Update January 16, 2012: Thanks to those who attended the presentation at Wordcamp. I have uploaded a revised set of presentation slides in PDF format that includes screen captures of the demonstration portions. If anyone has more questions, please leave comments on this post and I will try and answer them. blog-search-using-solr (PDF; 1.8 MB)

Update January 2012:  I am pleased to be presenting "Blog Search Using Solr" at Wordcamp Victoria 2012. As of today there may still be tickets available, so hurry and get yours now if you haven't already. See you there!

Original topic description: If you discover the default search in WordPress is too basic, you may benefit from installing a Solr for WordPress plugin. Enabling the power of the Lucene searching engine implemented in the Solr server sounds daunting, even to me. The search technology used by Digg, Netflix and Acquia (and others: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/PublicServers) could be yours. As a result of using it, you will discover whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Features like faceted search, keyword highlighting, and more are just the start. Once you see the plugin in action, you will understand the untapped search potential it provides.

You will find this blog using Solr for WordPress right now, and it is still a work in progress (so hopefully it still works when you try it).

I have a short code snippet to share, if you want to do simple date calculations using the Smarty template engine. As a very short preamble, I've used Smarty off-and-on for eight years, and it's great. I find its simplicity and power outweigh bloated frameworks on a regular basis.

If you need the date for tomorrow, you can do it in two ways.

The first way is to create the variable in the "code behind", assign it to the template and then you can use it:

In PHP:

$smarty->assign('tomorrow', strtotime('+1 day'));

In Smarty template (or use a date format of your choice):

{$tomorrow|date_format:"%Y-%m-%d"}

The second way is done in the template alone. This is useful if you did not, or did not want to, assign a variable in the code behind. It is also useful if you wanted to use multiple dates (tomorrow, the next day, next week, etc.), or you could even use it in a loop:

In Smarty template:

{math equation=x+y x=$smarty.now y=86400 assign=tomorrow}
{$tomorrow|date_format:"%Y-%m-%d"}

This uses the UNIX timestamp value of $smarty.now, and adds 86,400 seconds to it. Unfortunately you cannot easily add exactly one month - or one year - using this method because each month or year could have a different number of seconds in it.

In future, I plan to say a little more about Smarty and its virtues.

As a follow-up to my earlier post, recover a FileZilla password online, it only applies to version 2 of FileZilla. FileZilla 3 now does not obsfucate the passwords you save in the software, and relies on the operating system security to protect the plain text passwords (there's a scary thought).

At the time, I didn't quickly find an online form that decrypted a password nice and quickly, though since then I found at least one online form implemented in JavaScript. I have also found other versions of the decryptor function ported to PHP, so I'm adding mine below. It's a complete rewrite of the function in FileZilla. I think it's more staightforward than other solutions, but maybe that's just because I'm familiar with it because... I wrote it. I'll let you, the reader, be the judge of how readable it is. If you get a reason to use it somewhere, let me know.

function filezillaDecrypt ($password) {
  $key = "FILEZILLA1234567890ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
  $keyArray = str_split($key, 1);
  $clearText = '';

  // Remove everything but digits from the password
  $password = preg_replace('/\D/', '', $password);
  // Only continue if a password was supplied
  if($password != '')
  {
    // Split the password into groups of three characters
    $passwordArray = str_split($password, 3);
    $passwordLength = count($passwordArray);
    $keyLength =  count($keyArray);

    $i = 0;
    // The fun decryption happens below, using bitwise operator
    foreach($passwordArray as $char)
    {
      $keyIndex = ($passwordLength+$i)%$keyLength;
      $clearText .= chr($char ^ ord($keyArray[$keyIndex]));
      $i++;
    }
  }
  return $clearText;
}

The elegance of code is still important, for those of us who read and write code. If you use WYSIWYG editors or a code generating IDE then your code will never be elegant, but I digress.

The problem I wanted to solve today was to change the case of strings. For example, to change 'HELLO WORLD' to 'Hello World'. My challenge is to see whether I can do it with MySQL and just the built-in string functions. If it's not possible, it's no matter. I can fall back on a simple PHP script to do this one-time conversion very easily. This is because I've already written code in PHP to do this in the application for all new records that are created, and I just want to change the existing data stored in the table.

Googling a possible MySQL solution, I came across an article on Experts Exchange for the exact same problem, and they also agreed PHP is a better option than using just SQL. What surprised me on reading it was how inelegant the suggested solution was. Let me illustrate:

Their solution:

$field = strtolower($field);
$array=explode(" ",$field);
for ($i=0;$i<count($array);$i++)
{
  substr($array[$i],0,1) = strtoupper(substr($array[$i],0,1));
}
$field = implode(" ",$array);

My solution:

$field = ucwords(strtolower($field));

Which would you rather write? And more importantly, which would you rather read if you had to read someone else's code? Now my solution does have one important difference: I reviewed the PHP manual to see if there was a built-in function that capitalizes the first letter of each word. In simple terms it satisfies the DRY principle, code reuse and using as little code as possible. Sometimes all it takes is a little time and thought to create something so much more beautiful, elegant and readable - time well spent.