After several perusals from my friends, I finally switched to WordPress. It was not easy though as I had to write a custom script to import the Joomla database to WordPress (I still have that script, but it is a bit outdated am working on it for a plugin).

My first reaction on switching to WordPress was, "Oh My God, I did not know that blogging was so easy" and I seriously enjoyed it a lot. I even went out and wrote several WordPress plugins, few of which I released, and few of which are yet to be.

From 1.5 to 2.9 it has been a very interesting journey. I have learnt so many things in between and have been able to apply all of those learning’s to create plugins or optimize my own site, help others with their problems and more.

However, for me it was really important to have that first reaction of "OOPS!! Why didn’t I use this earlier". That changed everything.

What has been your first reaction on using WordPress? How have you grown into it? I would love if you share your own experiences here to see how it has shaped blogging for you.

Here is a short poll, tell us whether you are a Rockstar user who uses WordPress  for blogging or whether you are a serious Rockstar WordPress user who develops plugins or themes that help other users.

And yes please leave your comments saying why you have the WordPress power, why it makes you a Rockstar, it would really be great to listen and learn from you.

P.S: I used the word Rockstar, because WordPress releases are named after musicians, and I love both music and being a Rock lover, I enjoy both my music and helping the community.

To be honest when I started using WordPress, I thought of it as just another blogging platform, however after using it for around 4 years now, I know how good it is and always wonder what I would be doing without it.

That aside, bloggers like me and you use WordPress to write our thoughts, make a living with a professional blog and do so many things that would not be possible without such a wonderful platform.

But did you know that there are several big brands that use WordPress for their blogs?

eBay, Yahoo, Digg, Ford, Wall Street Journal, Sony, People Magazine, Samsung, Playstation, New York Times, Mozilla Firefox, CNN, Flickr, General Electronic are some of the most prominent brands that use WordPress as a blogging platform, in addition to this there are several more famous personalities who use WordPress to blog.

University of Florida, Duke University, Harvard Law School, Cornell University, University of California, MIT, Texas Tech University, University of Virginia, Oregon State University, University of Melbourne, University of Berlin and Boston University are some of the universities that use WordPress.

This is definitely something to cheer about, and hopefully more and more brands will start going mainstream with WordPress.

What are your thoughts about this? Do you know any other famous brands/personalities that use WordPress. Do let us know about them and your views on WordPress going mainstream.

Inspiration for this post came from a article by WP Beginner: 21 Popular Brands that use WordPress and 17 Popular Universities that use WordPress

However to solve the problem there is WordPress Extend, a place where plugin developers can add their plugins, making it easier for others to find them.

It would be really good if more and more developers started using WordPress Extend to distribute their plugins, I would like to discuss a few benefits developers get when they add their plugins to WordPress extend to make that decision easier.

Hint: If you are unaware of how to add your plugin to WordPress Extend, read our earlier tutorials.

1. List Your Plugin at the WordPress.org Plugin Directory
2. Adding Your Plugin to WP Extend Plugins Using a Mac

Here are the benefits of adding your plugin to WordPress Extend.

Free Hosting Space

You get free space to host your plugin files and also have the ability to host as many plugins you want, provided they are approved.

Free SVN Versioning System

If you have been a developer for sometime you might already know the benefits of using a versioning system, it not only helps you to have a history of changes, but also helps you to go back to previous versions or trunks with ease.

Publicity for Your Plugins

Once you add your plugins to the WordPress extend directory, it is discoverable by WordPress users, and with the ability to search plugins from the dashboard it gives your plugin much more better chance of being used and discovered.

In addition to that, whenever a user logs in to the admin dashboard they see new and popular plugins, giving them more exposure.

Ratings, Statistics & More

How Popular is your plugin, how many times have they been downloaded, do you want to keep track of these things easily without breaking your heads and using it to develop more and more useful plugins?

WordPress Extend provides users with all these features along with the ability to leave comments and feedback for your plugin.

