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Dougal Campbell

Presentation: Get Off My Lawn and Out of My Dashboard!

October 19, 2016 by Dougal Campbell Leave a Comment

Grumpy Old Man wants you to get off his lawn!
Get Off My Lawn!
Photo credit: Alex Griffioen, Flickr, CC BY 2.0, http://flic.kr/p/nU3Jv

I was so busy leading up to it, I never even had a chance to post here about the fact that my wife, Susan, and I both gave presentations at WordCamp Raleigh 2016 last month. Susan was the driving force behind the July 2016 launch of a new WordPress Multisite powered website for the Cherokee County School District. I helped her debug and implement some of the deeper customizations, and our presentations were both about the site launch, but from different perspectives.

Susan’s presentation was titled Teachers Make the Worst Students, and covered how she pitched WordPress as a replacement for the school district’s old website (built on SharePoint), an overview of the technology stack, and some of the technological and social barriers that she had to overcome.

My presentation was Get Off My Lawn and Out of My Dashboard. I covered more of the technical details of the server configuration and theme customizations that I helped Susan implement. This included:

  • Using multiple front-end servers to distribute web traffic load
  • Formatting a Nav Menu to display in columns by injecting Bootstrap classes
  • Removing specific choices from the Dashboard so that her school Webmasters could not change the theme or widget configurations
  • Doing the same for some of the Customizer options, both for native WordPress features and for theme-specific options
  • And when the Webmasters found a way around that, the creation of the ccsd_redirect_naughty_children() function which made sure they couldn’t bypass our restrictions!

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With: customizer, iis, presentations, raleigh, wcraleigh, wimp, windows, wordcamp

Pardon My Dust…

January 18, 2016 by Dougal Campbell Leave a Comment

The VPS server that I host this site on recently suffered a massive hard drive failure (filesystem corruption). I am still in the process of rebuilding the server from scratch, and taking the opportunity to improve some things along the way. I have this site up again, basically to help me troubleshoot as I reconfigure my web stack. But one thing you will notice is that images are currently broken. This is because the content directory that held all of my images is one of the many things that I did not have backed up. I have some ideas for possibly recovering them (I probably still have most of them on my laptop, or I might try pulling them from the Wayback Machine), but that’s not my top priority at the moment, so just bear with me.

UPDATE: It turns out that there is a Wayback Machine Downloader script which made it quite easy to recover my media files. Huzzah!

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With: backups, disasters, images, server

My WordCamp Atlanta 2013 Presentation Video

January 22, 2015 by Dougal Campbell Leave a Comment

I thought I had posted this here before, but I guess not. Here is the video from the presentation I gave at WordCamp Atlanta 2013:

The slide deck can be found on SlideShare: Secure All The Things!

Filed Under: Misc

Updated Resumé

January 22, 2015 by Dougal Campbell Leave a Comment

I have updated my resumé. In addition to adding details for my most recent position, I decided it was time to freshen up the appearance a little. I have replaced the Futura and Optima typefaces with Providence and the Avenir family. I find Avenir very pleasing to the eye, and Providence is a distinctive typeface which is a little quirky, without being too distracting.

My focus these days is on front-end JavaScript development, having spent most of the last two+ years working on that. But, of course, I still do back-end work, as well, (PHP, Perl, JavaScript), and I have a bit of sysadmin and devops knowledge, too.

Dougal Campbell’s Resumé

 

Filed Under: Misc

Help Wanted: CCSNA

January 30, 2014 by Dougal Campbell Leave a Comment

For many years, I have been a member of the Clan Campbell Society of North America. This non-profit organization helps maintain historical and genealogical information about the Campbell clan and its various septs, a quarterly Journal, a calendar of events throughout the United States and Canada, and various other benefits. Through a Highland Games event, my family became friends with Randy Seale and his family.

Randy is currently trying to get the CCSNA website updated. For years now, the website and membership services have been manually maintained, and Randy would like to bring the website into modern times with a CMS. He is already familiar with Drupal, and would prefer to use Drupal 7 to create the website (though I did try to sell him on the idea of using WordPress, and he hasn’t completely ruled out that possibility).

Randy already approached one well-known Drupal consultancy (who I will not name here), explained his needs, and told them his budget. They agreed that they could do the project within his budget, and set to work. But then, after billing him for about a quarter of his entire budget for their discovery process, they revised their project estimate to an amount that was about 3-times the original estimate. This has left Randy in a bad position, with a diminished budget and a soft deadline of sometime in April approaching.

I had planned to stand up a WordPress-based demo for him to look over, but I had another job opportunity come up that moved very quickly, and found myself without much spare time to help out. So, I promised I would help Randy find someone suitable to assist him with the new website.

A Few Details

I know that many of my web development colleagues, like myself, are WordPress developers, but because he is already familiar with Drupal, he will probably lean towards someone who can build in Drupal 7.

He can provide the wireframes and other notes that he paid the other consultancy to do, but he’s not married to using them. However, they might provide some useful information and ideas about menu and site structure that could be useful in any case.

He has a set budget, which I believe is reasonable for the project, and would probably provide for roughly 8-10 weeks of work, depending on your usual rates. Without getting too specific, the original consultancy was charging about 2-3 times my usual hourly rate.

Wanted

  • A web developer who can work quickly, communicate well, and deliver within budget.
  • The site needs an e-commerce portion which can handle merchandise sales, and recurring membership dues. It should also handle multiple/alternate shipping addresses (for gifts, for example).
  • A membership CRM which can provide members-only access to some portions of the website, extended member profile information (social media links, membership information, etc.)
  • Some simple calendar/event management would probably be useful, as well, to track the dates and locations of various Highland Games and other gatherings.
  • Workflow for user-contributed articles.

Notes

Randy is capable of and willing to import the old content into the system on his own, so that isn’t a part of the project you really need to budget for (except that you might want to manually cut-and-paste some initial pages from old site to new, in order to test your layouts and such).

Personally, I think his needs can be met while coming in under his time and budget requirements.

Interested?

Please contact me to let me know if you think you can take this project on. Also, please state whether you would be using Drupal or WordPress, and point me to your portfolio and projects. I will pick the best few candidates and pass their contact information along to Randy.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With: ccsna, helpwanted, projects

CodePoet Interview

April 4, 2013 by Dougal Campbell Leave a Comment

I was honored recently to do an interview on CodePoet. If you are interested in web development, WordPress, Open Source, or internet communities, please give it a read. I discuss a little bit of ancient history (in internet time scales), discussing how I started out, and touch a little on my more recent activities, such as speaking about security at WordCamp Atlanta last month.

Please check it out, and let me know what you think!

 

Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: codepoet, history, internet, interviews, web development, wordpress

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Recent Posts

  • Presentation: Get Off My Lawn and Out of My Dashboard!
  • Pardon My Dust…
  • My WordCamp Atlanta 2013 Presentation Video
  • Updated Resumé
  • Help Wanted: CCSNA

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WP Core Contributions

  • [41053] Widgets: Add legacy mode for Text widget and add usage pointers to ...
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Fancybox Gallery

FancyBox Gallery
Author: Dougal Campbell
Contributors:
Version: 0.3.2

Integrates the FancyBox jQuery plugin to generate dynamic pop-up image overlays for WordPress galleries.

4.5 rating based on 3 ratings
Downloads: 53111
Last Updated: Aug 26, 2015

WP Codex Contributions

  • For Plugin API/Filter Reference/nav menu css class
  • For Plugin API/Filter Reference/nav menu css class
  • For Plugin API/Filter Reference/nav menu css class
  • Function: wp die
  • For Plugin API/Filter Reference/nav menu css class

View the change in the Codex.

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