Wordsmithing For the WordPress Developer
Hey gang!
So I’m very excited that one of my first interviews in my role as “Online Content Producer” at MaRS is with Wordpress founding developer Matt Mullenweg. He’s appearing at WordCamp 2008 in Toronto, and I’ll be showing up, Sony Z7U and microphone in hand.
But I’m a bit nervous about the line of questioning, seeings as I’m not an open source software developer.
I’m lucky that through my position I’m able to liase with brilliant minds like Paul Jara from 43n79w.com .. and he’s given me this preliminary list of questions to ask Matt. But thought I’d ask you - the WordPress community as well.
Any questions you’d like me to ask Mr. Mullenweg?? Let’s crowdsource.
Here’s the line of questioning so far:
1. The project was criticized by a number of security experts and even a member of PHP’s core team. They argued that the code was difficult to maintain and extend without introducing new security bugs. Do you think that was a fair assessment and if so, what measures have been taken to address these concerns?
2. Every successful open source project tends to have a figurehead, a face that is synonymous with the project. Speaking as a developer, what is it like being that figurehead? Do you sometimes wish you did not have to attend all of the PR events and could just code more on the project?
3. The ability to blog on-the-go is now within the reach of anyone with a smart phone. How do you see increasingly cheaper and more powerful smart phones changing the way people use WordPress and what they demand of it?
4. More people are beginning to use WordPress as a content management system instead of simply as a blogging tool. How do you introduce more features into WordPress, so that it becomes more of a CMS, without losing focus on its core strengths?
5. It is one thing to lead an open source project and collaborate with people from all over the world. But what is it like to lead Automattic, the company you started, where your workers are located all around the world? There would appear to be all sorts of legal, collaborative, and logistical difficulties in operating a company this way.
Pretty comprehensive, I know. And my time will be short, to be sure. But just thought I’d put it out there. Any fun, little known tidbits you’d like to me to pose? Love to hear your feedback!
Cheers,
Roz
Tags: blogging, crowdsource, Interview, MaRS, matt mullenweg, Sony Z7U, wordpress
August 6th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Is there any plans to add PodPress like functionality, or just bake PodPress right in to WP Core?
August 6th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Awesome Q Bill, here’s a Q from another twittizen: “Ask him if he could write it again, whether he would use a framework like Django or Rails, or stick with PHP. If PHP, why oh why”
August 6th, 2008 at 11:50 am
More q’s via email:
Here are some questions from David Peralty (@davidcubed) of
http://xfep.com (a blog about blogging)
He’s one of my local meetup folk and a sponsor of the Niagara Meetup
(http://niagarameetup.com).
When will WordPress cap its features in hopes of stopping “bloat”? or…
When adding features to the WordPress core, is any consideration given
to the plugins the feature ideas came from?
By that I mean, that WordPress makes plugins obsolete, how is that
supposed to make the plugin authors feel?
When is the WordPress.com theme marketplace going to come about?
What do you think of the blogging related coverage that WordPress
gets?
Which WP blogs does he read consistently?
-Awesome q’s David and thanks to Bill Deys for forwarding them on!-
August 6th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
…and yet more Q’s via email - you guys rock!!
You were ranked earlier this year by PC World as #16 on The 50 Most
Important People on the Web. Why?
At WordPress, you are running a staff around the world from New York to
Australia via Singapore, and with no office. It seems that this setup would
present some special challenges in terms of establishing trust and creating
the right organizational culture. What advice would you have to
entrepreneurs who have aspirations of running a company with virtual staff
whose primary connections are Skype and email?
You once commented on the so-called “37signals-inspired” trend of “less
software” as being a “red herring.” You also referred to a problem you call
“cognitive bloatware” for application such as Word 2003. I found this
interesting. Could you expand on this point for us?
Many have described WordPress as a beautifully coded “Content Management
System.” What are some of the “jobs to be done” that you and your team are
tackling to help people use the Internet more effectively to share
information and collaborate on projects?
What are the top 3 things that contributed to WordPress being successful as
a product?
What are the top 3 things that you would say have made you successful as a
developer?
August 6th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
[...] Got a question you’ve just been dying to ask the Wordpress development team? Well, here’s your chance. Wordpress founding developer Matt Mullenweg will be at WordCamp 2008 in Toronto. Interviewer Roz Allen is looking for some help in developing a line of questioning. Head over to the therozblog.com and post your questions to her comment stream. [...]
August 7th, 2008 at 2:48 am
and yet another! from twittizen @jfedor: so the question I think I’d ask him is what’s the hardest thing Matt’s done that he never expected to do. IE not the hard work, decisions, etc.. hoping it’s a barbara walters type question that makes him cry
August 19th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Here’s a couple more… they were posted on the MaRS Blog, but I’m not too sure if you received them. They’re a bit on the technical side and could give us some scoop on the future of WP.
1) Wordpress has been around during since the earlier versions PHP. At the time, the emphasis of PHP was geared towards a procedural code structure following a page by page execution, provided there was some primitive object oriented (aka OO) constructs. Since then, PHP 5.x has emerged with a strong emphasis on improving it’s OO features to a level comparable to Java. Following that, ‘the PHP Company’, Zend, announced development of their open source, OO Zend Framework that has since matured to a stable framework making it comparable to Java’s Struts. Each new release of PHP brings further OO advancements. With current trends of pushing web development toward OO methodologies (Ruby/Rails, Python, ASP.net, Java/Struts), how would you vision the future of Wordpress under the influence of these object oriented trends?
2) Assuming that Wordpress is predominately procedural while using some object oriented features and a change of methodologies would require extensive work, would it be safe to say that such an undertaking would be, if at all, a long term goal of Wordpress or do you forecast a fork in the road with a new technical product under the same Wordpress branding similar to the Mozilla/Firefox switch-over?
3) With that being said and assuming that Wordpress is leaning towards a more OO product, can plugin developers expect an object oriented application programming interface anytime soon?
4) As an amendment to #1 of Paul Jara’s questions: Would you foresee Wordpress adopting object oriented safety mechanisms such as prepared database queries (PDO, MySQLi) as an attempt to improve security of Wordpress by inherently eliminating SQL injection and XSS (provided that custom filters on types were added by extending these mechanisms)?