WordPress Community

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I live outside of New Orleans, Louisiana with my husband and 3 daughters. I spend most of my time doing things with my family (translate: shuttling kids around and being wife/mom). I really enjoy watching my children grow and experience new things, it’s my main hobby in life right now.
My favorite place to be is outside somewhere. Even if it’s just weeding my flowerbeds or garden. I like good food and find cooking it very therapeutic. Finding new flavors and food combinations are exciting. I squeeze in the rare murder mystery novel when I travel, I love Agatha Christie and the Scarpetta series.

Michele: What do you do in the WordPress ecosystem?

Kimberly: I am the CoFounder of a Professional Website Management company. My job is less WordPress these days, my title is CEO so I spend a lot of time doing stuff surrounding the company and personnel needs.

Michele: How did you get involved with WordPress?

Kimberly: What feels like a bazillion years ago, I applied to work product support at WPMUDEV. I had no clue what I was doing, only my own WordPress site that I had crashed a dozen times. I cited that as my ‘real world’ experience and Mason unwittingly hired me.

Michele: Please tell me one story of someone who has inspired you within the WordPress Community?

Kimberly: My most vivid memory of getting hooked on the community is less inspirational and more warm fuzzy feels. My first WordCamp was in Miami. I was in awe that whole trip. I remember towards the end of the camp I heard Pippin talk. The overarching theme was about helping each other helps the community at large. It was such a warm message at a tech conference and I thought “this is really the nicest largest group of people ever, I’m not leaving it”.

Michele: What does the Open Source Community mean to you?

Kimberly: I knew nothing about Open Source when I found WordPress. Open Source and GPL were new terms I’d never heard of. My investment in these communities is the time I’ve spent working among the people and learning the ecosystem surrounding Open Source. It’s an amazing source of opportunity and attracts some incredibly interesting

Michele: Please name some of your favorite plugins. 

Kimberly: Any plugin that is coded with best practice and well supported with frequent updates.

Michele: Do you have a favorite theme or framework you like to use?

Kimberly: Genesis has always been kind to me, I’m not a developer.

Michele: If you could change one thing in WordPress, what would it be?

Kimberly: Tough, because if you change anything you change the nature of the community and its essence. But if I had to pick I’d like to see more of a global community focus on customer service. I believe that exceptional support from all corners and types of WordPress businesses could really create a name for WordPress in higher and larger spaces.

Michele: What is your most memorable WordPress moment?

Kimberly: The first kids camp I helped with. Those are all my favorite memories.

Michele: What is one piece of advice you would give to someone just getting started with WordPress?

Kimberly: Try stuff. Break shit. Ask questions. That’s three, sorry…

Michele: What do you think is in store for the future of WordPress?

Kimberly: I think this depends on the community’s ability to think big and adopt change. The market in WordPress is moving upwards on a curve that is leading away from commoditizing and the DIY blogger stereotypes. More commerce, higher pay, a general shift in the outside world’s view of WordPress is on the horizon.

Michele: Just for fun, share one memory that makes you proud to be a part of the WordPress Community.

Kimberly: What I do for a living is a mystery to many folks in my life. Being able to talk about my experiences outside of the traditional office setting, the people I meet from across the globe, and the team we have built at Valet makes me incredibly proud.

You can find Kimberly Lipari online at Valet.

If you find these interesting and would like to be spotlighted yourself, please see our interview form.

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Holder of a BA in History, David is WordPress developer and educator who loves to teach, share, and try to be kind. He runs WPShout, and strives to make it the best place online to learn to be a WordPress developer. Outside of that, he loves board games, bicycling, and puppies.

Michele: What do you do in the WordPress ecosystem?

David: I teach people how to do WordPress better

Michele: How did you get involved with WordPress?

David: I started out in WordPress in 2007. Without any idea of how a blogger could or would make money, I made a WordPress site and started writing. The business model never worked—because I lacked one, take that as your lesson, please :). I was mostly just a pro-user, but with time I started to get into customizing themes, then make a few plugins, and today I’ve built out at least dozens (if not hundreds) of WordPress sites for myself and clients.

