I recently felt a strong urge to write something about implementing a stream wrapper for PHP. A stream wrapper is a way to handle file interaction of any kind. PHP has built-in stream wrappers for HTTP, FTP, the filesystem, etc. But you are also allowed to implement custom protocols using your own stream wrapper. Stream wrappers are used by all file functions, like fopen() and fgets(). Creating a custom stream wrapper begins with creating a class (it does not have to extend anything) and then making a call to stream_wrapper_register. In this post (and future posts on the same subject) I will develop a stream wrapper for manipulating a DOMNode’s value using traditional file manipulation functions. The stream wrapper class is called “DOMStreamWrapper” and we register it for the protocol “dom”:

Recently I created my first WordPress template (the one you are looking at right now) and I was left both in shock and in great awe. This piece of software written in PHP has many users (like myself), yet it is so very outdated. The filtering mechanism by which you can modify HTML after it is generated by WordPress feels very dirty. But because a lot of the HTML snippets that WordPress generates are not suitable for decorating with Twitter Bootstrap’s beautiful CSS rules, I used those dirty filters extensively.