What I did on my vacation from reality

I realized that my default theme, a heavily modified version of Back in Black 2, is a little unfriendly towards search engines since it’s so heavy on the Javascript. I’ve written a plugin to automatically override the theme back to “default” when a search engine hits it.

Note that I’m hardcoding the bot domains. What I’ve done elsewhere is an Apache rewrite from robots.txt to robots.cgi, which then logs the bot in a MySQL database and spits out the real robots.txt. isengine() just checks the MySQL database to see if $REMOTE_HOST has snarfed robots.txt lately. It works pretty well. I chose to hardcode here just for simplicity.

Code follows.

<?php
/*
** Plugin Name: Theme Engine
** Plugin URI: http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/blog/
** Description: Automatically switches to the "default" theme for search engines
** Version: 0.1
** Author: Johnny Cuervo
** Author URI: http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/blog/
**
** So, my theme is apparently sort of horked for Google, since it's heavy
** on the Javascript. I wrote this plugin to play nice.
**
** - JC
*/

$engines = array(
        'googlebot.com',
        'yahoo.com',
        'live.com',
        'exabot.com',
        'yahoo.net'
);

function fastone_isengine ()
{
        global $engines;

        /*
        ** Reduce $remote to domain name
        */
        $remote = $_SERVER['REMOTE_HOST'];
        $rdom = preg_split('/\./', $remote);

        while (count($rdom) != 2)
        {
                array_shift($rdom);
        }

        $rdom = $rdom[0] . '.' . $rdom[1];

        foreach ($engines as $e)
        {
                if (strcmp($rdom, $e) == 0)
                {
                        return true;
                }
        }

        return false;
}

function pull_fastone_template ($template)
{
        if (fastone_isengine())
        {
                return "default";
        }
        return $template;
}

function pull_fastone_stylesheet ($stylesheet)
{
        if (fastone_isengine())
        {
                return "default";
        }
        return $stylesheet;
}

add_filter('template', 'pull_fastone_template', 1);
add_filter('stylesheet', 'pull_fastone_stylesheet', 1);
?>