How did you first get started with web design and development? Is it something you expected to find yourself doing a few years ago?

I graduated in architecture and after a few years struggling in the interior design field, I decided to change areas. Back at that time, it was 2000, web design seemed to be a promising career, so I took the chance and studied a postgraduate course in Hypermedia Design. At the same time I started working at a web agency and I’ve been working as a web designer ever since.

It’s not something I expected to find myself doing a few years ago — it’s been almost 12 years I’ve been doing this I mean, it’s been a long time! But before 2000, definitely not, my dream was to work with animation.

As an illustrator and graphic designer, do you think that you bring things you’ve learned or experimented with in those disciplines over to your work with WordPress or are they distinctly separate?

I think web design owes a lot to graphic design, therefore any work with WordPress does too, but I believe it’s a different discipline. I’d rather compare web design to architecture than to graphic design, mainly because of the relationship between architects and engineers versus designers and programmers. To design a website it’s really important to understand how it’s built, the possibilities, what can be done or not. I know that in graphic design you need to have an understanding of the printing process, colors, type of papers etc., but it’s not so much dependant on the technology behind it. About illustration, it’s something I’d like to bring more often to my designs, I don’t explore the possibilities that much, however what I’ve learned about colors and composition with illustration are reflected on my work, yes.

When did you first start working with WordPress, and what made you choose it over the other options available?

I started working with WordPress in 2007. A few years earlier I did a website for a traditional Catholic Festival in my native town, as a volunteer. It’s annual and they desperately needed to renew their website, but they had no money to pay for it. The programmer who worked with me before had disappeared and I didn’t know anyone else who would do the job as a volunteer. So I searched the internet for a solution where I could do the job all by myself and at the same time give the festival organizers the freedom to update and run their site independently. I was looking for a solution which respected web standards and that was free. When I found WordPress I thought it was fantastic, I didn’t know anything about PHP, MySQL, I didn’t know to write a line of code, but I just didn’t need to! There was great documentation and almost all of my doubts were already answered in the forums. I could do everything on my own. The other options I tried were Plone, but there was too much to learn, and Mambo (there was no Joomla yet) which generated terrible HTML. So there wasn’t a better choice than WordPress!

Tell us about a WordPress project you’ve worked on recently that made you proud. What did you enjoy and find most challenging about it?

We’ve just launched a redesign project called Catraca Livre. I did the design, HTML, and CSS. It’s a calendar for free or low cost events. It’s becoming very popular and it gets between fifty and a hundred-thousand visitors every day. Their Facebook page has been liked almost 1,500,000 times so far, too. Catraca Livre was one of Hacklab’s first clients — their website has been running on WordPress since the beginning of 2008. As it grew, its interface needed an upgrade to address mobile devices and the code needed improvements to deal with the growing audience. Besides, it needed a better search mechanism so the users could find events easier.

What I enjoyed the most was the fact the client liked the idea of a very colourful site and they gave me a lot of freedom to work as I chose. I really love bright colours and on this job I got to play with them.

The two most chalenging parts of the job from a front-end point of view were making it responsive while at the same time fitting the client’s dynamic workflow. Its homepage has a very flexible layout and its system lets its administrators choose from a set of three different types of rows of features: With one, two or three categories. Inside each row, they can choose from many different combinations of layout grids. It wasn’t easy to make it responsive, mainly because it depends on some editorial policies too.

The client’s workflow is crazy and from the beginning of the project they changed their main categories countless times. Because of this, it was difficult to make a perfect main menu. Sometimes it was best to make it horizontal, sometimes vertical. We launched it horizontal, but I believe we’ll need to rethink it soon.

From the development point of view, the most challenging part was to integrate a search server based on Solr. It allows users to find events near them by a geographical search, or filter the events by a variety of parameters. And all of this at an incredible speed.

What hard-won advice would you give to someone just starting out in life as a designer?

I read this article by Nathan Peretic at A List Apart and I couldn’t agree more with it. It’s about writing a proposal, but there’s a lot of good advice in it that I heavily recommend anyone starting out in this career to read. My favorite quote is this one:

Why should you be selected for this project? Because you’re the cheapest? The quickest? Because you promise to do more than the other guys? Maybe. Sometimes those are the reasons, but they’re also the levers you least want to rely on pulling. Website design and development are services and not, on the professional level, commodities. Providing a commodity is an exhausting, unsatisfying, deadening experience. Doing what you love, on the other hand, working as an equal partner with smart, respectful clients is invigorating.

Do you have a typical client or a particular niche you work with, or do you find that you’re working on all kinds of different projects in a given year? Would you change anything about that?

At Hacklab we like to position ourselves as a business with social concern; we believe in Free Software and we like to publish our solutions whenever we can. We also like to work with innovative projects. So though we’ve worked with different types of clients, most of them have a little bit of those values. What I’d change about it is that I’d like to work just for clients who shared those values.

Tell us about your work in the Brazilian WordPress community, and how that’s infleunced your professional or personal life?

I started the community in 2008 with Anderson Clayton, a guy from Rio de Janeiro. In the begining it consumed a lot of my time! I did a lot of everything, I translated WordPress, bbPress, BuddyPress, plugins, ran the website, moderated the forums, organized WordCamp, meetups. I had help, but I was on the front of all these activities. As I worked as a freelancer, I had plenty of time for that, but because of WordPress, more work came in and I started working with the guys at Hacklab.

So in 2010/2011 I had to let it go a little, and it was good because other people came in and started helping me out with the translations, etc. In 2012 I came back, mostly helping organize the two WordCamps we had, in Curitiba and São Paulo.

The influence on my professional and personal life was huge; since I had the idea of translating WordPress I haven’t stopped working, and what’s best, I’ve received some sort of recognition I didn’t have before. This interview, being featured in Matt’s State of the Word talk last WordCamp SF, and participating at the Community Summit are a great honor to me. I’ve met many interesting people, I’ve made great professional contacts, I’ve made good friends. There’s a feeling of fulfilment that is the best part, which is to know that with a relatively small effort I’ve helped many people and I’m part of this great thing that is WordPress .

What can people do to get involved with localization, submitting patches, or otherwise improving WordPress, and why should they bother?

There are many channels available. I think the best way is to go to any of the make blogs and see what’s up. But if people don’t think they have the time, they should at least adopt the pratice of sharing their WordPress knowledge and experience by publishing their code under GPL. They should bother because WordPress belongs to them, they should own it and make it better everyday. Knowledge is something we should cherish and share so everyone is able to profit with it, not only a small group. That’s why WordPress is great.

Quick Overview

Whether you totally missed the free 24-hour-streamathon of WordSesh, or just want to catch up on the infinite payload of WordPress wisdom shared by its participants, you’ll be pleased to know that the whole thing has been captured on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Image based on Words by Alby Headrick, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you first get into using WordPress?

I started using WordPress in 2006 in the web 2.0 and blog boom when I was looking for a good learning resource for new web technologies. I tried a few CMSs, but decided on WordPress. I have been creating custom CMSs for my clients with PHP and MySQL since 2001, so using WordPress was comfortable from the beginning. Needless to say, WordPress is still the best resource for people to learn the latest web development techniques.

