The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organisation founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratise publishing through Open Source, GPL software.
That is the opening of the WordPress Foundation’s about page and something that is always at the forefront of my mind when building WordPress products.
One of those products that is a passion of mine as a personal side-project, is my podcasting plugin for WordPress dubbed Seriously Simple Podcasting. I originally built the plugin for my church’s website because all of the available podcasting plugins at the time were either too bloated or too under-powered to use effectively. With that in mind, the main thing that separates my plugin from the rest of them is, as the name suggests, the sheer ease of use. My development focus has always been on the user and Seriously Simple Podcasting is no exception in that regard.
But I digress – what I’ve brought you all here for today is actually to say that my podcasting plugin isn’t just an easy to use solution for podcasters to make their content available to the world, but it is also aiming towards the lofty goal of emulating the WordPress project itself by fulfilling the mission of democratising podcasting as an open-source and entirely free product.
Now, to be clear, ‘open source’ does not necessarily imply that the software is free (in fact, the definition given by the Open Source Initiative doesn’t even mention price at all), but this is something that I wanted to do as a way of giving back to the community by making audio publishing just as free and easy as blogging has been made by WordPress.
If you’re interested in joining me on this mission to democratise podcasting then know that the Seriously Simple Podcasting repo on GitHub is always open and ready for your contributions as is the repo for the hugely significant stats add-on. You could even come on board by helping to translate the plugin.
Whether you get involved or not, however, I will continue to work towards the goal of democratising podcasting for everyone and I’d love some company.
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