In preparing for the interview, Nick Ohrn and I traded a number of ideas and drafted a number of questions and discussion topics. We eventually whittled the list down to two general themes:

1. The evolution of WordPress from an Open Source project used primarily by techies and developers to a product and platform used by millions of individuals, small businesses and even really big companies.
2. Challenges and benefits in creating a business around an Open Source platform.

These are good themes. They provided a chance to explore a number of different topics and cover some interesting subject matter. Our preparation was good, our plan was good. The result was OK¹, but just OK; and I knew it. I feel like I left too much of the best material in the bag.

I’m never going to be a “blow the doors off” public speaker. I know people who are, and I know how much effort they put into it. That’s just not going to be me. My interests have always been more in the doing than in the talking about it; which is why we chose the interview format instead of a straight presentation.

This morning I was listening to Dan Benjamin’s interview Ze Frank on the Pipeline and all of the things that were floating around in my head came sharply into focus. Dan asked good questions and followed up to get more interesting details about specific topics, but the main focus of the interview was simply Ze. That’s the good stuff.

Back to WordCamp Seattle; a few things happened that contributed to a “just OK” result. One was that we had some technical issues with the microphones (feedback, ouch!) and Nick and I had to pass a single mic back and forth. Since we didn’t each have a mic, it wasn’t really possible to have a more engaged, conversational discussion. I’m certainly willing to talk about myself, my experiences and lessons I’ve learned, but it’s still hard for me to jump straight to them without a little coaxing or it just feels like I’m self-absorbed and/or bragging.

The other was that I got too concerned about the half of the audience that weren’t developers or consultants and shied away from interesting things that were more about how Crowd Favorite was started, how we’ve grown, how it’s structured and what we do; as well as more technical topics. I’m a developer and the path that I’ve taken in creating my business has been a technical one. This is where the meat is. The cost of trying to keep the topics more general and suitable for the entire audience was losing some of the substance that I could offer to the technical/consultant folks there. And really, a more interesting story is better for everyone.

The worst part is that I already knew this, I just hadn’t connected all of the dots.

I’ve had the best results by picking panels and talks to attend based on who is speaking rather than the subject matter. I most enjoy talks by people who do interesting things, and I want to hear about what they do; even when it isn’t 100% applicable to me.

I think this is one reason why my panel talk at SxSWi this year went pretty well. My role there was well defined. I was there specifically to talk about the business of WordPress consulting and development, and I did so without concern about the folks in the audience who may not have been as interested in that topic.

WordCamp Seattle attendees, I’m inviting you to email me questions that you’d be interested in hearing about (development, business, Open Source involvement questions – you name it) – anything you wish I’d included in the interview at the event. I’ll respond to them as best as I’m able over the next few weeks and perhaps post some of them here as well.

Speakers, don’t be afraid to get personal and go where the meat is when talking to an audience; even when you don’t think everyone in your audience is looking for that content. I know I’m keeping that lesson at the top of my list for next time.

Thanks to Morten Rand-Hendriksen for taking the photos and publishing them under a CC license so I could use them here.

1. WPCandy liveblogged some of it. [back]

I talk quite a bit about Crowd Favorite and running a WordPress development business in the first 15 minutes or so, then chime in here and there throughout the rest of the hour.

My thanks to Shane for putting together a great panel and doing a fantastic job as the moderator, and to my fellow panelists Brandon and Sonia for their great contributions to the panel and making it a fun experience (and hopefully interesting to the audience).

1. The direct MP3 download is also available. [back]

Here are his questions and my replies.

What has been the motivation to churn out GPL plugins as well as support them? Branding is a benefit, both publicity and example of quality. However, I’m sure that doesn’t compare to the cost they require and you have plenty of branding and publicity already.

That is a complicated question, and one whose answer has changed over time.

When I first started contributing to the b2 community, it was a simple matter of publishing code I had written for my own blog/site. There was very little additional effort involved, the community was relatively small and technical, and I had the time to do it.

WordPress was created as a fork of b2 and it included some of the features I’d written for b2. Over time I ported the rest of them to WordPress, and began writing WordPress features as well.

When I created and ran the first design competition for WordPress it was because I believed that people’s vision of what could be done was too small. I saw the ability to do more and wanted to encourage people to push the limits on design. The results were excellent, hundreds of great designs were created and made available to the community.

