how to rotate taglines on your WordPress blog

Another thing on my todo list was to learn PHP and write a WordPress plugin to randomly select quotes stored in the database to rotate the tagline.

An admin interface to create, modify and delete quotes was planned for Version 2.1 (beta) due Q4 2008.

Fortunately for me though, a helpful person called Zombie Robot (pseudonym ?) has already produced wp-quotes (and another kind person tweaked it to work properly for taglines).

All that remains is the interesting part - performance tuning. No - wait. Existing users have already identified this modification as efficiently fetching a single, random record. Horribly database specific of course but worth having when you have 2.4 million quotes.

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    < $sql = "select * from " . WP_QUOTES_TABLE . " where visible='yes'
    < order by rand() limit 1";
    ---
    > $sql = "select * from " . WP_QUOTES_TABLE . " where visible='yes'";