BuddyPress.org

I discovered WordPress 10 years ago, on december 2004! Back then I used to code all my websites from scratch. The problem was that when my clients wanted to change something, they had to ask me. And it was a pain.

Content Management System

So I started looking for those called CMSs. The beauty of them was that theoretically they offered a user interface where my clients could make some changes on the site without knowing any coding at all.

I tried them all. PHP Nuke, Joomla (formerly Mambo), Drupal… but Oh, man! WordPress was head and shoulders above the rest. It was so easy to set up a site, compared to the others. But more than that, the best part was the user admin interface. So clean, so easy to understand for everybody. It offered the minimum options, and the usability was great. And it was open source!

WordPress

So I started to migrate all my clients’ websites to WordPress. I didn’t get paid for that. It was on the house. But it was a win-win situation. My clients got the best CMS on earth for free, and I freed up plenty of support time. They didn’t depend on me to change a typo on a page anymore.

Since then, I’ve been working with WordPress on a daily basis. I developed websites, Intranets, e-commerces, apps, social networks… even blogs 😉 The limit is your imagination (and your server, of course).

I like to think of WordPress as a framework I use to develop websites. It’s like PHP on steroids. It has its own CMS related functions library, which is great and useful, and it provides a useful admin interface for my clients to login and change everything. What else can I ask for? Oh, well… the community.

The community

That’s maybe the most important part of WordPress. The community behind it. Thousands of people developing plugins to extend the WordPress functionality out-of-the-box, and giving them away for free! Thousands of people answering questions on the forums, writing documentation in the wiki, developing awesome free themes, translating it, or even contributing to the core.

Even I developed some lazy plugins! How cool is that?

The future of WordPress

WordPress was born in 2003, so it’s eleven years old. Now it powers more than 20% of the websites that use a CMS. In that lifespan it changed so much that now it has nothing to do with those first releases.

Now it’s heading towards a PHP framework more than a blogging platform. As its creator Matt Mullenweg said, I see the future of WordPress as a web operating system. Long life to WordPress! 🙂

My future

I work as a freelancer. I’m a WordPress specialist (and evangelist, so to speak). I make my life developing websites with WordPress, offering SEO services to raise my clients’ ranks and fixing WordPress emergencies and problems. I also develop my own projects that help to make some extra money.

I work from home, so I don’t have to drive to an office. I don’t have to pay gas, public transport or to have lunch away from home. I can eat at home, with my family, and I have a great flexible work schedule. And I hope to keep doing it for a long time.

Of course it’s not all peaches and cream, but I’m happy!

So… thanks, WordPress!