Tim: What’s your WordPress “origin” story?
I was an early MovableType user and before that I was hand-rolling HTML archives for my pioneering blog called CamWorld (circa late 1990s). Around 2003-2004 I started working in Drupal and built some fairly large community-driven sites.
At the Open Source Convention in Portland in July 2004, I met a young Matt Muellenweg, who had just launched WordPress. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but remember how eager, honest and smart he was.
Several years passed and I noticed that a lot of the blogs I read and follow were moving to WordPress, so I started taking another look and saw how good of a platform it was, not just for blogs but as a robust CMS.
I stopped doing Drupal development work around 2011 and moved almost all of my professional work, clients and web sites to WordPress and haven’t looked back.
Tim: Whats your top 3 WordPress plugins? Why?
- TablePress – Because I can hook up all kinds of CSV files to it and let my clients update their tabular data without needing a lot of hand-holding.
- MailPoet – Because it’s very easy to build newsletters where the content is driven by WordPress posts. Very valuable from a content creation cost and marketing perspective.
- Visualizer: Charts & Graphs: Very good plugin that converts CSV files into charts and graphs. This is amazing for a client that doesn’t want to pay for the custom development needed to draw charts and graphs from a custom database table in WordPress. Simply pair this with TablePress and some source CSV files and you have a very inexpensive, yet powerful, tool.
Tim: Whats your most proud achievement around WordPress?
I migrated NJ’s largest public school district (40,000 students) to WordPress and am saving hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars over the course of five years.
I am leading the charge for embracing “WordPress in Schools” and my goal is to eventually have all 14,000+ public school districts in this country using WordPress in some way through a services-based company called SchoolPress.
Tim: What do you want our readers to know about you?
I hail from Northern Michigan, but grew up internationally, and currently live in Northern NJ with my family. I love to go biking, hiking and travel. About 15 years ago I came very close to starting an adventure travel company in Siberia but the funding fell through and the local Russian mafia advised me against it.
Tim: Define yourself with one word.
Scooby Doo’s “Huh?
Cameron is going to share his insights on using WordPress for Schools .