Wordsmithing for the WordPress founder
I’m very excited that one of my first interviews in my role as “Online Content Producer� at MaRS is with WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg. He’s appearing at WordCamp 2008 in Toronto, and I’ll be showing up, Sony Z7U and microphone in hand.
But I’m a bit nervous about the line of questioning, seeings as I’m not an open source software developer.
I’m lucky that through my position I’m able to liase with brilliant minds like Paul Jara from 43n79w.com, and he’s given me this preliminary list of questions to ask Matt. But thought I’d ask you, the MaRS community of entrepreneurs and innovators, as well.
Any questions you’d like me to ask Mr. Mullenweg?? Let’s crowdsource.
Here’s the line of questioning so far:
- The project was criticized by a number of security experts and even a member of PHP’s core team. They argued that the code was difficult to maintain and extend without introducing new security bugs. Do you think that was a fair assessment and if so, what measures have been taken to address these concerns?
- Every successful open source project tends to have a figurehead, a face that is synonymous with the project. Speaking as a developer, what is it like being that figurehead? Do you sometimes wish you did not have to attend all of the PR events and could just code more on the project?
- The ability to blog on-the-go is now within the reach of anyone with a smart phone. How do you see increasingly cheaper and more powerful smart phones changing the way people use WordPress and what they demand of it?
- More people are beginning to use WordPress as a content management system instead of simply as a blogging tool. How do you introduce more features into WordPress, so that it becomes more of a CMS, without losing focus on its core strengths?
- It is one thing to lead an open source project and collaborate with people from all over the world. But what is it like to lead Automattic, the company you started, where your workers are located all around the world? There would appear to be all sorts of legal, collaborative, and logistical difficulties in operating a company this way.
Pretty comprehensive, I know. And my time will be short, to be sure. But just thought I’d put it out there. Any fun, little known tidbits you’d like to me to pose? Love to hear your feedback!
Roz Allen is an online content producer at MaRS. She is a full time MaRtian, a part time CBC’er and a quarter time blogger.
Here are a couple more questions:
1) Wordpress has been around during since the earlier versions PHP. At the time, the emphasis of PHP was geared towards a procedural code structure following a page by page execution, provided there was some primitive object oriented (aka OO) constructs. Since then, PHP 5.x has emerged with a strong emphasis on improving it’s OO features to a level comparable to Java. Following that, ‘the PHP Company’, Zend, announced development of their open source, OO Zend Framework that has since matured to a stable framework making it comparable to Java’s Struts. Each new release of PHP brings further OO advancements. With current trends of pushing web development toward OO methodologies (Ruby/Rails, Python, ASP.net, Java/Struts), how would you vision the future of Wordpress under the influence of these object oriented trends?
2) Assuming that Wordpress is predominately procedural while using some object oriented features and a change of methodologies would require extensive work, would it be safe to say that such an undertaking would be, if at all, a long term goal of Wordpress or do you forecast a fork in the road with a new technical product under the same Wordpress branding similar to the Mozilla/Firefox switch-over?
3) With that being said and assuming that Wordpress is leaning towards a more OO product, can plugin developers expect an object oriented application programming interface anytime soon?
4) As an amendment to #1 of Paul Jara’s questions: Would you foresee Wordpress adopting object oriented safety mechanisms such as prepared database queries (PDO, MySQLi) as an attempt to improve security of Wordpress by inherently eliminating SQL injection and XSS (provided that custom filters on types were added by extending these mechanisms)?
Posted by: Tom on August 8th, 2008 at 3:40 pm