Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Blog Archives

Plugin: Fancybox Gallery 0.3.1

I have updated my Fancybox Gallery plugin to version 0.3.1. Fancybox Gallery will automatically turn your photo galleries generated by the WordPress ‘gallery’ shorttag into a dynamic lightbox. New in version 0.3 is the ability to navigate to the next/previous image while in lightbox mode. Another change is that this version requires jQuery version 1.3.2, and thus you’ll need to be using WordPress 2.8. If you are running an older version of WordPress, but the … Continue reading

WordCamp Organization Advice

I’ve already posted about the WordPress 2.8 release, and there will be plenty of other posts highlighting everybody’s favorite new features when it officially drops, so how about if I talk about something a little different? I’ve been listening to a couple of WordPress podcasts recently (WordPress Weekly and WordCast, in particular), and there had been a lot of buzz about some of the WordCamp gatherings taking place in various locations. In particular, there were … Continue reading

What’s the buzz?

Here’s a quick post, just to let everybody know that I’m still alive. During my long silence here, a lot of things have been happening in the WordPress community. First and foremost is the upcoming WordPress 2.8 release. There are several nifty new features in there. The most notable (for me) are probably: Built-in theme browser/installer Drag-n-drop widget management Syntax highlighting when using theme/plugin editor Image cropping in media uploader New theme functions for author … Continue reading

Where’s Waldo?

Or, more to the point, where’s Dougal? Sorry about the long silence here. After our son got out of the hospital from his pneumonia, he had four weeks of therapy before he returned to regular school. I had to drive across town to drop him off and pick him up, which ate up around 3 hours of each day when all was said and done. I’ve also tried to devote some time to taking care … Continue reading

Twitual

Recently, I launched a new project called Twitual. Twitual is a service which lets you compare your Twitter friends and followers lists in interesting ways. You can see which people are ‘mutual’ (you follow them, and they follow you back), which are ‘fans’ (people who follow you, but you don’t follow them), and which are your ‘idols’ (you follow them, but they don’t follow you back). Currently, I still consider Twitual to be in an … Continue reading

The Future of WordPress Themes

A couple of months ago, Ian Stewart asked me to be one of the voices for this year’s roundup on The Future of WordPress Themes 2009. There were a variety of angles from which to look at the subject, so it’s interesting to see how everyone interpreted the question. There are discussions about “Premium” themes and the GPL, about whether plugin functionality belongs in themes, and about seperation of presentation and content, among other things. … Continue reading

There’s no place like…

For anyone who wasn’t already aware, my wife and I spent the last two weeks in the hospital with our son, Jamie, who had pneumonia. Scary stuff, that pneumonia. I hope nobody else we know ever gets it. Anyhow, Susan and I pretty much lived at the hospital the whole time Jamie was there, though we did manage to get some work done remotely, and Suze put in some face-time at her office here and … Continue reading

My day as a tag cloud

If I could record all the phrases I said in a typical day, and turn it into a tag cloud, it would probably look something like this: Jamie stop DVD clean up come back hold your horses work not right now lunch toys Suze beautiful boo-boo dog cat snack dammit turkey kicking Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cute pick up Mary hitting smart Claire movie clothes stay out in a minute don’t nap sweetheart What would yours … Continue reading

WordPress 2.7.1 Released

The official WordPress 2.7.1 release is now ready for download. The announcement on the WordPress Development Blog is short and to the point: 2.7.1, the first 2.7 maintenance release, is now available. 2.7.1 fixes 68 tickets. You can automatically upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 via the Tools->Upgrade menu, or you can download the package and upgrade manually. Consult the list of fixed tickets and the full set of changes between 2.7 and 2.7.1 for details. … Continue reading

Efficient permalink strategies for WordPress

Over the past several days, there has been an interesting discussion on the wp-testers mailing list (though, it really belonged on the wp-hackers list, but that’s beside the point) about permalink structures in WordPress. The original question came from matthijs and questioned why WordPress was storing rewrite rules for every page on his site in a database option. Further discussion revealed that this was a side-effect of his particular permalink structure, and some really good … Continue reading