I’ve been using WordPress for many years since b2 (sort of) died. I liked blogging my photographs during my early years in college, and I also liked having the ability to work with the source code and create templates. I attribute a lot of my web development knowledge and financial success with WordPress. For a handful of personal reasons, the community has left a lot to be desired.
I’ve been to many WordCamps and have only made one really good friend through it. I could probably do a better job at trying to contribute, but the atmosphere doesn’t seem as friendly as other development communities I’ve lurked around. I’m also starting to get bored with the software. It seems to me that they are focusing too much on making it Tumblr-like, and the user experience seems to be getting worse with time – the evidence for me being the exponential increase in the difficulty of explaining to new clients how to use WordPress.
At Grace Hopper, I sat in a great open source development session, looking for inspiration for projects to get involved in. One of the panelists, the fantastic Danese Cooper, is on Drupal’s Board of Directors, and the way she presented herself was inspiring to me. I really like developing open source software, but I really want to be part of a strong, diverse community. She made it seem like Drupal was worth a shot, so I think I’m going to give it a try.
I’m not going to stop using WordPress or stop trying to stay involved in the community – although I will not be going to WordCamp Philly this weekend (partly because of my boredom, and partly because my mouth is dying). This just means that I want to diversify my platform skills and will most likely write more about those new skills in the near future. I’M JUST WARNIN’ YA.
I’d also like to point out how the folks from the Wikimedia Foundation were some of the coolest open source proponents ever. I got a lot of great contacts and inspiration to involve open source development and learning with my students’ curriculum at MSU. It was the highlight of this year’s GHC for sure.
Are you involved in any cool open source projects? Let me know as I’m shopping around for cool new things to focus on!
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This is a great post.
I wish the documentation was better. Then, I wouldn’t need Nacin sneer about secret APIs no one but the WordPress brogrammer club knows anything about.
My open source project is posting cool shit on github. Yeah!
P.S. Making one, really good friend is all you need.
eh … The closest I come to opens-source contributions right now is being a supported to the UnrealIRCD project, for now. I hope later on to find other worthy projects to lend my name too.
I’m looking forward to your Drupal posts! I like WordPress, but I did some experiments with other CMS to see if I’m not missing up on something. I had high hopes about Drupal, but it just left me puzzled.
Maybe seeing someone much more skilled than me start with it will help me “get” their philosophy.