I learned something today. WordPress isn’t really a web development platform or content management system.
It’s a community.
Today I had the great honor of representing WordPress Austin at the WordPress booth at South By Southwest Interactive, and I played the part of “WordPress Genius,” explaining what WordPress is, hearing how people use it, describing to them how it can help their business, and offering technical and other advice.
Some people who stopped by the booth weren’t very familiar with WordPress, so I explained that it’s free, it’s open source, it’s easy to use, and it allows people to build anything from a small personal blog to a giant news site like CNN. And in response, a number of them didn’t understand how WordPress can be a free product. They asked about the “enterprise level” (there isn’t one) or “what’s the catch?” (again, there isn’t one).
I suppose in this day and age it’s hard to imagine a product that is so powerful, and so widely used, but has so few strings attached. It’s something anyone can use however they want (and even modify!). And therein lies its power. Because it’s so easy to use, and free, it creates tremendous passion among its users.
But it’s more than just a product as well.
By working at the booth, I discovered that the people at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com that employs some of the most active WordPress contributors) really do want to hear from the community. Case in point: Jane Wells took to heart my comments about WordPress and accessibility. She said they worked hard to make the default theme Twenty Ten accessible, and are aware of, and have plans to fix, the accessibility issues in the WordPress backend/admin panel. She encouraged me or anyone else to submit patches to address any problems.
I also met Ian Stewart, the lead developer for Twenty Ten, a great theme to use as a starting place when developing custom themes that meet accessibility standards, because it has solid, clean, semantic code. Ironically, I mentioned my previous post about his Thematic theme and how it was difficult to modify for accessibility; he immediately pulled out a business card and had me promise to email him after the conference with my comments.
What this says is that WordPress cares about accessibility, but even more, they care about their users.
And that reinforces is a feeling I’ve had for some time: WordPress isn’t just code, or a product, or a CMS – it’s not just a thing. It’s a community.
It’s a group of people that includes people who work for Automattic; freelancers; open source contributors; third-party hosting and service providers; plugin and theme developers; meetup groups and WordCamps; and most of all, the users themselves.
We all use it, we love it, and we want to learn it, teach others, and help WordPress become even better.
In other words, we are all WordPress.
What a fabulous post Jackie!
I couldn’t agreed more about WordPress being a community and not just a CMS! I love the WordPress community. I was very jealous of all the WordPress happenings at South By Southwest! I’ll definitely be flying over with a couple of people from Australia next year. Hopefully I can be good enough to help out behind the Genius Bar by then too
Make sure to look for WordCamp activity in your area as well – its far cheaper than SxSW!
This is a fantastic post. Thanks to @kumar_sekhar for sharing it. I’ll be sharing this myself as well!
might have to use this post as an example of PR-style writing at its best for my media & communication students. i mean, you should’ve been PAID for this!
mind you, i’m a great wordpress fan, so i won’t be gainsaying anything you wrote here, but will be valiantly checking your other posts for some critical commentary as well.
*sigh* i guess i’m just envious of all the people who were able to get to the SXSW thing – sounds like a very cutting edge conference. see for example, the article in the guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/15/sxsw-2011-internet-online
Thanks for the compliment… I think!
I know some of what I wrote might seem like empty words, but it’s really a reflection of how I view WordPress and the community. For instance, we have a fantastic group of people in WordPress Austin who give up a lot of their spare time to share their knowledge with others. In fact, it’s because of these people that I was able to become so knowledgeable myself.
And getting to meet people from Automattic as well as WordPress users from all over the world simply reinforced what I had already experienced locally. People are passionate about WordPress for so many reasons, and it’s that passion that encourages so many of us to contribute to the broader community.
That is so touching. I myself have considered WordPress as a community. The official WordPress sites are my home, and community portals my loving neighbors.