Author Archives: Dougal

Dougal Campbell

Dougal is a web developer for MailChimp, and a “Developer Emeritus” for the WordPress platform. When he’s not coding in PHP or Perl, he spends time with his wife, three children, a dog, and a cat in their Atlanta area home.

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WordPress 3.0 Multisite Terminology

By Dougal | Published: January 25, 2010

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. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Tagged alpha, Blog, blog network, network, network settings, site, versions, WordPress, wordpress 3.0, wordpress mu, wordpress multisite, wpmu | 38 Comments

Recipe: Moroccan Chicken with Rice

By Dougal | Published: January 22, 2010

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 selection of chicken recipes on SimplyRecipes.com, and reviewing the ingredients we had on hand, I decided to try combining ideas from two different recipes: Moroccan Chicken with Lemon and Olives and Chicken and Rice Casserole.

In our case, I was cooking for seven people (myself, my wife, her parents, and our three kids). [...]

Posted in Personal | Tagged chicken, cooking, delicious, Food, hrecipe, mediterranean, medium-difficulty, Microformats, middle-eastern, moroccan, recipes | 5 Comments

jQuery API site using WordPress as CMS

By Dougal | Published: January 19, 2010

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. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Tagged Ajax, API, cms, content management, docs, documentation, JavaScript, jquery, libraries, livesearch, Search, WordPress | 5 Comments

Plugin Pages

By Dougal | Published: January 13, 2010

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.

The main Plugins page lists each plugin, with the plugin name and version, number of downloads so far, and an excerpt of the plugin description. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Tagged p52, Plugins, templates, WordPress | 8 Comments

WordCamp Atlanta

By Dougal | Published: January 9, 2010

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. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Tagged Community, Development, p52, Programming, Releases, wcatl, wordcamp, WordPress | 6 Comments

Merry Christmas!

By Dougal | Published: December 24, 2009

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!

Posted in Personal | Tagged Christmas, Holidays, new years | 2 Comments

I’m speaking at WordCamp Atlanta

By Dougal | Published: December 16, 2009

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 free to let me know. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Tagged Atlanta, Development, how to, Plugins, presentation, Programming, speaking, wordcamp, WordPress | 3 Comments

WordPress As a Documentation Platform

By Dougal | Published: December 14, 2009

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). [...]

Posted in WordPress | Tagged cms, developer portal, documentation, jquery, mediawiki, wiki, WordPress | 16 Comments

Post thumbnails changes

By Dougal | Published: December 11, 2009

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 failed to wrap one of my function calls with function_exists() protection. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Tagged Beta, downtime, features, functions, images, Themes, thumbnails, WordPress | 9 Comments

Suggestion: WordPress Option Namespacing

By Dougal | Published: December 10, 2009

I happened to be poking around in my database a while ago, particularly in the WordPress ‘options’ table for this blog. There’s an awful lot of cruft hanging around from old plugins that I don’t use anymore. I cleaned a few things out, but something hit me as I was perusing all those options: I can’t always tell which options belong(ed) to which plugins, themes, or to the WordPress core.

In many cases, plugin authors tag the option names in a way that you can figure it out. [...]