PHP South Africa talk: Growing your Product by Building a Community
In addition to running a WordPress development workshop at PHP South Africa this year, I also presented a talk about growing your product by building a community. The talk used…
Tag: Community
WordCamp Cape Town: Democratising Community
Today I presented a talk titled Democratising Community at WordCamp Cape Town 2016. Even though I gave an intro talk last year, this is actually my first real WordCamp talk and…
WPSessions: Community is to WordPress as Bacon is to Breakfast
Yesterday afternoon I presented a session on WPSessions that was all about the WordPress community and how we can all engage with it in a more meaningful way. The session…
Getting Started With WordPress Development
Last night I spoke at a meetup of the Cape Town PHP Group. I was speaking alongside the excellent Gareth McCumskey who was giving a run down of what we can expect in PHP 7 (we can expect a lot of awesomeness by the way – you should really check that out). My presentation for the evening was a primer on WordPress development and a guide on how to bend WordPress to your will (which would have made a way more awesome title for the talk).
Build user appreciation links into your plugin
The other day I posted about showing plugin developers appreciation and how it’s actually really easy to do. The problem, as was pointed out to me, is that writing reviews, donations, etc. are all only accessible from the plugin page on the repo and there’s no quick way to get there from the WordPress dashboard. All is not lost, however! It is possible to add custom links to the plugin list table alongside the default links that point to the author’s website and the plugin details page.
Developers are people too!
When we release a plugin on the repo we don’t do it out of need or obligation – rather it’s out of passion and a desire to give back to the great community that enables us to earn a respectable living. We do it because we believe that being selfish with our code doesn’t benefit anyone and by making it available for the world to use we are adding to the overall value of WordPress as a platform and as a community.
What WordPress means to me
“WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” That’s how WordPress is introduced on WordPress.org – a humble introduction for software that powers a huge chunk of the internet. Not only that, but to many people (myself included) WordPress is more than just ‘web software’ – it enables and signifies something far greater than that. This is what WordPress mean to me.
The True Value of a WordCamp
WordCamps are brilliant. They’re a great time to learn from some awesome people in your local (and international) community in a friendly and relaxed environment. If you’re lucky you’ll generally also get some top notch food, coffee and an after party to remember. But there’s something else that makes WordCamps truly valuable.
Contributing to WordPress: A Helping Hand
Contributing to WordPress may sound daunting at first, but it’s ultimately a hugely rewarding endeavour that will both improve your knowledge of the platform and give you that warm, fuzzy feeling that you can only get from being a part of something so much bigger than yourself. After all – WordPress and the community has given us so much, that it’s only fair to give a small amount back.