How did you get involved in the WordPress community?

My first contact with the WordPress community was submitting a bug fix to Core trac. I also created a .org account with the silly ID “tenpura” (I never imagined I would be so involved in the WordPress community in the future). Later, my bug fix was merged into the Core code and some people appreciated my work. This experience opened my eyes to open source community contributions and influenced the work I am doing now.

Tell us about how you contribute to the WordPress community.

In 2007, I worked with some peers to start ja.wordpress.org. Since then, I have been maintaining the site and ja packages, answering forum questions, and organizing WordCamps. As the local community grew, my contributions became eclectic. I’ve constantly contributed to core trac since I started using WordPress. The WP Multibyte Patch plugin might be my most unique contribution. It transforms WordPress into a perfect Japanese version of WordPress not only in language, but also in functionality. Some of the functionalities common to other languages have already been merged into Core. This was a discussion topic at the WordPress Community Summit 2012.

When did you set up Tinybit Inc. and what have you learned since then?

In the late 1990s, I worked as a freelance web developer. At this time, I mainly used Perl to build CMS-type systems (e.g. shopping carts, job matching sites). In 2000, as my number of clients increased, I started Tinybit Inc.

For years, we’ve been making and selling online journal aggregation/single sign-on systems for universities, hospitals, libraries, and think tanks. I’ve learned that the niche market is good with regard to this business. After I encountered WordPress, our company started using WordPress to make our clients’ websites. However, we hadn’t mentioned WordPress as our company specialty for a long time.

In late 2011, we moved our offices to Sapporo from Tokyo and reorganized our business line, finally finding our niche business in WordPress, which is “WordPress Support” (Sound too ordinary? Perhaps; but I rarely see anyone do this correctly.) The concept is support for everyone — from small site owners to WordPress pros — we help them in any way we can.

So far, most of the inquiries are from small business owners who build WordPress sites by themselves or small web-dev companies who build WP sites for their customers. A few years ago, none of my old clients knew anything about WordPress, but today in 2013, most of their corporate sites are built with WordPress. This makes me feel that WordPress has truly become the de facto standard for a site building tool. I think more and more professional helping hands might be needed by this new generation of WordPress users.

Tell us a bit about the project that you’re most proud of.

Running School+Q is a runner community featuring the Olympic gold medalist runner, Naoko Takahashi as a coach. The site is one of the first commercial use adoptions of WordPress by a big enterprise in Japan. It is also a successful sample of a multi-user blogging community.

Tell us about your involvement in WordPress Internationalization (i18n).

In short, WP Multibyte Patch is an i18n version of the hotfix plugin. The current version contains 15 enhancements and bug fixes for Japanese installs. Some people, like Andrew Nacin, suggested that I do this in Core and I think it’s a nice idea; but before we go too far, I think we need to research other languages and organize common problems and language-specific issues in order to determine the most appropriate way of implementation and one that will make everyone happy.

How has contributing to open source affected your work, life, and learning?

This is a difficult question. It has definitely changed the way I think and how I work with people, but, in reality, contributing to open source and business do not always go together. I still don’t know the best approach for accomplishing both.

What motivates you to stay active in the WordPress community?

I’ve known WordPress since its humble beginnings. The community is still growing fast and so many talented people are working hard every day to make the software better; I see no reason to stop watching it.

Do you remember when you first encountered WordPress, and the point that you realized it was something you’d work with professionally?

I first remember hearing about WordPress in the mid-2000s, when a few friends at CUNY were doing some pioneering work with WPMu. I used WordPress a little around that time while teaching Ethics to undergraduates: I had them keep philosophy journals on public wordpress.com blogs, which allowed for better peer review. In 2009, I was asked by my friend Matt Gold to help out for a few hours a week on his CUNY Academic Commons project. CAC was built on WordPress and BuddyPress (then in beta), and needed someone with some real technical chops. Despite this fact, he asked me to help. I knew nothing about WordPress or PHP when I started (just a bit of HTML/CSS). Within a few months, I’d written and released my first plugin. Within a year and a half, I’d quit my job to do WordPress consulting and development full-time.

You’re a Lead Developer for BuddyPress. How did you get involved with it, and what itch was it scratching (or not quite scratching) for you at the time?

I started using and developing for BuddyPress through my work on the CUNY Academic Commons. The team behind the Commons wanted to remain true to the for-the-public-by-the-public history of CUNY itself by using free software. At the time, BuddyPress was really the only social networking tool that was free (in all senses) and that integrated well with the other tools we wanted to use. When I started building features and fixes for BuddyPress, it was only fitting that the Commons leadership would encourage me to contribute them outward, either as distributed plugins or as upstream patches.

What are you proudest of having contributed to BuddyPress?

Much of BuddyPress’s recent development has been focused on transforming BP from a somewhat quirky, largely standalone system, to a robust, modular, scalable plugin that feels — both to users and developers — like a natural extension of WordPress. I’m quite proud of the work that I’ve accomplished toward this goal over the last couple release cycles.

In BP 1.6, for example, I made some modifications to the way that directory pages are built that reduced database overhead by up to 75%. In BP 1.7, I’ve replaced our aging, labyrinthine member query methods with a BP_User_Query class that is modeled on WP_User_Query, and improves query performance by a factor of three or more. These sorts of big changes — along with countless smaller improvements — make each version of BuddyPress more pleasant for the end user, more scalable for big-time implementations, and more approachable and fun for WordPress developers.

How important has getting involved with the WordPress community been for you, and how would you convince someone up against deadlines to give something back to that community?

My involvement with the WordPress community has been transformative in more ways than I can count. Working alongside numerous other developers has dramatically improved the breadth and depth of my technical skills. I’ve created a reputation and a niche that’s allowed me to be extremely selective about which clients I work with. I’ve met a lot of great people, some of whom I’ve come to consider close friends. And I’ve been able to contribute (however modestly) to a larger policital and philosophical cause that is extremely important to me: the development of software tools that allow individuals and organizations to reclaim pieces of their online lives from commercial entities and proprietary tools.

Nearly anyone who has done this kind of work in the open and has given things away — plugins, themes, tutorials, blog posts, forum support, whatever — will have anecdote upon anecdote about how this kind of openness tends to lead to unexpected and wonderful results. That said, I can understand why some are reticent about giving things away. We all have bills to pay. And, sadly, there is no cosmic karma guaranteeing that each act of generosity be repaid in kind — every developer of freely-available WordPress tools can tell stories about hours lost, and gray hairs gained, while interacting with unreasonable and ungrateful users. So, if someone were unconvinced that community work is the smart thing to do, I’d try to impress upon them that it’s the right thing to do: if every person who’s benefited from free software gave, say, 5% of their time back into free software, the world would be a far, far better place.

What was the thinking behind Commons in a Box, and what problems did it first set out to solve that weren’t being solved effectively elsewhere?