Michele: Please tell me one story of someone who has inspired you within the WordPress Community?

David: My friend Amber Hinds is an awesome story. Similar (though more successful) than my start, Amber was a blogger. She (like me) found herself without a business model, but the ability to make WordPress sites turned into a shockingly marketable skill. She’s now running her own business–Road Warrior Creative–and has hired her husband out from his more traditional job. And just this year they’re planning to start on their dream to be mobile for bit parts of the year in their big green RV.

Michele: What does the Open Source Community mean to you?

David: To me open source is about ownership, more than anything else. I think each software library has its own little ecosystem, but those don’t come free with open source. I think both WordPress and PHP (the open source spaces I travel in most) are amazing because of the people who put in the energy to build a meaningful community out of the collection of people using the lines of code.

Michele: Please name some of your favorite plugins. 

David: Pods is my current infatuation. I find Yoast helpful, and Jetpack I’ve come to appreciate a lot

Michele: Do you have a favorite theme or framework you like to use?

David: No, not really. Twenty Seventeen is great though 🙂

Michele: If you could change one thing in WordPress, what would it be?

David: I think I’d love to see at little more structure and vision at the heart of the project. I think that Matt Mullenweg does a good job, but I think he can be a little hands-off and then (seemingly) capricious, by turns. Those things scare off some great contributors, and I’d love that that didn’t happen.

Michele: What is your most memorable WordPress moment?

David: I have very fond memories of the first WordCamp I went to, in Boston in 2013. At that point I’d used WordPress for about six years, but that was the first time that I saw in person that there were real physical people I could meet, chat with, and get to know, who were there trying to help each other.

Michele: What is one piece of advice you would give to someone just getting started with WordPress?

David: Just do it. There’s no substitute for action. Whether we’re talking about making your first site, writing your first line of code, or hiring a writer, there nothing that you get better at without trying. So you’ve got to learn to accept that it’ll sometimes be hard and sometimes you’ll spend hours or weeks frustrated. But that’s where the learning comes from.

Michele: What do you think is in store for the future of WordPress?

David: I hope it continues to empower non-technical people to publish on the web. I love the internet, and I love WordPress because it also loves the internet. And while HTML is great, WordPress has succeeded by being a better tool to have a personal web presence than anything else, and I think the latest news with Facebook and Twitter just continues to underscore that there’s no substitute for your own online space with your own tools underlying it.

You can find David Hayes online at WP Shout.

If you find these interesting and would like to be spotlighted yourself, please see our interview form.

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Chris Wiegman is currently a software engineer at WP Engine working on developer tools to support the WP Engine user base as well as WordPress, PHP and other web developers.

Chris grew up primarily in Chicago and after high school thought he could make it as a musician (among other things). Fortunately, at least for Chris, those were in the days of the Y2K scare and he quickly realized he could make more money in Information Technology than in music so he left college after a semester and decided to try the IT world.

While a career in IT brought plenty of money it didn’t hold much else in the way of attraction. It turns out fixing other peoples’ computers just isn’t much fun. After his son was born about a year later he decided it was time to pursue a career in something he loved so he enrolled in the Aviation Program at Southern Illinois University (SIU) and relegated IT to no more than fixing computers at the airport as a student worker.

Fast forward to the Great Recession and, after flying private jets and nearly anything else with wings Chris was working as a captain for a small airline in Hawaii with SIU called to see if he wanted his old tech support job full-time. It paid about what a captain made in those days (next to nothing) and offered him the ability to get a master’s degree in Computer Science for free so over the next five years he moved back to Carbondale, IL, got married and made a transition back to technology with one difference. This time, instead of fixing other peoples’ computers he was writing code to build solutions to bigger problems than a crashing application.

