Wordpress to survive the most difficult hurdle

A legend in the making. Wordpress, as popular as it is among content writers, it is also one of the most cubersome platforms to deploy on. And when it comes to merging more than one wordpress sites, the biggest hurdle is the Database. Well, VersionPress is coming to the rescue.

What VersionPress (VP) attempts to do is make the whole Wordpress installation version controllable. Now, it's one thing when you are merging files but it's completely different monster when you want to take on the Database. Sure, merging 2 DB dumps cannot be an issue for git but what about context?

Imagine this scenario where you have developers making your site look and work awesome and content writers writing away on live production server. Now the day comes when you have to pull the changes from the development version to the production. Well several things get intertwined here

• Posts having same IDs
• Plugins having custom tables
• Options and Meta

Now that's a real spaghetti you got there. When you think about it, you feel like nothing short of a magic is going to be needed for that right? Well, if that's so, VersionPress is magic. Here's how they are supporting plugins in their new alpha. If you are late to the show, you might want to read their past release notes too.
https://github.com/versionpress/versionpress/blob/1036-plugin-support/docs/Plugin-Support.md

Running your first PHP application in Google App Engine (Fix for the --php_executable_path flag () issue)

As I may (or may not) have mentioned before, I mostly blog here for the purpose of note-keeping for myself. In most of the cases I don't really care about how good the tutorials (not so much) are coming out. So, please do your homework if you are following any of my tutorials at all. This is gonna be a disclaimer somewhere, but see? I can't give a damn here. Thanks.
I was trying my hands on the Google App Engine. My system is Linux so I downloaded, followed the linux part of things from their official how-to-first-time page here [ https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/gettingstarted/installing ]
As you can see from that page (yeah, that's a dependency) you
1. Download the PHP SDK
2. Extract it some nice place
3. Write a "hello world!" PHP script
4. Execute the python script (dev_appserver.py) in the the "google_appengine" (if you haven't done it otherwise) folder.
BUT ! I got stuck here for sometime, and looked up for the fix.
Source of the problem:

_PHPBinaryError: The path specified with the --php_executable_path flag () does not exist.

Which naturally implied 2 things

1. The PHP installation was NOT as the app engine wants it to be
2. God doen't want me to code anymore

I naturally believe God loves it when I'm busy with my favourite thing so number 2 was obsolete. I looked up on Google for some solutions and a sudden SO page suggested that executing the appserver executable like

./dev_appserver.py --php_executable_path="...path..to..the..php-cgi..executable..." helloworld

will solve the problem.
Following this trail I came to notice that my ignorance toward the tutorial's PHP installation paid of here. The problem was actually my PHP installtion was a CLI version. While the app engine essentially wants a CGI version. For doing so, the tutorial has very good instructions, and yes, php-cgi is NOT available in Ubuntu repos. So I did

sudo apt-get install gcc libmysqlclient-dev libxml2-dev
  wget --trust-server-names http://us2.php.net/get/php-5.4.15.tar.bz2/from/us1.php.net/mirror
  tar xjf php-5.4.15.tar.bz2
  cd php-5.4.15
  ./configure --prefix=$PWD/installdir --enable-bcmath --with-mysql
  make install
  cd -

And afterwards executed

./dev_appserver.py --php_executable_path="...path..to..the..php-cgi..executable..." helloworld

And it went smooth. :) By the way, the above method will NOT harm you normal PHP installation.

[PHP] Turn multiple input fields / selections into a single array

While trying to design a form so that it takes multiple inputs from text fields and multiselect selection menus, I was facing problem because even though I could handle a fixed number of fields in my script internally, what for multiple selections in a selection list?? The rescuer [] :)
Yes, just use it after the name of you input field, this way.

<select multiple class="input-medium search-query" id="autolist-filter-select" name="filter_str[]">

<input id="autolist-filter-text1" type="text" name="filter_str[]"/> <input id="autolist-filter-text2" type="text" name="filter_str[]"/>