The CUNY Academic Commons has been a model for many colleges and universities, both conceputally and technically. But reproducing and customizing something like the Commons — built on thousands of hours of development, testing, trial, and error — is no small feat. The extensibility and modularity of platforms like WordPress and BuddyPress are what make them so powerful. But these same qualities also make it daunting to set up a complex system of interacting plugins, themes, and other modifications.

The goal of Commons In A Box is to ease these difficulties. Commons In A Box does a couple of things, on your behalf, that help you get from a blank WordPress installation to a full-featured community site. First, we provide a curated list of plugins that are powerful, and we whitelist versions of those plugins that are known to work well together. We then fetch and install those plugins for you. We provide a theme that’s tailored for academic and non-profit communities, and which provides a robust set of tools for customizing layout and appearance without knowing CSS. And we handle upgrades for those plugins and themes, so that you don’t have to worry about whether, say, a new version of BuddyPress will break your site.

In short, we provide users with a head-start: instead of taking hours (or days, or weeks) to research, install, and configure WordPress plugins and themes, one can quickly get to work fostering community engagement.

What have you learned through iterating on Commons in a Box, and what might you consider doing differently if you could start again knowing everything you do now?

Technically, I think that Commons In A Box is pretty solid. Ray was the primary developer of its core functionality, and did a fantastic job building something that can easily be maintained and extended. And our theme developers, PressCrew, built a theme that strikes the perfect balance between ease-of-use and flexibility, without making any sacrifices on elegant design.

My biggest challenges during the development of a relatively large project like Commons In A Box were related to management. Most of the time I devoted to the project was not spent writing code, but doing code reviews, managing deadlines, leading testing, handling communication, and so on. I discovered that, while I like (and think I’m good at) playing a leadership role in a public volunteer project like BuddyPress, leading a grant-driven project like Commons In A Box takes a whole different skillset. I don’t really have the chops, or the desire, to do project management for my day job.

With Commons in a Box, Anthologize, Participad, and in a lot more of your work besides, there is (or seems to be) a real emphasis on community publishing. Which comes first for you — community or publishing — or are the two inextricably bound together?

The core idea that motivates my work with free software is that users should have control over what they do and produce online. It just so happens that I came to software development through BuddyPress and WordPress, so that my professional emphasis has been on tools for web publishing and community. In another universe, I’d be working on a different kind of free software

That said, community and publishing software are particularly important insofar as they both enable kinds of activity that are central to the way we conceive ourselves: the things we write, and the connections we make with others. Those who develop these kinds of software, then, have a special privilege and resposibility to respect user freedoms.

What roles do you see WordPress and BuddyPress playing in the ongoing transformation of education, and does it make a big difference that they’re Open Source?

Education (especially the liberal arts college experience) is often described as the process of turning youth into citizens. When a student takes a course in philosophy or physics or history, she’s gaining a set of tools for participation in society, for representing herself and her needs in a respectful relationship with the world around her. The rise of free software parallels this conception of education in a nice way: things like WordPress and BuddyPress are tools that enable students to become fully realized agents, individuals with control over who they are and what they create.

From a philosophical point of view, it’s far more important that these tools are free (as in speech) rather than that they’re open source. Most students are not technically inclined, and the idea that their favorite piece of software was developed using a given methodology is probably not very interesting to them. What does matter is that free licenses like the GPL protect their rights to use the software as they see fit.

More concretely, the ideas behind free software are very much in keeping with the public-engagement goals of universities, especially public ones. That means that schools are, more and more, embracing free over proprietary software. This has a cascading effect: students are creating content using software they’ll continue to use after leaving the university; the university is free to modify the software however they’d like for their own purposes; development funds go toward hiring free software developers who are generally local to the university and sympathetic to its purpose, rather than toward huge licensing fees paid to faceless software companies. It’s an amazing trend, and I’m proud to be playing a role in it.

Do you see a point at which educational and other organizations will be able to ditch proprietary networking, teaching and knowledge sharing solutions for Open Source alternatives? What, if anything, stands in the way of that happening?

I think it’s already happening, little by little. About five years ago, the CIO of one of the CUNY campuses told me they couldn’t support WordPress because “they didn’t have a Linux person on staff, and they never would”. In the fall of 2012, I helped this same campus move its externally hosted, guerilla WordPress installation to a Linux server supported internally by the IT department.

Leadership in campus IT is extremely conservative. For university CIOs, “free and open source software” has traditionally meant software that’s insecure, feature-weak, unreliably, and — most importantly for them — unsupported. In the last few years, the zeitgeist has shifted, at the same time that free software itself has gotten better. The marketplace that provides services and support related to free software, from big companies like Red Hat and Automattic to individual consultants like me, has played a big role in making free software seem less like a gamble to
these very risk-averse individuals. People on the academic side of the university — faculty, deans, provosts — generally don’t need much convincing to be sold on the practical and moral benefits of tools like WordPress, so as CIOs gradually find the idea of free software more palatable, there’s a potential for the floodgates to really open on its use in universities.

Has working at CUNY afforded you development opportunities that you might not have been able to give time to if you working in, say, corporate or startup space?

Definitely. CUNY has historically been a very particular kind of social justice institution, catering to a huge underserved subsection of New York City. So it’s been a fantastic place for what I’d call “activist software development”: the building of tools that are conceived to suit our specific needs, but are also designed from the start to be given away.

As I’ve done more and more work outside of CUNY as a freelancer, I’ve found that this same spirit — the desire to serve through building — exists within educational institutions all over the world (though sometimes not as openly as at CUNY). I’m really pleased that I’ve been able to do contract work for a wide variety of schools, playing my part in spreading the good news of free software.

On a personal level, I don’t think I’d deal well with corporate or startup culture. I get bored easily, and thrive on learning new things and dealing with new people. My preferred lifestyle is to spend 30 or 40 hours a week doing interesting and highly varied work, and to spend the rest of the time with my family. Pumping out 60-80 hours weeks working on a single app as part of a startup? That’s a young man’s game

What are you most excited about working on next, and what would you like to see happen longer term for WordPress and BuddyPress in your context?

By design, more and more of my work has been about tool-building, rather than website-building. This kind of setup has worked really well for me, satisfying my dual desires to keep my work varied and to have maximum impact. I’m currently in the process of working with a couple of different colleges on new tools to make WordPress and BuddyPress work better in the academic context: from beautiful BuddyPress portfolios, to full-featured BP file management, to group RSS curation in WP. Beyond the next six months or so, I don’t know what I’ll be doing — but that too is part of what’s exciting!

One of the long-term goals I have for BuddyPress is for it to play a meaningful role in rethinking a truly distributed social web. Today, so much of our social content is locked up in centralized silos like Facebook and Twitter. BuddyPress eases this centralization at a small scale, by enabling niche communities, like schools, to set up their own internal networks. But I can imagine taking this idea even further. BuddyPress (much like WordPress already is) could be a tool for individuals to take control of the social content they produce around the web. BP could aggregate content you leave elsewhere — a comment on someone else’s blog, say — while federating with the BP installations of your friends and colleagues. The open standards that will make this kind of personalized, decentralized social hub possible are starting to mature, and I’m anxious for BP to play a role in putting this kind of control within the reach of the masses.

