A decade gone, more to come

Ten years ago today the very first release of WordPress was released by Matt and Mike.  My WordPress story starts almost a year later with me searching for something to use for my first personal blog, finding WordPress and I falling in love straight away. The simplicity of the 5 minute install and the freedom to do what I wanted had me hooked.

Over the past ~9 years I have grown with WordPress contributing back in a number of different ways. My addiction to contribution started with the codex which soon led me to trac and sharing patches which fixed bug I found or other people reported. A while later I had the privilege of being invited to join the core team as a lead developer. A few years later this addiction even helped land me my dream job.

Around 1300 commits in, today I’m still contributing and looking forward to the next ten years and what surprises and adventures will be in store for us.

Scaling WordPress @ #wpldn

Last night I did a short presentation on Scaling WordPress using WordPress.com as an example giving an overview of the solutions we use for different scaling issues as well as highlighting some solutions that you can try out on smaller sites:

Feeding on feedback and progress

Keeping track of a projects progress is a common desire and if the project you are interested in happens to be a WordPress plugin then there are a number of RSS feeds which are an important resource for you (replace plugin_slug with the plugins slug!).

http://wordpress.org/support/rss/tags/plugin_slug
http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/plugin_slug?limit=100&mode=stop_on_copy&format=rss

The first of these contains all the support forum posts relevant to a particular plugin and the second is all the code changes that are happening in the plugins repository.

To keep track of these you have a couple of choices.

Firstly you could subscribe to them in your feed reader or if like me you like to receive emails for this sort of thing you can setup a cool tool called rss2email on your pc/server to email you new posts/changes.