Ability to Push Updates Directly to Users

WordPress has a excellent system to allow users to automatically upgrade plugins from the admin dashboard, however that feature is available to plugins that are listed in WordPress extend.

So the next time you add a new feature, fix a security problem or change something with your plugin, rest assured your plugin users will be intimated about it without you having to break your head and contacting each and every user, which is impossible by the way.

What Else?

Did I miss anything? Will you add your plugins to the WordPress Extend, now that you know the benefits? I would like to hear from you, the discussion is now open, so go ahead and let your thoughts be known.

P.S. One thing I would like to suggest WordPress plugin developers is to add a changelog to their plugins, read why adding changelog matters also check out the blog post Improving your plugin – Changelogs from the WordPress development blog.

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To get you up and close with the WordPress rock stars, we are starting a community interview series where we will quiz people who have helped WordPress evolve and grow, and we could think of no one better than Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress to start this off with. Here is the interview we did with Matt.

WLTC: First of All thanks for taking the time to do this interview, I
really appreciate it more than I can tell you, here is the first question. What does WordPress mean to you as a co-founder and when you think of it as a individual user?

Matt: It’s always been about expressing yourself online. For me, that’s a blog with lots of photography elements. For other folks it might just be a website that doesn’t look like a blog at all. But before b2 and later WordPress I never really felt comfortable with an online presence, there was just too much friction in the tools and they made it too frustrating to do what I wanted. WordPress exists to remove that friction.

WLTC: Happy 6th Anniversary WordPress. It has been 6 long years now, can
you tell us some of your experiences from day 1 to day 2190?

Matt: One day I’ll always remember is the first time someone translated WordPress into another language, I believe it was a project in Japan. To put this in perspective, WordPress had no translation framework at the time so this meant someone went through every single file and line of code and edited it.

This blew me away at the time, and I believe it also had a big effect on Ryan, who went on to lead the long and tedious work of making WordPress gettext-compatible so translators had a robust and efficient way to translate WordPress.

Today there are as many WordPress users outside of the U.S. as inside, and international is the fastest growing part of our community.

WLTC: How has WordPress evolved in community building, what steps does
it take towards it?

Matt: Everything we’ve always done has been trial and error. I think our problem then and now has been it’s too hard for folks to volunteer around WordPress. People break through the trouble and pitch in, but it could be a lot easier of a process and I’d love to recognized everyone who contributes a lot more, which is one of the ideas behind redoing how profiles work on WordPress.org.

WLTC: The GPL issue has been lagging around for sometime now, can you
provide some views on why GPL is the best way to go forward with?

Matt: WordPress wouldn’t exist if B2 wasn’t GPL — it’s the core of our existence. Plugins and themes use hooks, filters, functions, and core data structures in a way which makes them linked and they can’t take away freedoms from users granted by the GPL, which means they must be under the GPL or a compatible license. End of story.

WLTC: A couple of years ago WordPress was seen as a excellent blogging
platform, these days people see it more as a CMS in addition to a
blogging platform. What are your thoughts, and what steps is WordPress
taking towards it?

Matt: More and more people are discovering that the only limits with WordPress are your imagination. You don’t need bloated, seldom-updated, expensive, or never-backward-compatible "content management software" to create beautiful and powerful sites. I think people are starting to realize this because of BuddyPress and the WordPress Showcase.

WLTC: As a personal question, do you follow developments in other
softwares such as Blogger, Joomla and Drupal?

Matt: Absolutely, in fact earlier today at CMS Brazil I watched a presentation on Drupal 7.

WLTC: What are the core values from WordPress you might want or like
other companies to incorporate?

Matt: That’s a tough one — there’s a lot of opinions and philosophies embedded in how WordPress works that I’ve internalized so it’s hard to look at them from afar. Maybe one of the days I’ll get a page on WordPress.org about it.