How did you get started with web development, and when did WordPress enter the picture?

I got caught in the web before the first bubble in 1999 as a teenager in Montréal. My first exposure to code was Flash Actionscript 4.

That was soon forgotten and I started teaching myself C#. I built a simple CMS out of it, only to move to PHP thereafter. By mid 2000, I put the project manager’s hat. I gradually dropped coding and concentrated on organizing teams.

WordPress first came to me while I was in the Congo in 2005. I entertained my first blog on a platform built by a friend.

The “5 minute install” promise of WordPress piqued my curiosity. I was quickly sold and I knew that WordPress would be a game changer.

Tell us about Wysija and the problem you’re trying to solve with it.

Wysija is a newsletter plugin for WordPress that was first released in early 2012. It’s a freemium solution.

Me and my 3 partners in crime wanted to fill a gap: what newsletter solution can be more flexible than Subscribe2 or Feedburner’s email alerts and yet, not force users to leave WordPress.

There were 3 challenges:

• build an easy to use drag and drop editor
• make the installation easy
• keep it essentially free

What made you decide to build a product on top of WordPress, rather than as standalone software?

There are dozens of great standalones. Great, but users want an integrated solution within WordPress.

Once you’ve trained your friends, family or clients to use WordPress, you don’t want to teach them yet another third party application.

How did you arrive at the business model for Wysija, and what was the thinking behind it?

For some reason, I can’t imagine another model than freemium. Here’s why:

• I’m personally averse to buying Premium plugins myself, believe it or not.
• We need a lot of users to quickly to build a better product.
• The “competition” already use freemium models.

How do the challenges of supporting a product compare to those of dealing directly with clients, as a service provider?

I grew tired of answering phone calls from clients. Consider me relieved at having a product instead of a service.

Supporting a product is very intense nonetheless. Yet, it’s quintessential to our success and I regard it as our number one marketing tool. When you have a product, it’s OK to make some mistakes, but it’s fatal not to respond to your users.

What pitfalls do you think entrepreneurs and designer/developers might face when making the leap from service to product?

Good question. I get it all the time at WordCamps. Many developers are tempted, and yet afraid to make the leap.

Here’s my own unordered list:

• Committing to your product is a full time affair.
• Underestimating support, or disliking it.
• Working alone, because having a partner is tricky, will get you nowhere.
• It’s about the experience, not the features.
• Your users know what they want, they don’t always know what they need.
• Yes, you’ll be poor for a while. But you’ll be exhilarated and happy.
• Sell from day one, don’t wait.

What’s been your approach to branding, telling your story, and setting Wysija apart from the pack?

Your product needs to speak for itself. Build an experience and user interface that is easy and fun. Your users should feel they’re using something special.

As an author, you need to be reachable and transparent. Humans love to hear about other humans. When people write to you, or ask for help, they are friendlier when they’ve seen your photo. Go to WordCamps, and meet your users — it’s gratifying.

Then, it’s all about service. Provide fast and friendly support.

Your website has to look professional so your visitors know you’re serious about it.

Acquiring users is difficult. Try to make every single one of them loyal ambassadors of your product.

What do you look for in a plugin or WP-powered product you’re considering using, and what makes you run a mile?

I look for plugins that have, in this order:

• Regular updates.
• High number of downloads.
• Support reputation.
• Best compromise between features and user experience.

What part, if any, has the WordPress community played in your work and the success of your business?

The WordPress plugin repository is how people find us. More than Google, word of mouth, and sponsoring WordCamps combined.

I consider the repository as the most important community tool because it offers the support forums, the reviews and star ratings. More importantly, it’s not commercial.

Sponsoring WordCamps hasn’t given us a lot of traction, but we do it nonetheless.

Talking at WordCamps has a definite impact. Then again, the crowd is composed of enthusiasts and hardcores. An infinite group.

WordPress is used by the masses. They’re actually everywhere around you, in your daily life. They are unknowingly part of the movement. I’m thrilled when I stumble on someone who uses Wysija, yet knows absolutely nothing about it or WordPress. This is when I feel we’ve reached the core of the community.

What are the three most important things to keep in mind when supporting a premium product or service?

Premium or free, you should always support your users with this in mind:

• Answer within 48 hours, possibly 24 hours.
• Be courteous and friendly.
• Get to the bottom of the problem and fix it.
• Ask for a review when finished. See our reviews, as example.

Additional tip: ever noticed how girls always say they’re sorry when you tell them something bad happened?

They’re right! Say you’re sorry, even if you have nothing to do with the problem itself.

What are you proudest about Wysija, in terms of really distinguishing it from the other options available for creating and maintaining mailing lists?

Its simplicity. This said, you still need to be a geek to configure it. This is part of our ongoing battle to add features while keeping it simple.

I’ll leave the last words for a Matt Mullenweg quote:

“The goal is to reach simplicity and not to be simplistic.”

Today we talk about how WordPress has changed over time, the merits and challenges of Open Source software, WordPress security, digging into the guts of WP, and more development goodness than you could shake a bundle of sticks at.

What was your background before coming to WordPress development, and how did WordPress first come into your life?

My first experiences with the web were at the very beginning of everything. In the early-/mid-1990s, I was the Systems Manager for one of the first ISPs in Huntsville, Alabama. Early on, we just offered dial-up access to a Major BBS system, which was connected to a Linux box, which provided gateway access for things like email, usenet newsgroups, file transfers, and a gopher interface. This was in the 0.99.x days of the Linux kernel, and the question of whether to pronounce ‘Linux’ with a long or short ‘I’ sound were just starting. And the World Wide Web was still an academic experiment that nobody had heard of yet.

But it wasn’t long before this cool new program called ‘NCSA Mosaic‘ started making the rounds, and the GUI interface for hypertext documents was much cooler than the text-based menus offered by gopher. Mosaic was followed by Netscape Navigator (and later, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), we upgraded our systems, offering direct SLIP and PPP connections, ISDN service, shell accounts, and customers could create their own homepages.

It was in these early days that I first heard of this CGI script called PHP/FI. At this time, “PHP” stood for “Personal Home Pages” — it was only later that it was renamed to mean “PHP Hypertext Processor”. One of my first experiments was to use PHP and MySQL to create a database-driven news site for our customers, which I loosely modeled after Slashdot. It was my first blog-like system, pulling articles from the database newest-first, and displaying them ten-per-page. I didn’t even bother to make an article editing system, I just used PHPMyAdmin to add new entries to the database.

A few years later, we were starting to see open source blogging software. There were things like Movable Type, PHPNuke, Drupal, and even Slashcode which were fairly well known, and a lot of smaller projects. When I decided to set up a blog of my own, the first system I tried out was one of these lesser-knowns, named MyPHPBlog. I even became a code contributor to that project. But the lead developer was slow to integrate changes and push out new releases, and I became frustrated with it. For a while, I considered creating my own blogware from scratch, but I didn’t really have enough free time for that, so I was also keeping my eye out for other promising projects. I had started looking at b2, and it looked really interesting, but it seemed that its developer had more-or-less disappeared, and other people were forking the code already, or talking about switching to something else. I was already aware of this kid called Photomatt, and he was talking about forking b2 into a new system, with the blessing of b2′s creator.

