If for some reason you’re running a development website on your localhost, obviously the live, remote site will not be able to contact your localhost for the data. You will have to upload the XML file to the remote site. The Wordpress export tool does not provide the means to generate a the OPML XML file for you. You will have to visit the /wp-links-opml.php file and download the contents yourself, but this depends on how your browser handles XML files. Firefox will show you the raw XML, however, Safari will show you the contents of the XML nodes… which will most likely be only the name of your website. You’ll need to go to “View Source” option to see the actual XML code.Copy and past the XML to a file with the .xml file extension somewhere on your hard drive. Visit the import > blogroll tool and upload the file!

A simple way to download the file contents is to use the command line web browser Lynx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29

Just give Lynx the destination URL and the file to write to (it doesn’t have to exist) and then you can upload this file

<pre>

lynx -source URL > my-links.xml

</pre>

More info on lynx available here: http://kb.iu.edu/data/aczi.html

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How do I check if a user is a course creator for a given course? I’m still not 100% sure, the access control policy seems needlessly confusing on first glance and even after reading the heady and mostly pointless, expose on how roles/perms are calculated (Available Here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/How_permissions_are_calculated ) If you notice the section titled “Some Practical Examples” is 100% empty! (I’ve added my code to the wiki so not 100% empty any longer) The most useful part of the docs are completely empty! Instead boatloads of time went into a treatise on the internals and lovely graphs like this one

But you could always hop into the forum dedicated just to this chunk of the code base (Available here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?f=941&page=0) and search through the 500 topics w/ 5000+(i didn’t actually count) nested discussions (including version 1.7 of moodle as well).

No, instead, ACK came to the rescue and I found a snippet that performed the task.

Without further ado

$context = get_context_instance(CONTEXT_COURSE, $course->id);
if (has_capability('moodle/course:update', $coursecontext)) {
  /** do stuff here */
}

There it is. That could have saved me an hour if mentioned in the docs!

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zip -r my-compressed-dir-without-psd.zip directory-to-zip -x '*.psd'

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tar --use-compress-program bzip2 -xvf your-file-to-uncompress.tar.bz2

@source http://www.kde.gr.jp/help/doc/kdebase/doc/khelpcenter/faq/HTML/bzip2.html

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Source: http://www.serversidemagazine.com/php/how-to-convert-array-notation-to-object-notation

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  the_child_categories("Vermont");
  // print Burlington, Brattleboro... etc if this post has any child categories of Vermont

But I could not. The result that I did find, from various forums goes something like this…

$parentcat = get_category_by_slug('Vermont');
foreach((get_the_category()) as $childcat):
  if (cat_is_ancestor_of($parentcat, $childcat)):
    echo get_category_link($childcat->cat_ID);
    echo $childcat->cat_name;
  endif;
endforeach;

If you’re in the in the Loop, you can use the get_the_category() function to retrieve the category objects of the current post, without printing the results to the screen. You can loop over the contents from what is returned by the function.

This condition uses the API function “cat_is_ancestor_of” to check whether or not the category from the current post is a child of the parent which we fetched with the “get_category_by_slug” function.

Here is a little function that I threw into “functions.php” so that I can get the child categories easily in my theme.

/** Usage
_the_category_children("Vermont"); */
function _the_category_children($slug=""){
  if($categories       = get_the_category()):
    if($slug_category   = get_category_by_slug($slug)):
      foreach($categories as $category):
        echo (cat_is_ancestor_of($slug_category, $category)) ? $category->cat_name : '';
      endforeach;
    endif;
  endif;
}

More info/references on accomplishing this functionality are available
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/cat_is_ancestor_of
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/284057?replies=8#post-1120489
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/297615

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You create and/or register custom taxonomies like so. You may have multiple taxonomies.

add_action('init', 'create_my_taxonomy', 0);
function create_my_taxonomy(){
  register_taxonomy( 'musicians',
    'post',
    array(
      'hierarchical' => false,
      'label' => 'People who play lovely music that I like...',
      'query_var' => 'musicians',
      'rewrite' => array('slug'=>'musicians')
    )
  );
}

In your theme directory you need at “taxonomy.php” file. This will catch your custom taxonomy requests. You can get even more fancy and create a file like so “taxonomy-musicians.php” which you can use to differentiate your taxonomies look/feel. Nice and slick… however, you may be frustrated after following these two steps and be greeted with a friendly 404 page not found template instead.

Fear not, you need only visit the Admin >> Settings >> Permalinks page as a logged in admin to flush your rewrite rules and get linking and your correct custom taxonomy template file. Straight forward, unless if you didn’t know that merely visiting the Permalinks Settings page would correct the problem. But Alas, you do!

Addendum

You must also have posts using the taxonomy! Otherwise, you will still get the page 404 not found! I’m not sure if there is a work around for this at the moment. Anyone know?

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<%= render :partial => params[:controller]+"/sidebar" if File.exists?(RAILS_ROOT+"/app/views/"+params[:controller]+"/_sidebar.html.erb")%>

or you can catch the error that Rails throws

 <%= render :partial => params[:controller]+"/sidebar" rescue nil %>

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I wish I had this book about 3 years ago when I first started fooling around in the code base! At any rate, you can read the review on Moodle News at http://www.moodlenews.com/2010/moodle-1-9-extension-development-review-by-bseanvt/

There is also an interesting discussion underway about the ‘bloat’ in the Moodle code at http://www.moodlenews.com/2010/opinion-1000000-lines-of-code/

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<table id='my-favorite-table' cellspacing="0" >
...

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