The Complete Interviews Transcribed

 

Andrew Nacin:

• How can someone get started in contributing to WordPress?

It’s really easy to get involved in anyway number of ways. Most people think that it is just about writing codes, but it’s so much more than that…whether it’s designing, testing, writing documentation or support.   There are more people working on documentation today, than there are working on code, which is a really cool thing to see.

• How can someone be such a code machine like you?

On some days I wish I write more code than I do.  I do a lot of code review and feedback on other people’s code. It is very much a group effort and there is a significant investment in making sure that our underlying existing architecture and API have at least in the future a more coherent vision and base to build on top of.  So a lot of people of people contribute here and there, but there needs to be people looking over the overall vision of WordPress.

• How do you effectively manage your time working remotely?

A lot of people like to get an involved with a co-op.  I have an office at home and only use that to do work.   I try to do a routine, go on walks or walk my wife to work in the mornings.  I have even heard that some people will get up and go outside for a walk around the block and then go back inside and at the end of the day, they go back outside and walk around the block in the opposite direction and then their day is done.  Form a good routine and strategy and I only use my computer for work and at home I only work out of my office.    You need to be able to communicate on online effectively is a valuable skill and necessity, because you need to focus on how can I best get my point across best, when it is often over email and different time zones.

• Even when you were sick for a period of time, you managed to redesign the WordPress core Trac.  Do you have any hobbies that we don’t know about?

In this case, I just had this nagging cold or something for maybe 2 weeks over the holidays.   It was one of my goals to make it easier for people to contribute code.  A lot of that has to do with molding our tools around what our processes are.  In some cases, it was modifying and improving our processes to make a lot more sense for contributors.  I ended up spending really almost a month working on our tools and processes.  In this case, improving trac and our processes there.  Built some WordPress and track plugins for it.  I was planning on working on code, so it worked out being sick.  Being sick kind of gave me the excuse to burry my head and not really deal with anything that was going on over the holidays.

I was a volunteer firefighter for some time and it was quite an intense hobby.  No longer anymore, because I know live in the city and that does not make much sense.   I am also an ice hockey referee in the DC/Maryland Metro area. I referee high school, high school and junior ice hockey in the D.C. / Maryland area and sometimes up the cost.  In general, I try not to code 24/7, because it will burn you out.

• Where do you see yourself and WordPress in 10 years?

10 years? That’s a long time! I don’t even want to guess 10 year, but there is a lot that we can still do to make the editing, customization and writing experience better.  A lot of my work has gone into building a sustainable platform for contributors and in my case, most of my work has been on the WordPress architecture.   I don’t know where I will be in 10 years, but I can say that we are just getting started.

• WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging platform to something that can do pretty much anything.  What is the coolest thing you have seen made with WordPress?

It’s pretty interesting, because sometimes I look at a website and I think “wow that is a WordPress Website”.  People have made these incredible websites that I can’t even begin to imagine where they would have gotten started with that.  It is very rewarding to see that the platform is being used in such creative and innovative ways.

• Do you have any plans on implementing automatic updates for major releases or plugins?  As plugin authors can sometimes break things in their updates, how could that be avoided while still keeping current?

I do think that Plugins should be auto updated.  That said, it is a much harder problem than updating core, because of the fact that things can go wrong and it’s far more unpredictable what can go wrong.  For the moment right now, we are trying to leverage automatic updates for plugins and themes for fixing security issues in those plugins and themes.  If a plugin has a major vulnerability or minor vulnerabilities, being able to update and push out updates to those sites is incredibly important.  So when we get to major release updates for plugins or bug, how we can deal with customizations or maybe opt-ins for certain plugins, how we can deal with testing, there is a lot that needs to happen here. Saying that everything will always be updated: plugins, themes, core, translations, it will always be updated and you will not need to worry about it.  That is all but impossible, but that is a goal and it is a goal that we can continue to work for.  The same way that we made updates as simple as a one button update.  Even though it is going to be incredibly difficult along the way, there will be some wins that will make it easier for users and developers.

• From a hosting standpoint, we love that the majority of users are all updated on new releases.  How have the automatic updates impacted WordPress users as a whole?

I think it’s been fantastic and I think users definitely feel they can trust WordPress a lot more, in the sense that they no longer need to struggle to update. That in and of itself is huge, because they don’t need to struggle to find a security update or something they might have not seen for weeks.   There is no reason why even though you want to be self-hosted, control your content and install plugins and there is no point why you should have to go through the pain of updates if the system can do that for you.  In an ideal word, WordPress would update nightly like say Google Chrome does.

