Interview with Donncha O Caoimh-Developer of WordPress MU
Well this man indeed needs no introduction. All you web developer guys out there know him very well. An authority in his chosen field, a software developer and as they call him “Murphy’s Quality Controller” of Automattic Inc. He is Lead Developer behind weblog site WordPress.com and the multi-user version of WordPress WordPress MU. He lives with his lovely wife Jacinta in the scenic town of Blarney, Co. Cork, Ireland. He is also a passionate photographer, dragging around a camera everywhere and posting photos every day to Inphotos.org. Donncha is a Linux user and his primary post-production tool is The GIMP, using GThumb as an image viewer.
Donncha has released dozen of other useful WordPress Plugin. Some of them are No Adverts for Friends, Comment Referrers adds the referrer to comment notification emails, Flickr Comment Importer imports comments from your photos on Flickr into your blog. Flickr Blog This to Draft stops your post appearing when you blog a photo from Flickr. Brian’s Latest Comments Cached caches the output of Brian’s Latest Comments. WP Super Cache that creates static html files. Blog Voyeur – spy on your visitors! Cookies for Comments sets a cookie in your browser and marks a comment as spam if the cookie isn’t present later. WordPress Theme Tester enables you to test new themes without any impact on your visitors. Let’s talk to the man himself.
Shanker Bakshi: You are a lead developer of WordPress MU. There is lot of Buzz about its extension BuddyPress. Users are mixing up both WordPress MU and BuddyPress and creating powerful social media Networking sites just like Facebook. What’s your take on that?
Donncha O Caoimh: It’s exciting that the tools are there for users to build sites like Facebook. These same tools will raise the expectations of users for what their software should do, and possibly make it harder for proprietary software makers to compete with GPLed software.
Shanker Bakshi: When Ma.tt Mullenweg was here for attending WordCamp India a couple of months back I requested him to integrate BuddyPress with WordPress blog. He liked my idea. Do you think it will help bloggers if they have their blogs supported by an internal integrated social network community?
Donncha O Caoimh: Yes and no. Yes, it will help communication between bloggers to discuss issues but no, it might discourage those bloggers looking elsewhere for differing opinions. Their local social network could become an echo chamber where only the populist view prevails. I find the most interesting bloggers are those with original thoughts.
On a more positive note, an internal social network will help to gel a group of bloggers together. There will be friendships built, the site will become sticky and invaluable to those users.
Shanker Bakshi: Tell us something about how you guys works at Automattic. How its likes to be a part of the most influential work Group of Web 2.0
Donncha O Caoimh: Oh, it’s fabulous. We’re jetting off here, there and everywhere. We get to work on really cool code. Sort of. Working for Automattic is a superb opportunity and the job is very interesting and always throwing up new challenges. I never think much about how influential Automattic is.
I love working on code and doing interesting things with it so it’s a surprise to me when I hear things like that!
As you know Automattic is made up of people from all over the world so communication is vitally important. I think Matt’s recent post on P2 hits the nail on the head. IRC is really useful for immediate responses from those in your same timezone, but P2 does that too, plus the conversation I started on a micro blog can be joined by Matt when he starts work 8 hours later.
Shanker Bakshi: social-networking, video-sharing, wikis, blogs are the main evolutions on web 2.0. Where you see this movement in two years from now?
Donncha O Caoimh: Not surprisingly I think video will play a bigger role but there’s always going to be a place for the written word. I think we’ll find a lot more older people will get online. This may hopefully improve usability of websites. Some upstart website is going to shake the foundations a bit but for the most part technology will slowly evolve.
Shanker Bakshi: You have also developed a hand full of WordPress Plugins but it seems you are fallen in love with WP Super Cache. What are the other projects you are handing at this moment?
Donncha O Caoimh: Love? WP Super Cache? Ha! If you only knew the nights I fell asleep thinking of caching and why this or that didn’t work, or the weekends spent hacking on it when I wanted to be playing with my son. That plugin takes up a lot of my time!
