I have spent quite a bit of my free time lately re-working my wp-SwimTeam WordPress plugin in a quest to get a demo site up and running. In the process I changed quite a bit, some because I had no choice, some because I was knee deep in the code and decided it was time to fix some things I wasn’t real happy with.
A lot of the work involved working with Google Maps API. The Google APIs are really pretty cool, if you need to do some work with AJAX or Javascript, they are worth looking into. I ended up using the new Google AJAX API (which can load the Maps API) and the new syntax. There seems to almost no performance degradation from loading Google’s JS libraries as compared to loading them directly from the host site.
A bunch of the work was neccessary because GoDaddy, the provider hosting the demo site, doesn’t support PEAR which I was using to access the database. I needed to migrate to the WordPress database abstraction layer. As opposed to just hacking up the plugin to do this, I decided to do it right and enhance phpHtmlLib with a new database abstraction layer specifically for WordPress. I also made the changes to phpHtmlLib to make it into a WordPress plugin.
All in all, a lot of work behind the scenes which isn’t visible to the end user but in the long will make using wp-SwimTeam by other people much easier. There are quite a few posts on my wp-SwimTeam development blog if you are interested in all of the nitty-gritty details along with my frustrations with GoDaddy Support.