• What are some of the major improvement of WP 4.0 and what are some of the things we can expect in the near future with WP?

4.0 will have a number of really nice features I think. Working on a few things right now.  The big one is working on better localization and internationalization, because we have a huge global audience and a lot of potential to grow.  It’s a major untapped market and focusing on making it so anyone can translate any plugin or theme into any other language and anyone using that theme or plugin in that language can then leverage that translation is huge.   The real thing there, is that we want to make a seamless experience for that.  Aside from that, we are also working on finding the right plugin and this is a really tough thing to solve and 4.0 will not fix all of this.  There are more than 30 thousand plugins and many of them are quite good and it can be quite tough to find the right plugin for what you need, so there will be an installer screen, ideally that will give you more information to find the right plugin.  So, 4.0 will have a redesigned installer screen for plugins.

 

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Paul Clark:

• How can someone get started in contributing to WordPress?

The best place to start contributing is in the .org forums, there are plenty of ticket there that people need help on.  It’s an easy way to help the community, get a sense of what people need and any one can do it.  After that… just get on WordPress Trac or the blog.

• You work with some of the best minds in the world on WordPress. What has been the most challenging aspect of that?

There aren’t many challenges there, it’s just really nice. The WordPress community is very welcoming and collaborative with everyone and it’s an honor to be a part of it and to be able to learn and grow with people together.

• From your speech “How WordPress Saves Lives and Moves Governments,” you talk about the success WordPress brings to the voiceless.  Do you worry that repressive regimes might ban the use of WordPress or compromise contributors and developers in troubled regions around the world? If so, is WordPress prepared to deal with such a scenario?

WordPress is an interesting scenario, because WordPress.com is at a single address location like Twitter is and can be blocked because of that… you know, via firewalls and blacklisting.  WordPress.org is not, it can be installed on any computer, on any server, on a shared host, or say from a closet in China to bypass firewalls. So that makes it very difficult to control and for that reason, there are even WordPress plugins out there that use WordPress, its ease of us and adaptability to get around repressive governments and to basically use it as a proxy to get around firewalls and other things that a repressive regime might put up.

• Where do you see yourself and WordPress in 10 years?

I like to say that we make solid products for people and not for computers and as long as WordPress is helping people and solving problems for people, then I would continue to do it.

• WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging platform to something that can do pretty much anything.  What is the coolest thing you have seen made with WordPress?

My favorite story is what I talk about in my talk (How WordPress Saves Lives and Moves Governments), where there is a man who is living in a jungle and has no identity and no communication to the outside world.  He takes a photo of his people being bombed, he walks it across the border, puts it on a blog and it gets published on a news blog.  Now two governments and the United Nations came out to put a stop to then oppression.  This was in Myanmar.  The thing about WordPress that makes it cool, is not that it is all glitz and glam, it’s about the freedom to express ideas across boundaries.

• Do you have any plans on implementing automatic updates for major releases or plugins?  As plugin authors can sometimes break things in their updates, how could that be avoided while still keeping current?

I wasn’t personally involved in the automatic update process, but I do know that the core automatic updates go through great lengths to kind of sandbox the code and make sure it doesn’t cause problems. At the same time, Core updates go through tens of thousands of users for QA before there released and even that is a very small percentage of the WordPress market.  Most .org plugin developers don’t have the resources to do quality assurance in the way that I would be confident in that.   I am also open to being surprised with what somebody could come up with.

• What are some of the major improvement of WP 4.0 and what are some of the things we can expect in the near future with WP?

One really cool things, is the possibility of a front end editor that when you are in preview mode, the post Meta and the content area are live and editable within the themes design.  It still has some bugs and they are still working on it, but they did really good job on it and it’s a pretty good looking plugin as it is now.  It may or may not make it into 4.0.

 

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Jennifer Bourn:

• How can someone get started in contributing to WordPress?

When people say contributing to WordPress, people automatically think that you need to be a developer or that you have to be some ridiculous genius to contribute, because that is what everyone talks about.  What a people don’t talk about, is that you can give back to WordPress or to the community, but just getting involved with your local community WordPress meet up.   You can answer questions in the support forums or using your blog.  But sometimes the easiest is about finding your local community and just get your feet wet and then if there is a WordCamp in your area, then get involved with that.   I know that I would not be where I am at today, if it had not been for the WordPress community and our local meet ups and I think that breeds that need to pay it back and give it forward.  I just think it’s amazing that I make my living on software that others contribute to for free and why I try to give back the way I can with my local meet up in Sacramento.