WLTC: Bugs in WordPress, how do you handle those? Any advice to people
who want to share their bugs and problems or contribute towards solving
them?

Matt: We squish bugs with extreme prejudice. If you’re not sure if something is a bug or not the support forums are probably your best bet. If you’re tech savvy and know how to file a bug report, then I’d recommend to drop it on Trac. In the Drupal presentation I saw earlier they called it a "do-ocracy" where people who do things get things done, and recommended if there was something that you couldn’t code yourself to commission someone to do it on your behalf, which will probably be pretty cheap (a few hundred dollars). I thought that was an interesting idea.

WLTC: One suggestion you would give to someone starting out as a newbie
in WordPress?

Matt: Check out a book on WordPress, spend a little time clicking around the Codex and on WordPress.tv, and of course subscribe to the WordPress Planet and WLTC.

WLTC: One suggestion you would give to experienced WordPress users?

Matt: Check out the taxonomy system, and Dexter Gordon. (The saxophonist, not the WordPress release.)

Update: To learn more about what Matt and team are doing and planning to do with WordPress don’t forget to check the State of the Art Video From WordCamp SF.

Once again thanks Matt for taking out the time for us and answering the questions, it was absolutely nice to have you with us, we hope the readers of WLTC love it too.

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Not only is it very easy now, but it also has so many features in itself and those provided by plugins that make it even better, not to forget you can also decide how your blog looks by choosing from 1000s of free themes and customizing them without problems.

I have been using WordPress for almost 3 years now, and I definitely think it has changed the way I look at blogging, and has made it much more easier than ever, before WordPress I used Joomla for 6 months, however I definitely think switching to WordPress has changed everything for good.

The thing about WordPress that has changed my blogging life is that I can write and post my thoughts from practically anywhere and that makes my life much more easier when it comes to blogging, of course there are several other things that I love WordPress for, however this is the defining one for me.

What is that something in the WordPress platform that has made you change how you blog, you could be a new WordPress user or may have switched from a different platform, however everyone has something about WordPress that make them use it, what is yours?

It could be one thing, it could be ten, we would love to know them, use the comments form, write a blog post about it and tell the world how WordPress has changed your {blogging} life, don’t forget to tell us too through your comments.

Expanding Plugin Panel – Handy tips for plugin developers to show messages to users about new updates in their plugins, making it easier for users to know what they are getting into before they update a plugin.

14 Essential WordPress Development and Design Cheat Sheets – A cheat sheet for tweaking plugins and themes.

Top 10 WordPress plugins to promote Social Media Profile – Social networking is a major part of blogs, here are 10 plugins that will help you promote your social media profiles.

Writing your own is_page function – By default WordPress allows you to check whether users are on a page using is_page() function, these tips will help you determine which exact page users are on currently and display appropriate messages to them.

That sums up the first edition of the tips we received at @weblogtooltips, don’t forget to keep sending us your WordPress tips and tricks to the twitter account, we will be featuring them here regularly and also tweeting about them on a regular basis.

I started on my Masters degree in Computer Science after having worked in the industry for over four years. I decided that my education in Physics was not enough because it did not give me the ability to make enough of a difference to the people that I worked for. I could solve their problems and try my very best to make them smile when I left their establishment (I worked as a computer tech, making my way up to service manager when I quit) but I did not have the ability to help change their computing world and make them more content with their technology. I was just a fixer and could not enable change. So I quit my job, took out some loans, borrowed some money from my parents and went right back to school.

When I started school, I was fresh to programming. I had written some code in C for my undergraduate thesis and had taken one programming class at Wooster. However, truth be told, I was a real newbie in the programming world and was faced with a complex and advanced Computer Science curriculum that scared the living snot out of me. While searching the web for a project to sink my teeth into, I ran into blogging, then into b2 which finally led to me WordPress and a lanky kid from Texas with a lot of ideas and some fantastic leadership skills. I figured I would start two blogs to dip my toe in the water. One would be my personal blog and the other would be a log of all the programming work that I was doing. I figured it would help me get my arms around code, would help me help others and I would chronicle my journey in programming.

