname 192.168.1.100 myhostname.mydomain.com

The spaces are actually tabs, I don't know if it matters.

I also don't know what is needed and what is not, but I mimicked this layout on a new server and it worked; the MTA blah-blah service no longer takes forever and sendmail works nice and quickly.
[/EDIT]

preg_replace("([.*])Us", "", $excerpt)

The 'Us' at the end makes the search Ungreedy (U) and ignores newlines (s).

By the way, I think preg_replace() is one of the worst function names I've come across in a public language/API; but maybe that's just me.

I couldn't embed thumbnail sizes on my new WordPress install on my new Ubuntu server; I could only embed the original size (which was 3072×2048). The options to embed other sizes were just grayed out. It turns out that the default LAMP install doesn't include php-gd, the graphics library that creates thumbnails. Well… I guess that's easy enough to fix:

apt-get install php5-gd

Weather Underground has a nice XML API to get at their data, and I recently used it to create a small weather page for my friend's new HTC Hero. This little page turned into a learning exercise for me on both the Weather Underground API and SimpleXMLElement in PHP.

SimpleXMLElement: What a great way to parse XML! I've been avoiding XML in my code up until now because it's so freaking clunky to implement. But with this I'm eager for the next chance to use XML. I can sum it up in two lines of code (long lines, bear with me):

$xml_current_cond = new SimpleXMLElement(file_get_contents("http://api.wunderground.com/auto/wui/geo/WXCurrentObXML/index.xml?query=80301")); echo $xml_current_cond->temp_f;

So you see, I read the XML data into $xml_current_cond, and then I access the data through $xml_current_cont->[XML_TAG_NAMES]. It really couldn't be much simpler.

While I'm no fan of the spaghetti code that you get from writing PHP, I also realize that it doesn't matter. Everyone writes PHP, and SimpleXMLElement is a good example of why they use PHP.

Now that I know how to do it, I'm getting fed up with LAMP as a web platform. I much prefer Windows. (What can I say? I'm a Windows guy!) And I recently stumbled into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It makes installing WordPress embarrassingly simple. Just run the installer and it does everything for you. For instance: I made a website in IIS, then ran the installer and it…

• installed PHP,
• installed MySQL,
• installed WordPress,
• and installed a couple other bits and pieces for IIS.

From what I understand, it would have installed IIS if it wasn't already installed. And that's not all it installs either: Joomla, Umbraco, phpBB, DotNetNuke, MS SQL Express, and a lot of others. It's great and, more importantly, it works. With the Web Platform Installer I've gone from barely being able to get WordPress to work on Windows/IIS to stupidly simple installs that take about 5 minutes. Literally! It's great!

So, I downloaded the FastCGI extension from Microsoft, installed it, then added this hander for PHP files on the website of interest:

C:WINDOWSsystem32inetsrvfcgiext.dll

After that I re-ran the PHP installer and told it to use FastCGI. It worked perfectly. Now my phpbb3 is performing much faster, even though the web server still isn't as powerful as it should be. It works; that's all that matters.

PHP5 doesn't automatically enable itself on IIS6. You have to do it by hand for each website you create. The first step, and I'm not positive it's necessary, is to create a new Web Service extension and allow it.

Go into IIS, Local Computer, and right click on Web Service Extensions and choose Add new web service extension. After this choose a descriptive name (like PHP x.x.x) and add php-cgi.exe for "Required files." Click OK. Then allow the new service that you created.

Then, on the website of interest, you have to add the application extension for PHP. Right click on the website and choose properties. Navigate to the Home Directory tab and click the Configuration button. From there, under Application Extensions click the Add button and add the .php extension and the php-cgi.exe to the fields listed. Click OK, click OK and that should do it.

Don't forget to add index.php to your list of default documents for the site.

PHP Notice: Use of undefined constant php – assumed ‘php’ in…

Basically it means that the php ending tag should be ?> and not php?>

Thanks, ClickFire, for the PHP help