So I think in March 2003, Matt asked me if I was interested in joining in on this WordPress thing he was kicking off. At the time, I was super busy at work, and replied that I just didn’t have time for it. But in April, things were a little more calm, and we were still exchanging emails about it, and I said that I could try to join in and at least contribute some ideas, if not code. Soon after, I was doing things like adding HTTP 304 browser caching support to the RSS feeds and expanding the XML-RPC API with support for the Movable Type and metaWeblog APIs. I remained an active core contributor for at least the next year or so. And I’ve tried to stay active in the community up to the present day.

As a “Developer Emeritus” of the WordPress platform, and a former Core Developer you added elements to WordPress, such as XML-RPC API support and Post Custom Fields, that are still fundamental today. Which are you proudest of?

I think I ‘d have to say Post Custom Fields. At the time, I was very interested in metadata systems, and I had been experimenting with things like FOAF (the Friend of a Friend data format) and other RDF vocabularies. When I first mentioned the idea of postmeta for WordPress, the other developers seemed to think it was a mildly interesting idea, but were not as excited about it as myself. I knew that it would open the doors for some really fun and interesting possibilities for plugins, though. But even then, I didn’t imagine just how many different ways people would end up using it. Eventually, we also got metadata for users and comments, too.

I’m proudest of that because I love seeing how many different plugins and themes rely on it now, and for all the creative ways people have put it to use!

What are you most and least enthusiastic about the way that WordPress has changed since you first got involved?

I am most enthusiastic about the massive uptake of WordPress. At last count, it’s powering something like 18% of the top 1 million sites? I think *anyone* would have to be impressed by that. And anybody who has ever contributed the least little bit of code or idea to WordPress can say, “I’m a part of that!”

I am least enthusiastic about some of the recent dogmatism we’ve seen over the “100% GPL” guideline for WordCamp contributors. I think the idea of barring someone from organizing or speaking at a WordCamp simply because all of their code is not available in a “100% GPL” fashion (e.g. in a split-license situation where the PHP code is GPL, and the CSS/images are under a different license — which *is* allowed under the GPL interpretations we’ve seen), is just too harsh, and only serves to divide the community.

It would be one thing to ask speakers to only promote “100% GPL” projects at a WordCamp. It’s quite another to bar them from speaking about *anything*.

You’ve developed and contributed several plugins to the WordPress ecosystem. Is that something you’d recommend doing, and are there any caveats to go with that recommendation if so?

I highly recommend it. Sometimes the simplest of ideas can take a life of their own and become popular. If you think of an idea for how to add a feature to your site, and can create a plugin to implement it, you might find that you weren’t the only person to want that feature. Declare it GPL, submit it to the plugin repository, and then have fun obsessing over the download counts!

The caveat is, on the internet, there are plenty of people with lots of time on their hands who like to point out faults in others. If you are not an expert coder, someone is likely to point out flaws in your code, and sometimes they might do so in a very unkind fashion. If your skin isn’t thick enough to put up with that, and you tend to take criticism of your work personally, it can be very depressing when somebody tears your code apart and tells you that You’re Doing It Wrong! If this happens, try to use it as a learning experience. Find out how to Do It Right, improve your code, and update. Life is all about constantly learning new things. When I first started learning to play trumpet in 7th grade, I sounded pretty terrible. But I practiced, and got better, and in high school I was in the symphonic band and marching band, and had solo parts. It’s the same with coding, and putting your code out for the public to see is like playing a concert in front of an audience.

As your career has developed are there certain types of projects or clients you’ve gravitated toward more, and if so how are those different to the type of projects or clients you were interested in a few years back?

That’s a hard question. I’d *like* to be doing full-time work involving WordPress. But unfortunately, the job market hasn’t been able to lead me in that direction. As a result, lately I’ve been gravitating more towards front-end work (JavaScript and CSS) than back-end coding. With the semi-exception that I’m also interested in the node.js server, though I don’t use that in my work, and I don’t have much time to play with it on the side.

In the past, I have stayed almost exclusively in the back-end of web development, dealing mostly with overall business logic, database interactions, integrating other data systems and sources, etc. But more recently, the browser has become a much more interesting platform in its own right. The power of modern HTML5, JavaScript, WebGL, and other associated bits makes for a very fun playground to explore.

You’ve presented (and will be presenting, at WordCamp Atlanta 2013) on WordPress security more than once. What would your top three tips be for locking down a WordPress installation, and more generally, what are the most overlooked security issues you see developers make?

Fortunately, WordPress itself tends to be pretty secure. Even when we do see point-releases for security problems, most of them have been ‘privilege escalation’ types of things, where you’d already have to be a validated user in order to take advantage of them. Random, anonymous internet users wouldn’t be able to get into anything.

Tips?

1. If your site doesn’t need the ability for new users to register an account, don’t turn that feature on. And don’t create user accounts for anyone that you do not *absolutely* trust. And when you do, only give them the access role they *need* (‘Contributor’, ‘Editor’, etc). If your site *does* need registered users, make absolutely sure that you have a backup system in place. Back up your database, and also any theme or plugin customizations, and maybe your media uploads if those are important. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!
2. If your web host makes you use FTP to transfer changes to your site, don’t do that (“You’re Doing It Wrong!”). Use a secure file transfer method like FTPS, SFTP, or SCP. If your host doesn’t support a secure file transfer method, it’s time to figure out how to move your site to a service that does. The FTP protocol transmits your password in cleartext, and while you might think the chances of somebody intercepting that information are small, I can assure you that it happens all the time, often to people who do know better.
3. If your web site is mission critical (whether for a business or just because it’s important to you), try to evaluate the reputation of any themes and plugins you add to your site. *For the most part* plugins and themes you download from wordpress.org should be pretty safe. Especially if there are a lot of downloads and good ratings. If there seem to be some bad ratings, read the forums and see if there are valid complaints that you should be concerned about. For third-party sources, if you aren’t sure of the reputation, ask around the community (on Twitter, in the wordpress.org forums, etc.).

Programmers don’t like to re-invent the wheel. Instead, we like to take an existing wheel, share it, improve it, re-share it, improve it some more, and so forth. This is how WordPress came to be. And because of that nature, WordPress contains within it a toolbox full of utility functions that solve common problems, ready for developers to use. This includes many functions to help you code more securely. One of the main things to learn about is the ‘esc_*()‘ family of functions.

Also, for plugin or theme option pages, learn about the Settings API.

Security is such a broad subject, it’s nearly impossible to convey the complexity to someone who doesn’t already have some technical background. You have to consider every piece of a system — not just the WordPress source code, or even just the themes and plugins you add. Because that all sits on top of PHP and MySQL, which have their own security concerns. And PHP is running alongside a web server, which might be Apache, Nginx, IIS, or something else. And those are running on a server, which might be one of several different flavors of Linux, or FreeBSD, or Windows, or who knows what else. And those servers might also be running other services, like SSH, FTP, email, IRC, etc. And if there are other users on the server, they might have installed other software that you don’t even know about. And there are the network routers, and load balancers, and the DNS system, and…! The internet is a vast system, and while individual pieces of it can be somewhat simple, they are woven into a whole that is extremely complex.

