Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings - WordPress, web development, and world domination.

The Future of WordPress Themes

Mar022009

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. Give it a read to learn what I (and 14 other WordPress community influencers) had to say.

There’s no place like…

Mar022009

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 there.

Jamie was released on Friday afternoon, and we were certainly glad to get home. It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever get caught up on sleep (those fold-out chair/bed things are not the least bit comfortable, and nurses came in and out of the room every few hours during the night). And of course, I seem to have caught a cold, because you can’t be at a hospital without getting sick — it’s a universal law or something.

WordPress 2.7.1 Released

Feb112009

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.

I was going to highlight some of the changes here, but really there aren’t any major things worth pointing out. And as Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a Good Thing!” The fact that the bugfixes are all so minor simply reflects the overall quality of the initial 2.7 release. Good job, dev team! If you’re curious enough, you can view the list of closed tickets for WP 2.7.1.

Efficient permalink strategies for WordPress

Feb042009

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 information about good and pad permalink patterns. This information could be important for sites that use non-standard URL structures, and I thought it deserved a summary.

Continue reading →

WordPress 2.7.1-beta1 tagged in SVN

Feb032009

There hasn’t been an official announcement yet, but I noticed that SVN was tagged with WordPress 2.7.1-beta1 the other day. Though there have been many patches in the 2.7 branch since the last release, most of what I’ve seen appears to be pretty minor bugfixes (though one patch jumps out at me). You can peruse the list of changes since 2.7 yourself.

I’m sure it won’t be too long before we hear something more official.

FancyBox Gallery 0.1

Jan262009

I decided to go ahead a release my FancyBox Gallery plugin as-is. Version ~~0.1~~ 0.2 is very bare-bones: there are no options that you can set. Once you activate the plugin, thumbnails generated by the standard WordPress gallery shortcode will be handled by FancyBox. This works best if you use the link=’file’ option (see the documentation for more details). I’ll eventually add user-settable options for more control.

If you’re interested in trying it out now, download it from the WordPress Plugins Directory: FancyBox Gallery

Update: Updated the plugin to version 0.2. The new version adds styles which should keep the image captions from breaking under certain themes.

Plugin preview: FancyBox Gallery

Jan212009

I don’t have it ready for release yet, but I’m working on a new WordPress plugin which will integrate the FancyBox jQuery plugin with WordPress galleries. FancyBox is a “lightbox” plugin for displaying images in a nice overlay. I have the basics working, but I need to add an options screen, and resolve some CSS issues when it’s used with certain themes.

I hope to have it ready by next week (depends on how much spare time I can find). In the meantime, click these images for a preview…

When I feel like the code is a little more ready for prime-time, I’ll announce it here, and release the plugin in the WordPress Plugins Directory.

Awesome spam filtering for WordPress

Jan142009

I’ve always felt that Akismet does a pretty good job of filtering out spam. After all, since I started using it, Akismet has caught around 500,000 spam comments for me. But a few months ago, I decided to try out a different anti-spam plugin that caught my eye. And surprisingly enough, it’s my Akismet stats that tell me that the other plugin is doing a great job.

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Unit testing in PHP with SimpleTest

Jan132009

I recently worked on a PHP project which required me to write a suite of unit tests to verify that the code worked as expected. While I’ve done unit testing before, and I knew that it was valuable, I have to admit that I’ve only used it very rarely. I’ve only had a few jobs/projects that required it, and most other projects didn’t want to pay for the extra time.
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