Other projects are listed on my blog’s “WordPress Plugins” page, but I’ve also contributed to:
1. Tweetbacks – got it to use wp-cron to fetch tweets.
2. WP-hashcash – it now protects the MU signup form.
3. Subscribe to Comments which is now used on WordPress.com and I need to get a patch to Mark Jaquith
4. Viper’s adminbar which briefly made an appearance in MU but I’ll be merging the changes back into that plugin.
Shanker Bakshi: would you like to share some of the new features that you are incorporating in next versions of WordPress MU? I mean what major changes we will see in near future in MU Platform.
Donncha O Caoimh: The next major change will be merging WordPress 2.8 into MU, but mostly it’s bug fixing and incremental improvements. Any major improvements will likely come in the form of Plugins, if I find the time to work on them.
Shanker Bakshi: Tell us something about your other love Photography. You and matt both loves to click things. In fact I can see you post a new photograph every day on In Photos.
Donncha O Caoimh: Yeah, I love photography and drag my camera everywhere. It annoys some people but thankfully my wife is a photography fan too. I shoot whatever I find interesting, quite often from an unusual angle if I can and I have little time for the analysis of photography. My life is too busy with work and family life to worry about interpretation. If I like it, I’ll shoot it!
Shanker Bakshi: In the planet of more then 4000 WordPress Plugin which one is your favorite and which other WordPress coder’s works inspire you or impress you?
Donncha O Caoimh: Hands down, it has to be Subscribe to Comments. It’s currently maintained and developed by Mark Jaquith and has to be the most useful plugin of all. I cringe whenever I leave a comment on a blog that doesn’t use it because I know I’ll miss the rest of the conversation.
I also like what viper007bond did with his admin bar and Joost De valk did some neat things to make his Plugins easier to configure. He added a “Settings” link next to the “Deactivate” link on the plugins.php page in Tweetbacks. No other plugin does that so I copied it for WP Super Cache (Thanks Joost!)
Shanker Bakshi: Any thing you want to convey to your WordPress MU and Plugin users.
Donncha O Caoimh: Writing GPL software is a two way process. You get the software without paying an upfront cost in currency but the real cost is when you don’t give back in some form. That can be either by helping someone else use the same software, reporting problems back to the author, or submitting a patch to make the software better.
If you find a bug in a WordPress plugin, get in there with a text editor. Look at the error logs. Use Google to search for any error messages and then get back in there and learn. Sending the plugin author a donation or buying something off their Amazon wishlist will help too of course!
Shanker Bakshi: Thanks very much for giving time from your busy schedule to Shanker Bakshi dot Com readers. Thanks again.
Donncha O Caoimh: You’re welcome!
Best Buddies – Donncha O Caoimh with Matt Mullenweg
14 Responses to “Interview with Donncha O Caoimh-Developer of WordPress MU”
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superb interview!! I always knew Donncha because of Wp-super cache, but never knew he works for Automattic. Pleased to know so much about the genius!
Awesome interview, thank you so much!
Shankar, Great interview. Good to see that you are taking interviews with such great guys…
I am with raju, I know doncha through wp-supercache. It is a great and a must plugin…
Nihar´s last blog post..I Want to Change My Blog Theme. Any Suggestions?
The man is as always charismatic. I hope you have more interviews to show off more of his dashing personality.
great interview Shanker! Thanks for sharing.
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Donncha’s a great guy and he works really hard.
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Nice interview! It is nice to see that WPMU will constantly be on the same playing field with merges from WP now and into the future!
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I love Donncha’s work. WPMU and his plugins are awesome! Keep it up.
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You have done a lot of interviews from prominent internet figure. Donncha and Matt are two internet intellectuals who are both outstanding in their chosen field. WordPress is lucky to have them.
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Yes I agree, Automattic is team of some great guys.
just gr8
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A great interview! Such interviews with such persons always teach somthing to me and i always ready to add something extra in my knowledge.
Its Gr8 interview, thumbs up..