You continue to be active in the WordPress community, including presenting at WordCamps. What keeps you involved, and why would you recommend getting involved with the wider WordPress community to someone just starting out?

I suppose my continued involvement largely comes from the fact that I was fortunate enough to be so deeply involved in the early days of WordPress. I enjoy looking back and seeing how far WP has come over the years — how the features and interface have evolved. And even though I can’t always spend as much time working with WP as I might like, I also enjoy guiding newer community members to an “aha!” moment when they understand how to make WP do something they need.

The vast majority of the WordPress community are some of the most helpful and friendly people you could hope to meet. If you ever have a question about how to do something, all you really have to do is ask — on the support forums, on Twitter, the WordPress Stack Exchange, etc. You will generally get answers to your questions by someone who really knows what they’re talking about pretty quickly. And by using that opportunity to learn, and then later pass along some of your own knowledge to somebody newer than yourself, you have a chance to pay it forward.

What are the biggest benefits and challenges you’ve faced working with Open Source software? Does one outweigh the other for you?

The biggest benefit to working with Open Source, especially as a developer, is that I can modify the code however I see fit. There are very few closed source applications that let you do that at all, and if they do, it’s only if you pay a hefty licensing fee and sign strict contracts. As a user, you generally get the benefit that bug fixes and new features are released at a much higher rate than with closed source products. Since the source is available to all, many developers are able to investigate bugs and determine the best way to fix them.

The main challenge, though it’s lessened these days, has been getting companies to utilize Open Source alternatives to closed source commercial products. Most corporations are strongly attuned to Risk Management. With Open Source, you often (but not always) are not dealing with a centralized entity with contracts to hold them accountable should something go wrong with the product. Many companies consider this a very high-risk problem. You find it much less with the kinds of products associated with web development (web servers, database servers, browsers, etc).

You’ve previously advocated getting stuck into the guts of WordPress. What do you think are the least understood or most under-utilized aspects of WordPress as a platform, and how should designer-developers be making better use of them?

I’m not sure I have a good answer for that. I can say that some of the features that *I* am not as familar with as I’d like to be are the WP_Rewrite class, Custom Post Types, and Custom Taxonomies. I’d really like to find time to dig into those more, and find some interesting ways to use them for my own projects.

Maybe I can side-step the question a little bit here, and suggest that if you’re just getting started with learning to write plugins or themes for WordPress, you obviously have to start with the action/filter hook system. Find some simple examples to work from, experiment, learn the basics of those. Poke around in the WordPress source, and find places where it calls do_action() or apply_filters(). As you dig around, you’re very likely to see an action or filter that you never knew about, that might spark ideas for how you can use it for your own needs.

Once you understand the hooks well, start looking at the various files in the wp-includes directory. See how WP uses the walker classes, how the XML-RPC server class can be extended to add new API calls, how the image editor classes are used. Or you can start with your theme files, see how each piece of content is put into place, and what filters it goes through along the way. When you start looking at the code on your own to figure out how it all fits together, you are bound to learn something new and surprising. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone through the WordPress source, trying to figure something out, and said, “I didn’t know we had a function to do *that*!”

What’s the biggest difference between web development as a job and web development as a hobby? Can one feed into the other, or should they remain distinct?

Generally speaking, web development as a job will often limit which technologies and platforms you get to work with. On the one hand, by focusing on those core pieces, you will become very proficient with them. But on the other hand, web development as a hobby lets you explore wherever your interests take you. In my current gig, I’m dealing with Drupal, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and some of the more common parts of CSS. But what I’d *like* to be playing with node.js, websockets, WebGL, HTML5 canvas, CSS animation, and Arduino systems. And of course, WordPress.

I think for most people, the two do feed into each other. Obviously, the things you work on as a hobby outside of your job let you explore new areas. This can lead you to have new perspectives, new ways of thinking about and approaching problems, and this will almost always improve your overall skills and ability to do your job. And likewise, the focus you get through your work lets you gain a deeper understanding of your core tools. You get a similar benefit here because that strong reinforcement of knowledge keeps your skills honed and ensures that you are able to solve problems quickly. You can often extrapolate that knowledge and apply it to the new things you are trying to learn in your hobby life.

Quick Overview
Hosted by Ryan Imel and Brian Krogsgard, the WP Candy podcast covers plugins, plugin reviews, WordCamps, themes, community news, and more in their show. Give those reading eyes a break and tune in to the WP Candy podcast to keep up to date on WordPress happenings.

Image based on Candies by Moyan Brenn, CC-BY-2.0.

You have a background in industrial engineering. How did you get into working with WordPress, and have you found that your industrial engineering background has influenced your work with WordPress?

I’ve always been intrigued by the web, but I didn’t give any real consideration to building websites until I was in college at Auburn and thought I had a few good website ideas. They weren’t good ideas, but fortunately I managed to find WordPress in the process of figuring that out. I continued to be fascinated by how easy it was to create a basic website with WordPress, and for a while would periodically tinker with a new idea, but between 2008 and 2010 I was much more focused on my new engineering career.

I started blogging around mid-2010. I was hacking around with my personal website and of course coming up with new ideas. But this time around I realized that I enjoyed making websites more than I believed in any of my ideas for websites. I also realized just how much I liked to write. I got hooked on WordPress and web development in general and never looked back. I spent countless hours reading, tinkering, and blogging so I could learn more and more about WordPress.

Early on, I don’t know that my Industrial Engineering degree did too much to benefit my web endeavors. But now that I am a full-time programmer and consultant, I consistently see the benefits of my Industrial Engineer’s mindset and focus on core business goals in tasks that I perform. Plus, Apple CEO Tim Cook is an IE grad from Auburn, so I feel like that gives me some major street cred, right?

At what point did you realize that you could make a living with WordPress, rather than tinkering with it as a hobby?

By spring 2011, I knew that what I was doing wasn’t going to fulfill my career ambitions. I had found my professional passion, and I started thinking about how I could possibly work on the web full time. I knew little to nothing about professional web development or the WordPress economy, and I certainly didn’t know just how in-demand WordPress developers were.

I thought I was going to have to take an enormous leap of faith and leave a well-paying job with great benefits and become a freelancer. So I just kept building websites for family, friends, and fun to help prepare myself. And then in August 2011, I saw a tweet from one of the largest and oldest web development agencies in the state promoting a full-time position for a WordPress developer. I was shocked, and felt like I must at least send them an email, even though I still didn’t think I was quite “ready.” A week later, I had a job offer in hand from Infomedia to be their lead WordPress developer.

You recently launched Post Status. How do you pitch that to the unawares, and what inspired you to put it together?

I typically define Post Status as a “WordPress News & Links” blog, but really it’s just a short-form blog where I link to things I like while adding a bit of context to the conversation. Also, other people periodically submit posts that they find interesting. I’ve enabled up-voting on the site as a method for visitors to offer additional insight to other readers on whether the linked post is interesting or not.

