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.

Bug Chasing

Okay, so in my post about Code Spelunking I mentioned about how working on a project can lead you to explore the code because you need to become more familiar with how the code works. But it can also lead you to explore the code to figure out why code doesn’t work. In this particular case, I spent many hours puzzling over why something didn’t work correctly, chasing down the root cause, and eventually finding a bug in the WordPress core. [...]

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Dougal on WordPress Community Podcast

I was the guest tonight on the WordPress Community Podcast, hosted by Joost de Valk and Frederick Townes. We talked about upcoming features in WordPress 3.0, my past work as a WordPress core developer, my WordPress plugins, microformats, and a smattering of other topics. [...]

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WordPress Code Spelunking

Earlier today, I finished up a WordPress plugin that I’ve been working on for a client.  Without divulging too many details, I’ll say that it wasn’t a huge project, nor was it overly complicated, but it was interesting. . [...]

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Bing Maps Photosynth Mashup

I’ve always been a big fan of Google Maps. . [...]

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WordPress 3.0 Multisite Terminology

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. [...]

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Recipe: Moroccan Chicken with Rice

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). [...]

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jQuery API site using WordPress as CMS

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. [...]

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Plugin Pages

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. [...]

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WordCamp Atlanta

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. [...]

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Merry Christmas!

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!

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