Everyone has a WordPress story. The moment WordPress captivated them and changed their life forever. WordPress certainly changed my life.

As I sit in my office reading The Best Story Wins by Matthew Luhn, it occurs to me I’ve never actually written down my WordPress origin story. So here it goes.

The year is 2003. The setting is my childhood bedroom. This is how most tech origin stories start, isn’t it? Oh well, so I’m a cliche. So be it. I’m probably tinkering with yet another content management system (CMS), something I loved doing. I was always fascinated with how PHP-based systems were able to build dynamic pages. At the time, I enjoyed tinkering with HTML 4, and learning about all of the properties to be able to transform a design I had created into a website or single webpage. I’d been doing this for years at this point, though only briefly dipped into PHP and actually using a content management system. At the time, I had built zapunx.com, a place for the South African alternative music community to come together before social networks existed. Using a modified version of MD-Pro and some other scripts (Coppermine Gallery, anyone?), this site was where I tinkered and learned the basics of PHP and MySQL. Fueled by my love of music and live shows, I used this space to build the site the community was missing. I’d go to a concert in the evening (sometimes several in a single weekend), and stay up late after the show editing and uploading photos, so folks could see themselves at the show when they woke up the next morning.

The bug had bitten.

Fast forward to 2007, and I’m working part time at a small web design and development agency here in Cape Town. We had our own custom CMS where we built websites for local sporting companies among others. This tool was built in-house, and could be shaped to do almost whatever we needed, with lots of continued custom code.

This was around the time where Twitter was new and taking off. Tweet-ups were a thing, where people who met on Twitter arranged to meet in real life. Through all of this, I reconnected with WordPress, one of the CMSes I regularly tinkered with on my local WAMP server, along with the many others available on Sourceforge and other similar websites of the time. WordPress had a horizontal WP Admin, was mostly light blue and orange in it’s design, and was quite straightforward to setup, even without the now famous “5 minute install”. The more I tinkered, the more I enjoyed doing so.

Why not start a blog? I saw a bunch of other local people on Twitter using WordPress, and swiftly registered and set up matty.co.za which I dubbed “Lost in Mattyville” (everyone had “cool” blog names back then). Here I blogged about music, coding, and actually about blogging and whatever was going on in life at the time like tweet-ups, etc. Blogging felt freeing and encouraging. WordPress had everything I needed to empower this sharing, as well as offer the freedom to craft the code of my custom WordPress theme as I chose, with the perfect semantic HTML of the time, and a very lean CSS profile (by this point, we now had CSS). I was in love. I took time on that Summer holiday over December to dive into my own WordPress theme, craft exactly what I wanted in a lean blogging theme, and to launch my personal blog. This is where I first learned WordPress theming, and where I discovered the community and the flexibility of WordPress.

For those who are curious, this blog started running WordPress 3.7 at the time.

At the time, zapunx.com was running smoothly, and had taken off. A good friend who was an aspiring blogger at the time asked why I didn’t quit my job and do zapunx.com full time. It had honestly not occurred to me to do so. That sparked a question, though: “what if I could do WordPress full time?”

Early in the following year, now full time with the agency for a couple of years, I demo’d WordPress for the agency I was working at. I showed how it can be customized with different content types (before custom post types were available in WordPress core), and how we could make the system look and feel however we wanted, with our own settings for each client’s needs, and how we could reduce engineering time by replicating common code as plugins. After much convincing, all new websites at the agency were built on WordPress, and we ditched the custom CMS.

I was now doing WordPress development full time.

This is the point at which my “I am” statement changed. I now referred to myself as a “WordPress developer”. “I am a WordPress developer”.

Everything about my blog changed toward this focus. I promoted what I was doing and learning with WordPress, fell in deep love with the community around the project, and immersed myself in learning as much as possible.

As we developed new projects, I would dive in and learn more about leveraging the hook and filter system in WordPress, enabling us to build exactly what each client asked for. This learning sparked an interest in exploring and solving questions which were being asked by other developers in the WordPress community, diving in on lesser known areas of the codebase to learn how they operate. We built a simple menu manager with a list of checkboxes in a hierarchical list based on the page structure, and empowered clients to build out their own navigation menus before the current navigation tools existed. It was lean and simple, and did exactly what we needed.

Fast forward to the second half of 2010. I’m enjoying working with both WordPress and Magento (there was no WooCommerce at the time), and looking for my next growth challenge. I continued to publish on my blog about what I was learning with WordPress, and published I believe this post about styling the TinyMCE editor in WordPress, with a corresponding tweet. Somehow I recall it being a different post, though this post lines up better with the timeline. A couple of days later, I received a direct message from @adii, asking if I’d be interested in joining WooThemes. I had followed Woo through it’s launch and journey to that point, and was interested to learn more.

Adii and I actually had met a few years earlier, through the music industry in South Africa. While I was running zapunx.com, Adii was pursuing various ventures including the Gif Appel Festival in Stellenbosch near Cape Town. This was a 3 day music festival, with the top alternative bands from across the country. Adii reached out asking if I’d be interested in covering the event for zapunx.com. So my best mate Shane and I went up to Stellenbosch for the weekend, covered the event, and enjoyed many chats with Adii at the front door while he stamped people in.

We continued to keep in touch over the years, every now and then bumping into one another in Cape Town while Adii was coming to buy a new camera or other piece of gear for his current ventures.

This single Twitter message shows the power of continued connection, regardless of what one’s focus is at the time. Focuses change and shift, and that’s totally okay.

As my trial project for WooThemes I built out a simple table reservation tool called WooTable. This was later bundled with the Diner theme, enabling restaurants to take reservations for their establishment. I’m particularly proud that the tool includes one specific feature- the ability to set up tables with numbers of seats, and to intelligently combine tables to fit in a larger group of diners (eg: combining a table of 4 and a table of 3 to fit 6 diners). It was simple and helpful for restaurant owners who wanted something simple to get themselves started.

After code review and several chats about next steps, I had joined WooThemes.

Now I was really working on WordPress full time. On the tools themselves which helped to power thousands or more websites across the world.

This is meant to be an origin story, so I’ll pause here for now. There is a whirlwind of more to share beyond this point, which is likely due it’s own blog post. I’m sure I’m forgetting several details which happened along the way.

There is so much power in creating an “I am” statement. One which you feel in your gut, not only in your mind. A statement which winds itself into every fiber of your being.

WordPress not only changed my life as a developer. It changed my life as a writer. I now write regularly, and feel empowered every time I do so, owning the space where I share my thoughts, and seeing how my thoughts expanded and evolved over time.