I put it together simply because I wasn’t satisfied with existing methods for consuming WordPress-related information. I’ve always enjoyed Hacker News for broader tech news aggregation, but it’s still a bit impersonal and obviously not WordPress-centric. I also love the style of the Next Draft newsletter, as it’s a collection of the top ten news items every day, curated by Dave Pell. Dave’s own “voice” really shines in his newsletter, while simultaneously driving me toward the articles he links. My goal is for Post Status to be like a hybrid of the two.

Tell us a bit about the thinking behind how Post Status works, and how you set it up to be as democratic and user-focused as WordPress from the get-go.

I’ve seen a number of WordPress news sites come and go, for a variety of reasons. But most WordPress news comes by way of a blog post anyway, so re-writing longer-form blog posts as “news” is a bit silly in my opinion. So Post Status merely attempts to drive traffic to the source, and add context in as few words as possible to help readers discern whether they want to read the original article.

I rely heavily on user feedback, submissions, and validation (by voting) in order to make Post Status its best. In a perfect world, Post Status would be a go-to resource for anyone interested in WordPress. I want it to be part of people’s daily routine. And I can’t do that alone. If Post Status helps someone’s blog get more attention when they’ve written great content, and also offers a source of quality information to readers that they otherwise may not have found, then we all win.

By day you’re the lead WordPress developer at Infomedia. Can you think of a project you’re particularly proud of having worked on recently? What made it stand out for you?

One of my favorite sites we’ve done at Infomedia is Weld for Birmingham. Weld is a weekly paper in town that has done a great job of balancing print and online media. They have a small staff, but they also encourage community members to start their own blogs on Weld. I love how passionate they are about Birmingham and how focused they are on high quality local journalism.

From a technical perspective, we built a responsive parent theme using the Hybrid Core drop-in framework and a child theme for the blogs in their Multisite network. We’re using a custom post type and Posts 2 Posts so they can relate their online articles to their print issues. During the process of building this site, I discovered just how much advertising technology isn’t keeping up with responsive design.

My talented coworker, David Hickox, is responsible for the beautiful design. Weld is engaged with their online community and they love WordPress. They are a joy to partner with, and the project has been very rewarding personally.

How important has the WordPress community been in getting and keeping you involved with WordPress, and would you encourage others to get involved on some level?

My relationships with other members of the WordPress community are incredibly important to me. I wasn’t hired at Infomedia because I was a proven developer. They took a chance on me, because they were just getting into WordPress, and saw my commitment to staying engaged with the community. I learn every day from many people in the community, and cannot stress enough just how valuable my relationships are. WordPress has a very special community atmosphere, where even the most talented WordPress professionals in the world are approachable and helpful.

My wife jokes with me about my “internet friends,” and I always love when I get to turn an “internet friend” into an “in real life” friend at WordCamps and meetups.

You’ve written about pricing products and services on your blog before. What’s the most important thing that someone just getting started with their WordPress business should keep in mind about pricing, and what do you wish you’d known years ago that you know now?

Clients hire consultants for tasks they can’t handle themselves. Therefore, creative and technical aptitude is assumed from the get-go. Being a great programmer isn’t going to make a client an advocate. Excellent communication skills, complete honesty, and doing what you say you’ll do will make a client an advocate every time. We should price our work based on the value we provide to the client, but we also need to make sure the client will look back on the project as a positive experience as a whole. They will never see the value in our code if we don’t communicate properly and make good on our promises.

As far as more practical pricing tips from some people I really respect, the Code Poet ebook on pricing is exceptionally good. I promise I’m not just saying that because of this interview. Mark, Remkus, and Shane are all top notch members of the community, and it’s very nice of them to share their knowledge and experience.

I certainly wish I knew a few years ago just how in-demand WordPress developers were. When I first thought about making the jump, I didn’t know how many agencies were seeing the popularity of the platform and desperately trying to find talent. I could’ve started working full time with WordPress sooner than I did. You’ll never think you are “ready” as long as you are learning, because you’ll always see things you still don’t know. I tell aspiring developers to just go for it. Start sending emails to local (or remote) companies and give them an honest overview of your skill set. Someone will love to hire you, and then you can learn on the job.

How important would you say it is to provide documentation or training to clients, and what’s in it for the designer-developer itching to move onto the next project?

Unfortunately, building something doesn’t mean the user will automatically know how to use it. Documentation and/or training is pivotal. I talk a bit more about how to offer users help on WP Realm, but in addition to those methods, nothing beats real in-person training. I usually leave training sessions with more personal notes on things I can improve in the UI interface of a particular feature, just from watching them use it for the first time, than items the client requests.

As for what’s in it for the developer, nothing is worse than building a feature that goes unused. And if they don’t know how to use it, why would they?

Tell us about the Happy Theme you designed and shared with the community, and what you learned from the process of putting it together?

The Happy theme started as a project to design and develop a theme I’d release to the public. However, I simultaneously needed a new base theme for our Infomedia client sites. So, Happy hasn’t really become the finished theme I wanted it to be yet, because I focused on creating a base theme first.

On our client sites, we use a forked version of Happy that we’ve consistently iterated. We were in need of a flexible theme that we weren’t afraid to fork when the work necessitated it. Because it’s built on Hybrid Core, that’s easy. The framework lives in the “library” folder, but doesn’t assume anything about the theme markup or specific features. Therefore, we can build most sites as a child theme, but if we need to fork the parent, it’s no problem.

Before long, I’ll finish up the Happy theme the way I initially imagined it, with all the goodness and flexibility of our Infomedia base theme. Then I’ll finally submit it to the repository. In the meantime, patches are welcome!

The biggest thing I’ve learned in theme development so far is that thinking through a theme architecture only goes so far. Nothing beats putting it to the test in the real world to see how both users and other developers will use it. My teammates at Infomedia make for a great test group!

Which three things would you underline as essential to anyone wanting to carve their own place in the competitive WordPress design and development world?

1. Never stop learning. New trends and techniques are always emerging. I often finish a project and immediately want to go back and change something based on a new technique I learned. Read blogs, books, and follow industry folks on Twitter to stay up to date.

2. Blog. We build things for other people every day using WordPress. We need to eat our own dogfood and use WordPress ourselves. I’ve learned so much by blogging consistently, both about how to use WordPress efficiently and just by writing about topics I want to learn about. Also, blogging has helped me get my name out in the community more than anything else I’ve done.

3. Be nice. There are enough inconsiderate people in the world. Follow the golden rule. Treat others how you would want to be treated, whether they are a client, a colleague, or a random person you encounter on the internet. This isn’t always easy, and I often fail, but if we all made a conscious effort to be nice to one another in our daily interactions, the world would be a better place.

How did you first get involved with WordPress and what drew you in?

In early 2005 I was using my personal site to test out a bunch of the available CMSs. I tried WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, Xoops, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, Typo3, and probably a few more that I can’t even remember at this point. I was trying to stick to the PHP-based options, since that’s what I knew. WordPress was the perfect mix for me. It was easily extensible and easy to use.