WordPress evolved to support official plugins and themes and the community enjoyed explosive growth. I continued to create functionality that I thought was useful for WordPress and release it as plugins. This required more effort than it used to, because the WordPress community was becoming more mainstream and to be generally useful the plugins needed to be more polished, more forgiving of user error and required creating much more documentation.

Around this same time I was making the transition from an independent developer to a consulting and development shop that focused largely on WordPress development. I was hiring my first employees, getting a business off the ground, doing things like finding office space, worrying about making payroll, selling, etc. – my free time largely went away, and my ability to put out free plugins and themes went with it.

Now we have a team of about 15 people and my obligations to my team are greater than ever. I’ve also been blessed with a wonderful 18 month old daughter. She is a priority for me, the time spent with her and my family largely replaces time I previously used to contribute code back to the WordPress community.

Do you see indirect financial benefits in any other way, shape, or form?

I used to get about $100-200/month in the way of donations through my website. Unfortunately due to changes in the way plugins are presented on WordPress.org that has dried up to about $5/month.

I made it a priority to update all of our publicly released plugins this summer and hired an intern at Crowd Favorite to make this happen¹. WordPress best practices evolve with each release, and plugins written properly just a few short years ago are badly outdated as a result. We’ve invested a significant about of money in this effort, and I honestly don’t expect to receive anything back from it.

Do the thanks and appreciation go anywhere near compensating the constant e-mail asking for support? What inspires your desire to give without return?

I actually feel strongly that the current situation is unsustainable. Unless the WordPress community at large starts to better recognize and reward the developers that create the tools that they use and rely on, the developers won’t/can’t continue to provide as they have.

In talking with other plugin developers, it seems fairly universal that the reward for a successful plugin is a deluge of support email that includes the worst kind of sense of entitlement, rudeness and ignorance. The community as a whole seems to expect to be able to pay nothing, yet received expert and individual help and support for free.

One of my goals with WordPress HelpCenter was to try to affect change in this area. My belief was that we could work with plugin developers to have them send support requests to WPHC, have WPHC provide commercial support services, and give a revenue stream back to the plugin developers. While WPHC has been successful overall, it has utterly failed in this effort. What we found was that regardless of the actual issue, users experiencing trouble with a plugin blame the plugin. They assume it’s a coding problem (even though it isn’t in most cases), expect free support and are so rude that we’ve lost people from our team as a result; ultimately having to refocus our efforts away from this type of support. One of my WPHC devs told me that he was amazed I kept my plugins freely available, that he would have killed them off long ago if he had experienced the type of feedback he was seeing now that I was forwarding my support requests to WPHC. I think this was a reasonable response, and that makes me sad.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is (my idea certainly didn’t get legs), but I know that I am very rarely willing to make the extra effort (and make no mistake, the process of packaging, documenting, writing extra code to make something as forgiving as possible to different environments and user error is typically more work than writing the code in the first place) to publicly release free plugins anymore.

I still see the WordPress community as a group that has wonderful potential and many bright spots. It’s for this reason that I am happy we are able to work within it. I really enjoy helping to push WordPress to become something more than it was before – for example via our Carrington Core platform and Carrington Build. We are also working on a new WordPress product that should really help WordPress adoption in environments where more sophisticated staging and deployment requirements are enforced.

I hope that the WordPress community and ecosystem is able to find a way to better support the contributions of individual developers as it continues to evolve. There are lots of smart people with good ideas trying to do the right thing, I’m optimistic that solutions can be found. I’ll certainly continue to support that effort however I can.

1. Most of the work is done, we’re in the proces of final code review and polish. [back]

My thanks to Sally for putting together some good initial and follow-up questions; I hope it’s of interest.

You can stream or download the podcast here.

We discussed the WordPress HelpCenter, the Carrington CMS theme framework and a little about Open Source business models.

You can download the MP3 file here.

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Thanks to the Squadcast team for having me on.

The discussion includes a variety of things, including:

• WordPress
• Crowd Favorite
• ShareThis
• MyFreeBusy

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Thord asked some good questions, I hope my responses are interesting.

This was my first podcast, I think I probably stumbled on my words more than you’re supposed to – oh well.