{"id":293,"date":"2011-07-26T18:00:21","date_gmt":"2011-07-26T16:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/2011.capetown.wordcamp.org\/?p=293"},"modified":"2013-01-21T20:17:49","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:17:49","slug":"speaker-spotlight-adii-pienaar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/speaker-spotlight-adii-pienaar\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaker Spotlight: Adii Pienaar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"adii_pienaar\"<\/a>We are happy to welcome Adii Pienaar of WooThemes<\/a>\u00a0as an official speaker at WordCamp Cape Town 2011. Adii will host a session on the Developer track. We caught up with him online and asked him to tell us a bit more about his talk and his thoughts on WordPress.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tell us a bit about yourself<\/h3>\n

I’m an ex-designer & developer, current entrepreneur & the co-founder at WooThemes<\/a>, along with a few other projects that I’m involved with in various capacities.<\/p>\n

Why WordPress?<\/h3>\n

I first started using WordPress back in 2006 when I wanted to have a blog and I decided to create my own (instead of using a hosted solution). WordPress – even back then – seemed to find a great balance between the learning curve of picking it up and the ultimate reward of applying one’s learnings.<\/p>\n

To this day, I think WordPress is an incredibly flexible and well-developed CMS, which can be used for a wide variety of different projects.<\/p>\n

What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole? And the South African WP community?<\/h3>\n

I see the WordPress community more as an ecosystem of users, providers, buyers etc. And that ecosystem is absolutely thriving.<\/p>\n

I think South Africa have been a bit slow in joining this ecosystem and specifically see a shortage of quality, local WP designers \/ developers that are working hard to persuade & educate SA clients about the benefits of WordPress.<\/p>\n

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Cape Town?<\/h3>\n

I’ve learnt a lot about WordPress & the ecosystem over the years and I hope that others can benefit from that experience.<\/p>\n

What is your talk going to be about?<\/h3>\n

WordPress has grown into a very diverse ecosystem, where its users have cultivated multiple different opportunities to create & build a business. Commercial themes have been the most obvious \/ mainstream success, but beyond theming there’s still so many untapped opportunities. This session briefly explores some of the more untapped opportunities.<\/p>\n

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town?<\/h3>\n

I’ve not connected with as many local WP peeps as I would’ve liked recently. So I’m keen to catch up with a few “old” friends & make a couple of new one’s.<\/p>\n

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?<\/h3>\n

Hopefully I can inspire a couple of talented individuals to pursue some WP ideas and build a business around those.<\/p>\n

What is your favourite WordPress theme and\/or plugin, and why?<\/h3>\n

Would I be biased if I said the WooFramework<\/a>? \ud83d\ude42 Whilst I don’t do much development these days, I always miss the WooFramework<\/a> & its bundled functions when I’m working on a website that is not powered by it.<\/p>\n

Share one WP tip<\/h3>\n

Keep plugins to an absolute minimum. Mo’ plugins, mo’ problems.<\/p>\n

What is the most exciting feature\/addition\/improvement to WordPress that you have noticed in the last year?<\/h3>\n

Menu’s (being biased again) & post formats \/ types.<\/p>\n

Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?<\/h3>\n

Not much different to what it is now. I think WP will always be a great publishing platform, with the open option to use it as a fully-fledged CMS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are happy to welcome Adii Pienaar of WooThemes\u00a0as an official speaker at WordCamp Cape Town 2011. Adii will host a session on the Developer track. We caught up with him online and asked him to tell us a bit … Continue reading Speaker Spotlight: Adii Pienaar<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7694169,"featured_media":317,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,9463],"tags":[9464,29,9460],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcement","category-speaker-spotlight","tag-adii-pienaar","tag-speakers","tag-woothemes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/files\/2011\/07\/adii_pienaar.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1wS7r-4J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7694169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3241,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions\/3241"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}