Why not to copy and paste code mindlessly

While working to try and fix what was preventing the status messages from showing I came across a few things that were wrong and all come from copying and pasting code.  This is why I need to get better with writing in these languages rather than copy and paste shit because in the end I waste more time trying to fix the code.

I posted a link to a wordpress support forum where a user posted "working" code for retrieving a user id from a username: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-user-id-from-username  The code I used from here was:

$user = get_userdatabylogin('admin');
var_dump($user);
echo $user->ID; // prints the id of the user

get_userdatabylogin (http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_userdatabylogin), is a deprecated function and was replaced with get_user_by (http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_user_by).  This wasn't what caused the error but it's always nice to be using updated code.

What was causing the error was the var_dump: http://php.net/manual/en/function.var-dump.php
This is used to dump information about the variable but with the get_user_by function I surely don't need it and when I took it out and ran it with the get_userdatabylogin it still worked.  So maybe something changed in wordpress (since that solution was posted 4 years ago) to make this not work.

The last problem I found was that I left two variables with the same names from the php file they were in before ($wti_like_message and $wti_unlike_message).  So I fixed this (renamed them to $like_count and $unlike_count) and now they will work again and be put into the $result array.

At the end of everything here's today's handlelikedata.php: http://pastebin.com/7fuf5R0i

So not much was accomplished today but I did once again learn the lesson that it can sometimes be better to code things from scratch so you have a complete understanding of what's going on.  Mindlessly copying and pasting things is never the answer and can cause you to waste more time in the end.  I still have to build the level system onto this and put the $author_id and sql queries I've made already to good use.  For the rest of the night though I'm just going to lurk on my usual forums.