Two years later I was doing client work using WordPress and I ran across a bug. I fixed it for the client, and then started trying to figure out how to get my fix into Core. I remember reading a bunch of existing tickets in Trac, and asking several questions before actually opening my first ticket (#4433). The patch didn’t follow coding standards, was created with diff not svn diff, and it doesn’t look like it was relative to trunk, but Mark Jaquith recognized that it fixed a legitimate issue and committed it. That was it. The hook was set.

After that I started following WordPress development more closely. I wasn’t especially outgoing, so it was mostly lurking at first, but I’ve been getting progressively more involved ever since.

When did you first start working with WordPress commercially?

When version 2.0 came out in late 2005 I started seeing it as a viable solution for clients. WordPress now had rich editing, static pages, a decent default template that I could use as a starting point for whatever I built (yep, I’m talking about Kubrick), and it supported plugins. It took me a little while before I found the right projects for it, but by mid-2006 I had used it on several client projects.

Tell us about your involvement with WordPress Core and the community. Has that influenced your professional work with WordPress?

At this point I’d say that I’m pretty heavily involved in the community. The community itself is getting bigger though, so I try to focus my involvement into the areas where I can make the most difference. I’ve contributed code to every version of WordPress since I started on 2.3. I attend all the dev meetings in IRC, try to help review patches, etc. I’m even co-leading the 3.6 release. I also speak at WordCamps as well as other events, especially when they’ll let me talk about getting involved in WordPress.

And yes, it has drastically influenced my professional work. At first it mostly affected how I positioned myself in the market, allowing me to know more about WordPress and what was coming down the pipeline. Then I started getting work referrals from other community members that knew the quality of my work because they saw it in Core. Eventually this allowed me to be more selective about the work that I took, giving me the flexibility that every freelancer wants. The biggest change though came within the last year when I partnered with two other WordPress contributors to start Range, a WordPress design and development company staffed completely with WordPress contributors!

How can people get involved in helping out with WordPress as an Open Source project, and when or why should they?

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to get involved with the WordPress project. Sometimes it’s as simple as profit. WordPress currently runs 17.5% of the internet or more than one out of every six sites! This is up nearly two percent in the last year, with steady growth. It powers tens of millions of websites. If you’re a designer, developer, business consultant, or work with the web in any way, WordPress is a huge potential market. That’s great, but how do you differentiate yourself and stand out from all your competition? When you get involved with the WordPress project — you increase your WordPress skills and even learn about new or upcoming changes. Just by getting involved, you become more valuable to your clients.

Another reason is a little more altruistic, and is what actually drew me to contribute. If you help make WordPress better, it’s not only better for you, it’s better for everybody. Your contribution will help someone else out, and someone else will contribute something that will help you! In the end, everyone benefits.

Once you’re ready to help, there are plenty of places to get involved including translation, documentation, events, support, accessibility, user interface or user experience, testing, and development. A great place to start is the Codex article on Contributing to WordPress.

Tell us about WordPress 3.6 and what you’re proudest about as a co-lead of the release.

WordPress 3.6 is still under heavy development, but so far I definitely think it’s our work around post formats, lead by Helen Hou-Sandi and Range’s own Pete Mall. It’s been such an underused feature, that has such potential! We’re going to be revamping the post screen to make them easier to use, standardizing the way extra data for each post format is stored, and even creating fallback output so all themes can use them. Then, we’re going to add the icing on the cake by really showcasing them in Twenty Thirteen, the new default theme that will also be shipped with this release!

What are the three most important lessons you’ve learned since setting up shop?

Make sure you clearly set expectations up front, and be specific. No matter how well you think you understand what a client wants, it’s likely that you’re not quite right. Documenting exactly what is going to be delivered will help. It gives the client the chance to make corrections, gives the client something that they can hold you to, and helps prevent scope creep by giving you something that you can hold the client to. I can’t stress enough how important this is.

Charge what you’re worth. Undercharging isn’t just bad for you. When you undercharge you attract the wrong clientele. You end up with projects that don’t challenge you or interest you and you end up underperforming. Your poor work doesn’t allow you to charge more, and the cycle ends up being self-perpetuating.

Lastly, work with the right people. This applies to both clients as well as contractors or employees. A client that really matches your goals and abilities will be a happy client, and one that doesn’t only cause grief. Similarly, working with the wrong contractors or employees can kill your reputation. Remember, you’re putting your name on whatever they do. It is well worth it to take your time and make sure you’re always working with the right people.

Do you prefer to work solo, as part of a team, or both depending on the circumstances?

I love working on my own. I really do. I distract easily, take a long time to get back on task after being distracted, and I hate both waiting on other people to finish something I need as well as the feeling that someone is waiting on me. I’m also not bothered that I’m the only one in my office at home. I don’t feel the need for personal contact to come through work, I have friends for that.

Having said that though, there is a huge drawback to working solo, and that’s stagnation. You’ll never learn as quickly, or as much, than when you have other great people to learn from. This is something that I didn’t even realize I’d get from the community when I started contributing to WordPress, but I did. Working on WordPress with people like Mark Jaquith, Ryan Boren, Andrew Nacin, Pete Mall, and many more, has made me a better developer. Working with people like Sara Cannon, Jen Mylo, Lance Willet, and Helen Hou-Sandi has given me a better eye for usability. This was one of the driving forces behind starting Range. We get better just by working closer together.

Tell us about Range and the impetus behind joining forces with fellow WordPress luminaries Sara Cannon and Pete Mall. How does this fit into the other work you do?

First of all, Pete and Sara are awesome! Who wouldn’t want to work them?! Honestly though, we’d all been running our own companies for a while. We’d trade work back and forth some, but we realized there was a lot more potential there. By teaming up we’ve been able to create an amazing team capable of handling much more than we could ever do individually. And the best part is, we all have the same desires to give back to WordPress and have been able to make that an integral part of what Range is! Which means that instead of Range getting in the way of my contributions, it actually helps to enable them. There’s no possible way that I could be co-leading the 3.6 release without their support.

What advice would you give someone just getting started with working with WordPress professionally?

The WordPress community is a great tool. Use it to your advantage. Take the time to get involved and to connect with other WordPress professionals. There’s a huge wealth of knowledge there, and it would be crazy to ignore it.

Finally, as a self-confessed beer snob, could you recommend some choice beverages Code Poets should be seeking out?

My two favorite beer styles are the dark heavy beers with layers and layers of flavors, such as the porters and stouts, and the bitter hop-heavy beers like the IPAs. For the darks, you really can’t beat the barrel-aged Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, but you should definitely try the Big Bad Baptist Imperial Stout as well. Also, look for a place that serves beers on nitro instead of just beer gas. They’ll often have something like the Left Hand Nitro Milk Stout, which is phenomenally smooth on nitro.

For the IPAs, just look to the West Coast. Almost everyone there is doing it right including Stone, Green Flash, Alpine Brewing, and many more. Some of the team-ups between these breweries are absolutely stellar.

Also, if you use untappd my username is aaroncampbell.

Quick Overview
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Image based on “These boots are made for walking Project 365(4) Day 28” by Keith Williamson, CC-BY-2.0.