<?php  wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li=&exclude=6'); ?>

Navigation items that have submenus (css dropdowns) are still clickable, but for this website they have no content. I wanted a way to make those items unclickable. I was unable to find any way with wordpress’ api, but I did find a way with jquery.

$('#navigation > li > a').filter(
    function() {
        return $(this).siblings().length == 1
    }
).attr( 'href', '#' ).attr( 'onClick', 'return false' );

This sets the href to ‘#’, and onClick to ‘return false’ of all navigation links that have submenus. Make sure to change the navigation id to reflect your site.

To illustrate this I’m going to show you a template written in a template engine, and then in PHP.

Here’s an example from the Smarty website

<table border="0" width="300">
    <tr>
        <th colspan="2" bgcolor="#d1d1d1">Guestbook Entries (<a href="{$SCRIPT_NAME}?action=add">add</a>)</th>
    </tr>
    {foreach from=$data item="entry"}
        <tr bgcolor="{cycle values="#dedede,#eeeeee" advance=false}">
            <td>{$entry.Name|escape}</td>        
            <td align="right">{$entry.EntryDate|date_format:"%e %b, %Y %H:%M:%S"}</td>        
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2" bgcolor="{cycle values="#dedede,#eeeeee"}">{$entry.Comment|escape}</td>
        </tr>
    {foreachelse}
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2">No records</td>
        </tr>
    {/foreach}
</table>

Here’s an example using PHP. e() is an escaping function you write yourself.

<table border="0" width="300">
    <tr>
        <th colspan="2" bgcolor="#d1d1d1">Guestbook Entries (<a href="{$SCRIPT_NAME}?action=add">add</a>)</th>
    </tr>
    <?php if ( count( $data ) ): ?>
    <?php foreach( $data as $entry ): ?>
        <tr bgcolor="<?php if( $i++ % 2 ): ?>#dedede<?php else: ?>#eeeeee<?php endif; ?>">
            <td><?= e( $entry['name'] ) ?></td>        
            <td align="right"><?= date( $entry['entryDate'], 'e b Y H M S' ) ?></td>        
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2" bgcolor="<?php if( $i % 2 ): ?>#dedede<?php else: ?>#eeeeee<?php endif; ?>"><?= e( $entry['comment'] ) ?></td>
        </tr>
     <?php endforeach; ?>
     <?php else: ?>
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2">No records</td>
        </tr>
     <?php endif; ?>
</table>

As you can see there is only 2 added lines of code. I had to add an if statement to account for smarty’s foreachelse. No added layer. No extra work for the interpreter. Just as readable (unless you’re a developer, then it will be more readable)

In closing read this post on the sitepoint forums. Pay particular attention to Voostind’s replies (#1, #2, #3)

index.php?dosearch=true&page=1&search[co_name]=best+buy&search[address1]=12+main+st&search[city]=bridgeport&search[state_province_abbrev]=ct

…and wanted to create a link that would go to page=2, but keep the rest of the query string?

This recently happened to me so I created a function. Normally this would be a trivial call to array_merge, but I needed it to handle single-level arrays too.

I present to you mergeQuery

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function mergeQuery( $link ) {
 
	parse_str( $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], $qry );
	parse_str( $link, $lnk );
	$mergedQry = array_merge( $qry, $lnk );
 
	foreach( $mergedQry as $var => &$val ) {
 
		if ( is_array( $val ) ) {
			foreach ( $val as $val_k => $val_v ) {
				$finalQry .= sprintf( '%s[%s]=%s&', $var, $val_k, $val_v );
			}
		}
		else {
			$finalQry .= sprintf( '%s=%s&', $var, $val );
		}
 
	}
 
	return '?' . rtrim( $finalQry, '&' );
 
}

Any variables you supply will overwrite variables from the current query string.

Examples

<a href="<?= mergeQuery( 'page=1&id=23' ) ?>">
<a href="otherpage.php<?= mergeQuery( "page=5&id={$data['id']}" ) ?>">

Maybe someone else will find some use for it

With fetchAll() you can pass ( PDO:FETCH_CLASS, ‘class_name’ ) directly

$sql = sprintf( 'select * from %s where prod_id=:prod_id', TABLE );
$findProducts = $this->db->prepare( $sql );
$findProduct->execute();
$products = $findProducts->fetchAll( PDO::FETCH_CLASS, 'Product' );

But with fetch() you must initiate it with setFetchMode

$sql = sprintf( 'select * from %s where prod_id=:prod_id', TABLE );
$findProduct = $this->db->prepare( $sql );
$findProduct->setFetchMode( PDO::FETCH_CLASS, 'Product' );
$findProduct->execute();
$product = $findProduct->fetch( PDO::FETCH_CLASS );

Apparently you have to set the character set of the connection as well via:

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SET NAMES 'utf-8'

SET NAMES indicates what character set the client will use to send SQL statements to the server. Thus, SET NAMES ‘cp1251′ tells the server “future incoming messages from this client are in character set cp1251.” It also specifies the character set that the server should use for sending results back to the client. (For example, it indicates what character set to use for column values if you use a SELECT statement.)

Great!

The only issue remaining was the fact that I didn’t want to have to run that query on every page.

I use PDO, and I found out you can use the driver_options argument of PDO to run an initial command.

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$dsn = sprintf( 'mysql:dbname=%s;host=%s', DB_NAME, DB_HOST );
$driver_options = array( PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET NAMES utf-8' );
try {
    $dbc = new pdo($dsn, $user, $pw, $driver_options);
}
catch (PDOException $e) {
    // Handle exception
}

Good reads about character sets

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets
• Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues
• Mysql – Connection Character Sets and Collations