Author Archives
About Dougal Campbell
Dougal is a web developer, and a "Developer Emeritus" for the WordPress platform. When he's not coding PHP, Perl, CSS, JavaScript, or whatnot, he spends time with his wife, three children, a dog, and a cat in their Atlanta area home.
Plugin conflict
Tracked down and reported a conflict with the WPTouch plugin that affected Formattd’s mobile post format setting feature.
New Theme (in progress)
Apr252011
Welcome to my new theme. It’s not done yet, but I’m making it available so that others can help me improve it. Read more about the details to learn what features it includes, what remains to be done, and how you can help, if you’re so inclined. Continue reading
Competitors “Taking Aim”
Mar242011
Open source CMS projects like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! provide web publishing tools that give users the freedom to modify the system and own their data in ways that proprietary systems don’t offer. BC Gurus, a consultancy specializing in Adobe’s Business Catalyst (a hosted turnkey web publishing product), “took aim” at Open Source CMS’s, kicking off a proposed series of articles with a video showing two BC Gurus people at a firing range, using WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! logos as targets. The communities for these projects were, understandably, not happy about it. Continue reading
Snowpocalypse 2011
Jan102011
Atlanta’s first snow of 2011, and the second of the season, since we had a White Christmas.
Smarter Post Formats?
Dec102010
A suggestion for marrying get_template_part() and get_post_format() to create a new layer in the WordPress theme file hierarchy. Continue reading
Installing node.js on a Mac
Nov232010
For anyone else who might be interested, here are some quick-and-dirty instructions for how to install node.js and npm (node package manager) on Mac OS X, from the terminal. This assumes that you’ve already installed the XCode tools, and git: # Fetch and build node.js git clone git://github.com/ry/node.git cd node ./configure make sudo make install # Now install the node package manager, npm: sudo chgrp -R staff /usr/local/{share/man,bin,lib/node} sudo chmod -R g+w /usr/local/{share/man,bin,lib/node} curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh … Continue reading
WordPress and Drupal: Convergence?
Oct132010
If there was a perfect Content Management System, some sort of CMS Nirvana, what would it be like? It would be very easy to use, and yet have a powerful feature set and a strong underlying architecture for developers to build upon. WordPress and Drupal are both trying to be that tool, though they have approached it from different directions. Let’s see what we can learn from each other. Continue reading
Pitfalls of a Popular Project
Sep182010
My presentation for WordCamp Birmingham 2010 was on the Pitfalls of a Popular Project. This is a non-technical talk, and it is not specific to WordPress (though I use WordPress as an example in a couple of places). You can download the PowerPoint version of my presentation, which should include my notes for more information.
WordPress Care Package
Sep012010
Around the time of the Thesis GPL debates, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg made an offer to send people free t-shirts. When I talked to him at WordCamp Savannah, he said that he had gotten about 300 requests. I got my care package right after I returned from the WordCamp. In addition to the shirt, it included some Gravatar and WordPress stickers, and a nice certificate, proclaiming that I am “One of the Three Most Important People … Continue reading