Author Archives: Dougal

Dougal is a web developer for Crowd Favorite, 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.

WordPress theme licensing

There is finally an official answer to the question of whether or not WordPress themes must “inherit” the GPL license that WordPress itself uses. Matt asked the Software Freedom Law Center to examine the WordPress source and how themes fit in. The final, official answer to whether themes must be GPL? Yes and no. [...]

WordPress Themes Tutorial

If you aren’t already following along, I highly recommend checking out the How To Create A WordPress Theme tutorial series by Ian Stewart (ThemeShaper.com). This 12-part series (8 complete at the time of this writing) aims to take you from nothing to a fully functional, semantically rich, flexible WordPress theme in digestible chunks. [...]

Dougal’s must-have iPhone app list

My brother-in-law, John, recently got an iPhone 3Gs (lucky dog). Knowing that I also had an iPhone (though mine is the older “2G” model), he asked what apps I recommended. I’ve got a ton of apps installed, many of which I never really use, and should probably delete. But here are the ones that I actually find myself launching with some regularity, grouped into rough categories, all free, except where noted:

Productivity/Utility

Evernote
This is a great note-taking app. [...]

Drupal shop gives props to WordPress

My wife sent me a link by Volacci, a Drupal SEO development shop, giving some nice kudos to WordPress 2.8.

Last week the much anticipated new version of WordPress (version 2.8) was released for download. Many webmasters, bloggers and CMS fans alike have come to expect great things out of the seasoned system, so the expectations were high. [...]

WordPress 2.8.1 Coming Soon

Right on the heels of version 2.8, we will be seeing a WordPress 2.8.1 release soon. There are several minor bugfixes in so far, mostly dealing with tweaks to plugin and menu management. But the big problem driving a quick update is a bug in the core upgrade feature. It seems that in the case where the upgrade can’t be completed for some reason, the upgrade feature was deleting the wrong files when it attempted to clean up. Oops!

On the bright side, when this did happen, it would only delete files that are part of the core package, not any of your plugin or theme files. So the failure could be fixed pretty easily, by just manually re-installing the 2.7.1 or 2.8 files from a zip archive. [...]

Plugin: Fancybox Gallery 0.3.1

I have updated my Fancybox Gallery plugin to version 0.3.1.

Fancybox Gallery will automatically turn your photo galleries generated by the WordPress ‘gallery’ shorttag into a dynamic lightbox.

New in version 0.3 is the ability to navigate to the next/previous image while in lightbox mode. Another change is that this version requires jQuery version 1.3.2, and thus you’ll need to be using WordPress 2.8. . [...]

WordCamp Organization Advice

I’ve already posted about the WordPress 2.8 release, and there will be plenty of other posts highlighting everybody’s favorite new features when it officially drops, so how about if I talk about something a little different? I’ve been listening to a couple of WordPress podcasts recently (WordPress Weekly and WordCast, in particular), and there had been a lot of buzz about some of the WordCamp gatherings taking place in various locations.

In particular, there were a few complaints that were pointed out (and some kudos, as well), and it got me thinking about things that event organizers might want to plan ahead for when getting ready for future WordCamps. [...]

What’s the buzz?

WordPress

Here’s a quick post, just to let everybody know that I’m still alive.

During my long silence here, a lot of things have been happening in the WordPress community. First and foremost is the upcoming WordPress 2.8 release. There are several nifty new features in there. The most notable (for me) are probably:

  • Built-in theme browser/installer
  • Drag-n-drop widget management
  • Syntax highlighting when using theme/plugin editor
  • Image cropping in media uploader
  • New theme functions for author metadata
  • New OOP WP_Widget framework for plugin authors
  • More support for custom taxonomies
  • New combined i18n/escaping theme functions
  • Script loading improvements

The first fourĀ  are the main “visible” features for this release. [...]

Where’s Waldo?

Or, more to the point, where’s Dougal?

Sorry about the long silence here. After our son got out of the hospital from his pneumonia, he had four weeks of therapy before he returned to regular school. I had to drive across town to drop him off and pick him up, which ate up around 3 hours of each day when all was said and done. I’ve also tried to devote some time to taking care of some tasks around the house before I start my new job.

MailChimp HeadNew job, you say? Yup. [...]

Twitual

Recently, I launched a new project called Twitual.

Twitual is a service which lets you compare your Twitter friends and followers lists in interesting ways. You can see which people are ‘mutual’ (you follow them, and they follow you back), which are ‘fans’ (people who follow you, but you don’t follow them), and which are your ‘idols’ (you follow them, but they don’t follow you back).

Currently, I still consider Twitual to be in an alpha-testing state. [...]

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