The Daily WTF

Initech had a lovely little Content Management System built by a third party that was good at “building” CMSes. That is to say, this company knew its way around a WordPress template.

When Initech needed a new public-facing website, they went straight back to that vendor. Now, this new website was a complicated statistical tool, with all sorts of complicated business rules and requiring a large amount of custom programming. So the vendor that just cranked out WordPress templates may not have been a good fit for the project, but that didn’t stop anybody.

That’s how Magnus M found code which looks like this:

$dataTotalArray[$md[‘adt_group_id’]][$md[‘atss_id’]][‘adt_text’] = $md[‘adt_text’]; if($md[‘type’] == “totalthisyear”) { $dataTotalArray[$md[‘adt_group_id’]][$md[‘atss_id’]][‘amount’] = $md[‘amount’]; $dataTotalArray[$md[‘adt_group_id’]][$md[‘atss_id’]][‘count’] = $md[‘count’]; }

There are so many nested braces here I’d almost suspect this was a LISP dialect instead of PHP.

That’s just ugly and incomprehensible, and it isn’t the WTF. The real WTF

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