The Tar Pit

The reader will, I suspect, immediately notice that this should have been two posts. Unfortunately stuff got delayed a day or two, so since both items approach the subject of MP-WP changes, and moreover the two V patches discussed are added to the same tree, I might as well put them together. Here they are:

• mp-wp_markdown-plugin.vpatch (seal);
• mp-wp_tools-ttp2mpwp.vpatch (seal).

The first V patch, mp-wp_markdown-plugin, adds a Markdown plugin to MP-WP, and this is useful to me personally because I use this sort of shit. Note also that the markdown.php file included in the patch weighs about three thousand lines of code, which is a lot: the thing, ten years old as it stands, is full of useless crap -- that, I shit thee not, I had to manually disable by commenting lines of code -- and screams for a clean-up, which I'm going to do and publish at some point. Meanwhile, the list of burning tasks is evergrowing.

Among the stupid behaviours of this plugin: if I wrap a piece of (Markdown) text in a HTML tag, it suddenly doesn't get parsed as Markdown anymore. Although this shit conforms to Gruber's original spec, it also happens to be really stupid, because why wouldn't I want to add Markdown inside a <table>, <pre> or <p>? "Markdown is not a replacement for HTML", which is why I should be able to mix the two, motherfucker. This issue, by the way, can be fixed by commenting lines 320 and 1809 in markdown.php. The problem with this is that it doesn't remove all the cancerous matter that remains hanging, which is why this change is not a V patch -- yet.

Anyway, I haven't any clue whether anyone besides myself is interested in this plugin, which is why I sorta expect this V patch will denote a branching point in the MP-WP tree. Really, don't import 3K lines of crap in your MP-WP install if you don't have or want to.

Moving on to the second V patch, mp-wp_tools-ttp2mpwp -- this does two things: a. it adds a new folder, wp-tools</span>, inside the MP-WP root¹; and b. inside wp-tools, it adds the script ttp2mpwp.php.

There is to my knowledge no one else using The Tar Pit LBS, let alone planning to migrate it to MP-WP, but just in case you're in this situation: the script was intended to be more or less self-contained, so make sure to read it and set all the variables therein properly before running it. And in any case, you're better off running this on a test MP-WP install before importing your posts.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm not sure I'll ever get to use the script again, so this V patch marks both its initial and final version. Otherwise it proved very useful and it can be used as an illustration of MP-WP hacking -- I'm definitely going to reuse some parts for that CLI post editor I'm planning to get running, and yes, that'll also be a patch on this side of the tree. If nothing else, this little script could be considered a reflection of my current knowledge of MP-WP.

To conclude: recently there's been discussion about mirroring V trees. I firmly believe that V patches should be mirrored on as many boxes as possible, not just lie in that one place which becomes inaccessible a day before someone wants to grab them. Thus, not just the two patches above, but the entire MP-WP tree is accessible from my source code repository here.

Filed under: computing.
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