 

• How can someone be such digital marketing machine like you?

You have to love it.  I really enjoy writing and teaching and sharing and it’s always been something I liked sense I was little.  I actually wanted to be a teacher, but… I went for money and I had a Dad who stressed that I should not rely of other people and that I should be self-sufficient.  I found in my business that I was able to dig back into that love of teaching and sharing through my blog.  To be able to write, to teach and to share and to give all that knowledge, feeds that other part of me that I just like.

 

• What is the most challenging aspect you face when building WordPress sites for clients?

Getting them to understand the difference between their theme and content.  That there content is merely what goes into that theme.    We do custom themes mostly, so when they are looking at design drafts, they get really hung up on what a specific menu item says or a picture placement when that is just a place holder things. The biggest challenge, is  really educating them on the difference between the theme files, the content files,  and then the added functionality of what plugins bring and helping them understand that and then it helps with the different phases of the project as well.  You need to learn how to communicate the value that you are bring to the table.

 

• You have created quite a successful business providing marketing, design, and the coding needed in today’s business world.  How do you manage your time and what is the most challenging aspect of the job?  What advice would you give to future WordPress entrepreneurs?

The first part is managing time and we were lucky enough to be in business long enough to choose what we work on and who we work with.  So, I don’t answer contact forms, project inquiry forms or make sales calls unless someone specifically ask to speak to Jenifer.   Otherwise, my time best spent in design, because that is where I can have the biggest impact and the best use of my time.  We really structured that Monday to Friday from 9 to 5, its client work only.  We don’t work on our own business until after 5 pm, so it’s a lot of work being a business owner.   For advice, I would say that that if you are looking at providing services that you look for partners early on, so that you don’t get used to providing your income solely by yourself. What I wish I had done and my best piece of advice is to get resources early and always be looking out for potential partners and experts that can be there for overflow work.

• Where do you see yourself and WordPress in 10 years?

I would like to be able to contribute more and find a more meaningful way to give back more of my time and getting involved.  Whether it’s starting a WordCamp in our area and giving back because of what WordPress has afforded us to do.   I think that if WordPress continues to have the support and growth that it has over the past few years, it will undeniably be the go-to resource for publishing online. I think it is going to just continue to grow and the core will become much simpler to use and dominate the online landscape if the support continues to be what it is today.

• WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging platform to something that can do pretty much anything.  What is the coolest thing you have seen made with WordPress?

The coolest thing that I have seen made with WordPress is this co working space that had used it to schedule the use of the space and to give access to people to open or not open the doors.  Never would I have imagined that you could program it to do something like that.  Also, Paul Clark did a speech were he had used WordPress to power medical resources out in the jungle.   People don’t realize that it can be used for so many more things beyond it being a website CMS or a blogging platform.

• Do you have think that WordPress is going to have automatic updates for plugins?  As plugin authors can sometimes break things in their updates and for this reason, do you think WordPress should have automatic updates for plugins?

I don’t know if they should, I think that before they can get to a point where they can have plugins, I think they need to get to a point of standardization in how they are built.  For example, we use a particular plugin that we had highly customized and do it on our client’s sites and the latest update and push out of that plugin, did not take into consideration everyone who customizes it and it broke every single one.  So, until there is a standardization to how they are created or how they are updated, they should shouldn’t do automatic updates unless there is an option to opt into the updates, because I just don’t think we are there yet.

• From a hosting standpoint, we love that the majority of users are all updated on new releases.  How have the automatic updates impacted WordPress users as a whole?

I think as a whole, it’s a really positive push, because most people don’t update or there designer will try to teach them, but they forget.   A lot of business owners don’t really log into their sites and so as a whole the automatic updates also them to not have to learn another thing that they need to do.   This makes their sites less susceptible to hacks and functioning better, even when they are not involved with their site.   Also, I think WordPress gets blamed a lot for sites getting hacks, when it’s often not their fault, because it was the users fault.  You know, GoDaddy had that horrible hack last year when hundreds of sites went down and everyone blamed it on WordPress, when it was due to a massive outage on part of GoDaddy.

• What are some of the major improvement of WP 4.0 and what are some of the things we can expect in the near future with WP?

My partner Brian tracks all of the new WordPress updates and the development aspect of the business, so that is his thing and I leave that to him.   So, I really don’t know, he updates me on the things that I need to know, so that I can adjust and be the best consultant possible.