Speakers Chime in on Four WordPress Questions

Recently, I asked our speakers four questions so that I could share their answers with our readers. Between now and WordCamp on the 19th, I will post a few at a time. It’s a great read and a way to learn even more about who is speaking at this years WordCamp.

The four questions were:
Why do you love WordPress?
What is your favorite plugin?
What’s the most interesting project you have ever done that involved WordPress?
What is that one thing WordPress doesn’t do that you wish it did?

Mark Root-Wiley

Why do you love WordPress?
Let me count the ways! It’s been the engine behind my business for the past two years. It’s name sells itself. I can teach people to maintain their own website it two hours. I can always find nice people to help me when I get stuck. It’s brought together an amazing group of people in Seattle, many of whom I now call friends.

What is your favorite plugin?
The one that solves my problem.

What’s the most interesting project you have ever done that involved WordPress?
Building a dynamic front-page “dashboard” to track the progress and crew updates from five guys rowing around Vancouver Island.

What is that one thing WordPress doesn’t do that you wish it did?
I wish WordPress could better defend itself from getting hacked, ideally by welcoming in a hacker at first and then breaking her morale with pictures of sad kittens and puppies. (Serious answer: Right now, I really wish Attachments supported the Category and Tag UIs so we could tag photos and build amazing galleries.)

Visit his website to learn more about Mark.

Aaron Hockley

Why do you love WordPress?
I love that WordPress makes it very easy for me to publish content while also allowing me to get geeky and tweak things behind the scenes.

What is your favorite plugin?
I suppose Akismet is the easy answer, but I’d like to mention W3 Total Cache which keeps my site speedy even under heavy traffic spikes.

What’s the most interesting project you have ever done that involved WordPress?
I’m more of a blogger than a developer, so my “projects” mainly involve publishing – I’m not sure it’s the most interesting for others, but in the last year I’ve consolidated my  previously-diversified sites into a single blog at aaronhockley.com. I’ve found that my readers who followed one or more of my sites were often interested in the others, and consolidation has made things easier for them along with helping me out by eliminating the “does this belong on site A or site B?” queries.

What is that one thing WordPress doesn’t do that you wish it did? 
Someone should build WP-Caffeination, a plugin which I could install which would provide that extra boost for bloggers – some might need it just to write faster, some might need it to nag them to publish blog posts more often, or for those with crappy hosting maybe it could just speed up their sites.

Visit his blog to learn more about Aaron.

Michael Pick

Why do you love WordPress?
The thing I love most about WordPress is its flexibility, in every sense of the word. It’s a platform that a beginner can pick up reasonably quickly and get publishing with, but one that will grow with them if and when their needs get a little more complex. It’s free and Open Source, so has the flexibility to be modified and extended according to any need or scenario the community can throw at it. And having a huge community of designers and developers working with the platform gives businesses, individuals, and other designer-developers a huge range of skilled people to draw on, whatever it is they need WordPress to do for them. I guess I’m also quite happy about the fact that WordPress pays my bills 🙂

What is your favorite plugin?
The one that gets the job done with the least hassle in any specific situation. It’s often the simplest plugin for the job that serves a project’s needs most elegantly. I’ve been working with media, and specifically video, on the web for aeons and thinking back to the dark ages of web video I still look back fondly to first discovering Viper’s Video Quicktags and the headaches that put aside for me. That’s the mark of a great plugin.

What’s the most interesting project you have ever done that involved WordPress?
I always look forward to producing the WordPress announcement videos, and then seeing them appear on blogs across the interweb, so that’s way up there. But the highlight of my year so far, in terms of interesting projects, has been designing Matt’s State of the Word keynotes. That’s perhaps a bit tangental, but I’m a media/ communication design guy rather than a designer/developer. I still like to hope it has some small impact in getting the word out about WordPress.

What is that one thing WordPress doesn’t do that you wish it did?
That’s a tough one, having seen the platform develop year on year. I guess from my point of view, as someone that works a lot with video, I’d love to see tighter integration of media publishing within WordPress core. That said, there are so many awesome plugins that take care of this and almost every other need that it’s difficult to really find anything wanting, there’s almost always a plugin to solve any problem you can come up with.

You can find Michael over at Automattic. 

Eric Mann

Why do you love WordPress?
I’m a big fan of the community.  When I started using WordPress, I didn’t know a thing about programming. But the various developers helped me get involved, taught me what to do, and helped me along to a place where I was actually making money doing things for others.

The fact that so many people give back to the community selflessly is awfully inspiring.

What is your favorite plugin?
Right now, it would be WP Core Contributions Widget (GitHub / WP.org).  I say this not because I’m the primary developer, but because it’s a plugin that reflects everything that’s so great about WordPress:

• It was inspired by a conversation between several users of the software who wanted to show off their growing coding credentials.
• It contains code contributions from 4 different developers.
• It rolled in feature recommendations that came out of a local WordPress meetup.
• And just this week it was translated to German by another interested user.

What’s the most interesting project you have ever done that involved WordPress?
One of my earliest clients wanted to build a subscription-based video website.  I was still very new to development, so it was a huge task for me.

It utilized custom registration methods, integrated with a merchant services account, handled very large video uploads and streams, and tied in with an automated purchase fulfillment system to ship hard-copy workbooks.  The most interesting part for me, though, was the custom registration.  I had never written a plugin before, and my first instinct was to just rewrite WordPress’ internal registration mechanism to support registration codes, custom user levels, and pay-to-play registration management.

I was hit pretty hard with rapid maintenance releases to WP over the period of the project, and was eventually taught how to convert my custom hacks into a plugin instead.  Remarkable amount of learning, and an impressive site in the end, too.

What is that one thing WordPress doesn’t do that you wish it did?

Add hours to my day 🙂 I spend so much time playing with code and doing cool things with WordPress that I forget to have a life.  If I had a 36 hour day, though … watch out!

Visit his website to learn more about Eric.