No talk here, all action! Aaron Campbell is a long time contributor to WordPress. Founder and lead developer at Xavisys, a WordPress focused web development company. Check out some of the plugins he has created, you’ll need more than two hands to count them all 🙂 We’re very excited to have Aaron as a panel speaker at WordCamp San Diego 2011. We got a chance to chat up some cool questions with Aaron, here we go:
How long have you been working with WordPress and what first attracted you to it?
I’ve been working with WordPress over 5 years. I was first attracted to it because it was the best option available for my own personal site (I tried quite a few options before deciding on WordPress).
What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole, including WordCamps?
The WordPress community is both phenomenal and maddening at the same time. In general there are a lot of extremely helpful people that are part of the community and at it’s core there are a lot of people that really believe in the idea free software who are helping that community to grow and thrive. Unfortunately in any community of that size there are bound to be some people that are just trying to make things difficult. The fact that those people haven’t soured the rest of the community is a true testament to how great it really is.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
As a developer I tend to look up to and follow some of the other developers like Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith, John Jacoby, Andrew Nacin, etc. However, I also have to give a shout out to Jane Wells who really helps keep things rolling during release cycles. WordPress would push far fewer releases without her, and I’m not sure how she does it.
What is the most exciting feature/addition/improvement to WordPress that you have noticed in the last year?
Well, while the introduction of a new bundled theme (Twenty Ten) and the merge of WordPress/WPMU were both notable, Custom Post Types and Taxonomies definitely take the cake.
Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?
I’m excited about the relatively near future of WordPress. I feel like we’ve shrugged off some of the shackles that were making development slower and harder (support for old PHP/MySQL versions, support for IE6, etc) and we’re really starting to push the envelope more than before (browser upgrade notifications, Distraction Free Writing, etc). It’s pretty obvious that WordPress is the leader in the market, just look at all the other imitating us, and I think we’ll continue to blaze a trail that all the others will follow.
