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.

Geolocation Plugin for WordPress

May042010

This Geolocation Plugin will be a nice addition for people who do travel blogging or who write about things in a particular area (restaurant and business reviews, hyperlocal news, etc). The plugin adds a subtle but powerful addition to posts you’ve geotagged using WordPress for iPhone: a link appears inside your post with a short description of the location where the post was tagged. When your users hover over the link, an interactive map appears … Continue reading →

FancyBox Gallery demo fixed

Apr292010

Yesterday, I discovered that the demo at the bottom of my FancyBox Gallery plugin page was broken. After a little research, I discovered that a third-party javascript was the culprit. I’ve disabled that script for now, and alerted the service provider to the problem. So, my apologies if you came to the page and got the impression that the plugin didn’t work well. In a related note, I’ve been working (slowly) on some updates to … Continue reading →

WordPress as a Forum?

Apr212010

I know there are some efforts to integrate forums with WordPress. Of course there’s bbPress, which can share user logins. And there is the Simple:Press plugin, which seems pretty full-featured. And I have heard references to other efforts for plugins, or integrations for external forum systems. The main problem with external forum systems (as opposed to solutions purely based on plugins and themes) is that if you want a consistent look-and-feel between your blog and … Continue reading →

Open Source Community Personality Spectrum

Apr142010

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) Most good open source projects attract an audience of supporters. When the buzz around the project reaches a certain point, it will also pull in detractors. We commonly use the term “community” to describe the group of people discussing the project. Mostly we mean the supporters, but it really includes anybody with an interest in the project, good or bad. When you … Continue reading →

Email subscription changes

Apr132010

For a while now, I’ve had an email signup form in the sidebar (look, over there on the right), and a few people have taken advantage of it. This allows you to receive an email notification whenever there are new posts here on my blog. Until now, these emails have been driven by FeedBurner. However, I’ve now moved them over to MailChimp. This will give me more control over the formatting of the emails (I … Continue reading →

Customize Your WordPress Dashboard

Apr122010

If you are reading this, there is a very high chance that you are a WordPress user. There’s even a chance that you arrived here through a link in the Other WordPress News widget in your Dashboard. The WordPress Dashboard is a great summary of current activity on your site and in the WordPress community. What some of you might not realize is that you can customize your Dashboard according to what you think is … Continue reading →

Running on WordPress 3.0-beta

Apr022010

I’ve been running this site on WordPress 3.0 for several days now (it was still alpha when I switched, and it hit beta-1 status on Friday night). Despite all the cool new stuff available in the new version, you probably won’t see much different when you upgrade. The most obvious changes that you might see in the admin area are that “Updates” moved from under “Tools” to under the “Dashboard” menu, there’s a new “Menus” … Continue reading →

Bug Chasing

Mar072010

Okay, so in my post about Code Spelunking I mentioned about how working on a project can lead you to explore the code because you need to become more familiar with how the code works. But it can also lead you to explore the code to figure out why code doesn’t work. In this particular case, I spent many hours puzzling over why something didn’t work correctly, chasing down the root cause, and eventually finding … Continue reading →

Dougal on WordPress Community Podcast

Feb232010

I was the guest tonight on the WordPress Community Podcast, hosted by Joost de Valk and Frederick Townes. We talked about upcoming features in WordPress 3.0, my past work as a WordPress core developer, my WordPress plugins, microformats, and a smattering of other topics. My interview should be up later tonight. Joost and Frederick do a great job with the interviews, so if you haven’t already, you should subscribe to the WordPress Community Podcast and … Continue reading →

WordPress Code Spelunking

Feb182010

Earlier today, I finished up a WordPress plugin that I’ve been working on for a client. Without divulging too many details, I’ll say that it wasn’t a huge project, nor was it overly complicated, but it was interesting. One fun thing about working on projects for clients, is that it often gives you a chance to explore areas that you might not have looked too closely at on your own.