It was at SIU that Chris discovered WordPress as a solution to make it easy for various people and groups in the Aviation department to create their own websites. To help protect those sites, as so many others on campus were being hacked, he also started Better WP Security around this time to protect both his own sites and the Aviation websites from the biggest threats they would face, their own users (it’s true that the “Away mode” feature in the plugin was actually built to stop student workers from posting about parties and other things they shouldn’t have been after hours).

After college Chris and his wife, Joy, moved to Austin, TX and quickly got involved with the Austin WordPress community while watching Better WP Security go viral in the WordPress world. A few years, and a few jobs, later he realized that Better WP Security had reached what he could do with it on his own so he sold it to iThemes where it became iThemes Security.

Chris continued to work on iThemes Security until 2015 when he moved to Florida and joined 10up. In 2016 he returned to his roots in Higher Education by joining the team at UF Health where he worked on their two large WordPress networks for hospitals, colleges, clinics and various other units in the UF Health system. Finally, Chris moved from UF Health to WP Engine in September 2018 to help better support WordPress and other developers with workflow and other improved developer tools.

While only having been officially employed as a developer since 2012 Chris has lucked out, if you will, by getting to work with some of the best and brightest in the WordPress and Higher Education spaces. Today he is considered an expert in WordPress plugin development, security, WordPress site performance and the technologies and techniques needed to succeed as a modern web developer.

When not writing code, Chris and his wife enjoy getting out to the beach near their home as well as traveling, writing and reading as much as possible. This year alone you might seem him at various conferences around the country or even hear him passing overhead with a student in a small airplane.

Michele: How did you get involved with WordPress?

Chris: While at SIU I got into WordPress as a solution to providing sites to our faculty, student groups and other stake holders. Originally I thought of it as a simpler and complimentary system to work alongside our Drupal sites but as time went on it’s abilities shined through and it eventually became the sole system I worked with.rcross: On accident, really, since I had a full time job in the finance industry at the time. I had built a server at my house with an old desktop, and had to install something on it. It took a bit to get WordPress to run (this was a Windows server in 2006) but a friend had a small site he needed hosted so I assumed I could figure it out.

Michele: Please tell me one story of someone who has inspired you within the WordPress Community?

Chris: There are so many here that naming one is nearly impossible but I would say I’m constantly inspired by folks like yourself (Michele Butcher-Jones) who have overcome so much to be where you’re at with the help of WordPress and its various communities.

Michele: What does the Open Source Community mean to you?

Chris: Democracy and shared goals are, to me, the key components of the open source community. The ability for a wide range of folks to work together to, in some cases, change the world is really unparalleled in technology.

Michele: Please name some of your favorite plugins. 

Chris: Pods Framework, SearchWP, Gravity Forms, Jetpack, Yoast SEO

Michele: Name a favorite theme or framework you like to use.

Chris: My current site is on Underscores but I’m also a big fan of Genesis

Michele: If you could change one thing in WordPress, what would it be?

Chris: Replace the organizational structure with a board of directors made up by a more diverse group of WordPress users and companies.

Michele: What is your most memorable WordPress moment?

Chris: When my plugin, Better WP Security, first crossed 1 million downloads.

Michele: What is one piece of advice you would give to someone just getting started with WordPress?

Chris: Don’t be afraid to pursue your own goals and remember WordPress is just one tool of many to get you to those goals.

Michele: What do you think is in store for the future of WordPress?

Chris: Like any project it will continue to evolve and change. As long as there is no real competition it will continue to thrive with an ecosystem that really can’t be topped.

Michele: Just for fun, share one memory that makes you proud to be a part of the WordPress Community?

Chris: While I’ve seen it a few times it’s the ability of the WordPress communities to take care of their own. From friends like Jesse Petersen and Jeff Chandler to countless others I’ve watched people in WordPress be there from the beginning to the end in ways that go far deeper than any job or club. I’ve seen Jeff, for example, be there for people who really need help and then turn around and introduce himself to me with the opening line “so you’re that asshole…” Not many places or people could manage that.

You can find Chris Wiegman online at ChrisWiegman.com.

If you find these interesting and would like to be spotlighted yourself, please see our interview form.