Dev-Picayune

I found myself in a quandry in the midst of my trackback implementation. A normal implementation in blog software involves listing the total number of total trackbacks on the listing page. Then, for the full entry page or a separate trackbacks page, the actual details of the trackbacks are displayed. The issue I had was that I was using PHP to perform the XSL transformation on my XML blog contents file. The trackbacks are controlled by a funky Perl script (that I have since modified). I wanted to be able to do a PHP server-side include bit of code inside the results of the XSL transformation. Luckily, looking at this article on evaluating php expressions using Sablotron, I discovered how to get PHP to render the result and then evaluate the inner PHP expressions that I included in the XSL.

Key to this whole thing is using:

<xsl:processing-instruction name="php"&gt php stuff goes here... </xsl:processing-instruction>

Next, you need to change the processing slightly in the php code to look like this:

$xh = xslt_create();$result = eval ("?>". xslt_process($xh, './devblog/current.xml', 'devblog.xsl'));echo $result;xslt_free($xh);

And you’ll be good to go. So that takes care of the count so that I can show the number of trackbacks for each entry and it will also provide me the ability to include the trackback details inline with the single entry display page.