Speaker Spotlight: Matt Geri

 The latest top notch speaker to official join the line up at this year’s WordCamp Cape Town is Matt Geri, self confessed WordPress Geek and Mobile champion. Matt will be blowing our minds on the Tech/Development track with a session on using WordPress as a Mobile publishing platform.

Tell us a bit about yourself

My name is Matt and I like to think of myself as an adventurous web and mobile developer. I am one of the original MobilePress developers as well as the founder of WordPress Geeks (www.wpgeeks.com).

Why WordPress?

I have been using WordPress ever since I can remember. It’s popular, flexible and a solid base to work from when building websites, communities, apps etc. I think most importantly though, the reason why I choose WordPress and it is probably the main reason why countless other open source blogging platforms have failed to uproot WordPress as the number 1 open source blogging platform, is the developer community. No matter what kind of issue you are having with WordPress, someone is willing to help you get it sorted out. Be it via a blog post, forum message, mailing list or IRC chat room.

What is your talk going to be about?

Having developed MobilePress, I have unique experience and knowledge about using WordPress as a mobile publishing platform. My talk will give some insight into the mobile world and why you should care about it, how to turn your blog into a mobile blog and some technical information about developing and optimizing mobile themes for your blog.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town?

Meeting the attendees, hopefully teaching them something new and also listening to what other speakers have to say in their own talks.

Share one WP tip

Go mobile! There are many plugins you can use to turn your WordPress blog into a mobile blog and it shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to pick and install one.

What is the most exciting improvement to WordPress that you have noticed in the last year?

The adoption of PHP 5. Backwards supporting PHP 4 was becoming painful! I am really excited that the WordPress development team has now made PHP 5 a requirement! It gives plugin and even theme developers many improvements that were not previously available when backwards supporting PHP 4.

Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?

WordPress is currently the dominant open source blogging platform. In two years time, I see it being used more and more as a CMS and themes becoming optimized towards a cross platform experience (web, mobile, tablets etc).