Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

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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.

Bing Maps Photosynth Mashup

I’ve always been a big fan of Google Maps. But stuff like this is could sway me into using Bing Maps on a more regular basis: Microsoft is combining geo-tagged, Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr, and integrating them with Bing Maps using their awesome Photosynth technology. To try this feature yourself, you’ll need the Silverlight browser plugin.

WordPress 3.0 Multisite Terminology

One of the big changes coming in WordPress 3.0 is the merge of the WordPress MU code into the standard stand-alone WordPress codebase. When WordPress 3.0 is released, you will be able to choose to install it either as a single site, or in multi-site mode. With the migration from WordPress MU (MultiUser) to WordPress 3.0 (Multisite), I think there is a need for us to clarify some terminology. On the wp-hackers mailing list, I’ve … Continue reading

Recipe: Moroccan Chicken with Rice

Let’s take a break from the tech talk, and I’ll share a recipe with you. No, not a programming recipe, but the food kind. Yes, sometimes I cook. I generally like cooking, though I’m not so fond of cleaning up the mess afterward. Recently, we had some split chicken breasts that we needed to cook up. I thought about just doing a standard baked chicken, but I wanted something a little. different. After perusing a … Continue reading

jQuery API site using WordPress as CMS

I mentioned before that the jQuery project was going to switch from Mediawiki to using WordPress for their online documentation. They’ve recently pulled the trigger on that change, and you can now visit the new WordPress-powered site at: api.jquery.com Performance and Backend As mentioned before, we’ve switched away from using a MediaWiki backend to a new WordPress-powered backend. So far we’ve been very impressed with the performance. Every single page on the site is heavily … Continue reading

Plugin Pages

I have finally gotten around to adding proper pages on this site to provide information about my WordPress plugins. It’s still a work-in-progress, but it’s at least at a point that they are useful. When I get a chance, I’ll document the methods I used to automate things. But basically, I’ve created a couple of page templates, and I’m using the Plugin Info plugin to automagically bring in plugin metadata from the wordpress.org plugin repository. … Continue reading

WordCamp Atlanta

As I begin writing this, Jane Wells is delivering her keynote at WordCamp Atlanta, speaking about the upcoming changes in WordPress 3.0. On the one hand, WordPress releases are ‘serial’, so an 3.0 release doesn’t necessarily have any bigger changes than when we move from 2.8 to 2.9. It’s just the next step after the 2.9 release. But, that said, there are big changes coming. One of the biggest is going to be the merge … Continue reading

Merry Christmas!

I had hoped to post about some things before things got too hectic, but that didn’t happen. But I wanted to at least wish everybody a Merry Christmas (or which ever holiday variant you prefer), and a Happy New Year!

I’m speaking at WordCamp Atlanta

I’m pleased to announce that I will be speaking at WordCamp Atlanta next month. I will be presenting an updated version of the Jumping Into WordPress Plugin Programming talk that I gave at WordCamp Birmingham in September. I think I can squeeze some more details in, and hopefully give some more detailed examples. If you saw the original presentation (or just the slideshow), and you think there’s something else I need to cover, please feel … Continue reading

WordPress As a Documentation Platform

Twice now, the jQuery Podcast has mentioned that the jQuery project is going to migrate its online documentation from Mediawiki to WordPress. Which is pretty cool, because, I happen to like WordPress (duh). It’s also interesting, because when a lot of people build documentation websites, it’s pretty normal to choose a wiki. So, why would they want to switch an existing documentation resource from Mediawiki to WordPress? One of the first factors is probably that … Continue reading

Post thumbnails changes

If you visited my site in the last 9 hours and found it displaying nothing but an error message, my apologies. It’s part of the danger of running my site out of the WordPress SVN trunk (i.e., beta code), and taking advantage of new features. My site automatically pulls in the latest code changes from SVN at midnight. And it seems that sometime yesterday, all of the post_image_* functions were renamed to post_thumbnail_*, and I … Continue reading