When I downloaded and installed WordPress, I had no clue about PHP, SQL, web servers or about most of the other technologies that I worked with. I huffed and puffed, stumbled and fumbled, tore my hair out and swore like a pirate almost every night when I sat down to play with my PHP scripts after finishing my Knowledge Based Systems homework. After much learning and quite a few painstaking weeks, I put together a few ‘hacks” for WordPress to make it do the things I wanted it to do and posted them on the support forums and on my blog.

But I quickly learned that the magic was not within me. The magic was within the community, the ideals championed by the community and benevolent nature of the community. Every hack was welcomed with open arms. Every tip that I posted made me more friends. Every theme I hacked up with my color blind eyes made me more popular. People started to recognize my name in the forums. I regularly received emails and conversed with folks from across the world. Before I knew it, I was a part of a fantastic community where I was more than just a nickname. The experience was sickeningly satisfying. The WordPress bug had bitten me and I could not stop scratching.

But the community was growing very quickly. I was not the only person that found solace in being within the community. There were dissensions, disagreements, flare ups, trolling and everything else in between. In watching various events unfold that first year, I learned my first lesson in community building.

Everyone speaks a different language even if we all speak English.

This is a well discussed and researched topic so anything I say has probably been said more lucidly in the past. But here is why I think our community works in spite of all our differences.

We have a glue. The glue is WordPress.

Why are we all such fans of a piece of software? I am a fan because it has helped me promote myself and my work. My dad is a fan because it helps him teach others about his fascinating ideas on alternative medication and spread wellness and news on staying healthy.

WordPress is a gift that keeps on giving.

WordPress is not just a one time pleasure. It continues to give me a lot for next to nothing. My ROI on WordPress is just massive. If you think for a few minutes, you might see your ingredients for the glue. I would love to know what WordPress gives you back.

Take a penny, leave a penny.

To me, WordPress represents everything that is fundamental to the Open Source movement. It represents a virtuous circle. Every WordPress personality keeps harping about how every user should think about giving back to the community because it will pay them back. Here is how I think of it. If all effort and resources were like a little penny holder in a store and we believe that all people, in their heart of hearts are good people (which I do), then every penny that you leave in that penny jar will make the jar look more full. An overflowing penny jar gives the person who needs a penny the confidence that if they take a penny, the jar will not become empty. It also gives the person who has a few extra pennies the desire to do what other good people have done in the past. WordPress enables us to feel good about ourselves.

We are all wellwishers.

I think we as human beings tend to forget that most people have good intentions. I also know that knowing that is not enough. It is very difficult to see the other person’s point of view. This is especially true if you feel very strongly about your opinion. That brings me to my next point.

We eat our own dog food.

Even core WordPress commiters have disagreements. However, I believe that we as a community have matured enough that we know when to give in. We have given WordPress the ability to be molded and shaped in the way it needs to be in order to make ourselves happy. Most features in WordPress can be removed, changed or enhanced to suit individual needs and abilities. There are plugins developed by core WordPress folks that get around certain features which they did not like but did not have the reasoning to enforce a global change on. Even in its failures, WordPress shines through.

That brings me to my final thought and the title of this post.

Be kind, educate.

I adore Lorelle. To me, she is the embodiment of our community in everything she does and in every action she performs. She is supportive and critical at the same time. She embraces and challenges in the same breath. She sticks her tongue out and throws her arms wide open all in one swoop. I believe what makes her approach so nice is that she is kind to the people that can enact change and she loves to teach other people to do the things she does so well. She is a WordPress enabler.

I wanna be like her. So I pledge to be as kind as I can be and I promise to educate everyone that cares to listen. While I am at it, I hope to learn a thing or two along the way. Will you help me do that?

So what do you pledge to do for WordPress and what can WordPress pledge to do for you?