WordPress Rockstar: Joost de Valk

I am excited to have been given the chance to interview Joost de Valk. I have enjoyed his site Yoast for his WordPress tips and SEO tips. In a way, he has been inspiration to not just myself, but as I have noticed, quite a lot of people.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did when I got my answers back from him.

ME: When did you start using WordPress? And, what interested you in order to use the CMS?

JOOST: First installed it in ’04 or ’05 I think, first serious go with it was when I created www.css3.info and my own blog, which was then at www.joostdevalk.nl. The first post on my own blog that remains is from April ’06, about Webalizer, the first post on css3.info (which I no longer run) was from june 13rd of the same year.

ME: For those looking to develop WordPress plugins, what are some pointers you have for people learning?

JOOST: Pick a plugin apart that does something you’d like to do, and start coding. Be sure to keep up to date with the latest stuff around wordpress plugin development, some great blogs for people interested in the topic are Planet Ozh, and WP Engineer and I’ll be doing some more posts on the topic myself soon. By the way, WP Engineer had a wonderful post recently dubbed Our WordPress Developer Toolbox, most of the stuff in there I use as well.

ME: Is there anything that you believe WordPress could not do versus other CMS like Drupal and Joomla?

JOOST: Yes, WordPress is pretty bad at looking that bad in the backend and having such an awful user interface 🙂 Other than that: no.

ME: Do you have any WordPress-related projects or plugins you are currently working on that you would like to share?

JOOST: Loads 🙂 I’m starting a new project called WPBasics.com soon, and working on some new and updated plugins, for example I’m working on a major update to my Google Analytics plugin and on an update to Simple Taxonomies, a plugin to make easier use of the custom taxonomies functionality that was added in WordPress 2.8 and further enhanced in 3.0.

ME: What inspired you to start blogging and making plugins to help other bloggers?

JOOST: I basically started writing plugins to scratch my own itch, still, today, I run more of my own plugins than anyone else’s, not because there’s nothing that good out there, but because I’m stubborn like that 🙂

ME: What do you think of the WordPress community versus other open source communities?  (Is it big? Is it friendlier/ helpful?)

JOOST: It’s big, friendly and helpful, and also sometimes a bit like high school, with the little riots and sudden friendships and fights. But in all, it’s a great community to be a part of. Sometimes I wish we weren’t as dependent on Automattic, even though they seem to play their role nicely, it would be good if we as a community became somewhat more democratic.

ME: What would you like to see WordPress improve upon in the future?

JOOST: Ugh, where to start 🙂 I’d like to get rid of calling anything a blog that’s not a blog. WordPress is a CMS, and with 3.0 it’s about as full fledged as they come. Next to that… You know what: it doesn’t really matter. If I need something that’s not in core, I’ll write a plugin. So I fully support the core team to work on UI and UX stuff, to make it even easier for the end user.

Joost de Valk is a web developer and SEO, who writes and maintains dozens of WordPress plugins, but also non WordPress tools such as Quix, several SEO tools and other stuff. All are aimed at making the life’s of developers and SEO’s out there easier. Joost regulary speaks at conferences and consults with companies big and small on how to build and optimize their website. You can reach Joost through his blog or through twitter: @yoast.