I tracked down Mark Forrester one of the co-founders of WooThemes, who are a Gold sponsor and we are really happy to have their support. WooThemes are the leading premium theme company in the WordPress world with 40k users.
Tell us a bit about your business. How do you use WordPress?
At WooThemes we create cutting-edge commercial themes for WordPress. We are a team of 12 in 5 countries with a user base of 40,000 commercial theme users, and hundreds of thousands of sites use our free themes. Our business exists because of WordPress, our network of sites are built using it, and our membership and theme administration system is all custom developed on top of WordPress.
Why WordPress?
We are WordPress evangelists because it is open source supported by a global community, hugely scalable, robustly flexible and undeniably idiot proof in usability in comparison to other open source content management systems available online.
Why did you decide to get involved and sponsor WordCamp Cape Town 2011?
Even though a lot of people don’t know it, we don’t pro-actively market it, and our team is dotted around the world, we are a proudly South African business with headquarters in Cape Town. We hope to network with like-minded individuals at Wordcamp Cape Town and hopefully inspire the local community in our presentations.
What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole? And the South African WP community?
WordPress’s success is directly linked to it’s community’s interaction with it. The transparency of the WordPress core team, and the influence the community has over WP’s development direction, really resinates with me and how we hope WooThemes is also percieved. The GPL licensing of WordPress and commercial themes and plugins, although opens it up to abuse, really is WordPress’s unique strength and something the WP community should respect and contribute to.
The South African WP community is still fairly small, so I’d love to see it grow and community members to help market WP’s benefits to their clients, slowly but surely getting more and more South African sites using it. Events like WordPress Cape Town will certainly help equip them with more knowledge and meet more people who can help do that.
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town?
Meeting local WordPress users, and site owners. I’m also looking forward to hearing Dan Milward talk about his WP Commerce plugin.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
Am I biased in saying our team members at WooThemes? 🙂
Brian Gardner and the Genesis Framework. Andrew Nacin and his knowledge of the WordPress code. Ryan Imel and keeping everyone in the loop with WordPress community news with WPCandy. And of course Matt Mullenweg and his visionary leadership of the mothership.
What is the most exciting improvement to WordPress that you have noticed in the last year?
Custom post types and taxonomies and the doors they open, specifically in building sliders, portfolios, galleries and e-commerce modules.
Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?
Still a lean codebase, I hope without the bloat a lot of other content managements systems have gained over time, that will be used more often as a development framework for any kind of website or web application, than as a simple content management system.
