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We recently had a chat with Syed Balkhi founder of WordPress support website wpbeginner.com about the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress, staying secure, plug-ins and themes he recommends, carving a niche in the WordPress community and what he is looking forward to in WordPress 3.0

Could you provide a bit of information about yourself and WPBeginner.com?
“My name is Syed Balkhi. I started in the web industry around 7 years ago as a web designer. Even though my main focus has always been web designing, I have worked in many different industries such as domaining, blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing, Social Media marketing, and programming. Everything I know to this day, I learned from trial and error. I have been working online since I was 12 years old. I started working with WordPress back in 2006. Because of its features, and it’s ease of use, I decided to stay with using WordPress and it has developed into a very powerful script. After using WordPress and getting comfortable with it, I decided to contribute back to the community. If it was not for this community, my business would have failed. After helping users in the WordPress support forum, I realized that many users have the same question and the forum browsing method was not user friendly. Many contributors can suggest their own version of codes which would make the page really long and full of many codes. Sometimes a lot of the codes mentioned would work, but there is one best solution. WordPress forum does not have the features of highlighting the Best Solution and bringing it to the top.  That was when the idea of WPBeginner came about, a site just for WordPress Beginners where the support is user friendly. They can search for their problem on the site and if they see something, there will be one solution or two solutions offered in which we always make sure to let them know what are the pros and cons of each. We allow our users to ask us any question that we did not mention in our site, so either we can answer it in public, or if it is really specific we try to answer it in the email just for them.

WPBeginner was launched in July 2009 and since then it has received a lot of love from Social Media and WordPress community. It has been mentioned on many top level sites including but not limited to Wired Magazine, Smashing Magazine, Problogger, Webmonkey etc. WPBeginner attracts all level of users to the site, but the largest percent consists of those who are either just getting into WordPress, or those who are ready to make a switch from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress.org. Another big percentage of user group would be new designers who are trying to find solutions for their problems that they might face in their projects. ”

What do you consider to be the strongest features of WordPress and on the other side, what are its limitations?
“WordPress has many strong features. It is user friendly in terms of interface and ease of use for users unlike other CMS and blogging software. I think one click upgrade for both plugins and the entire software is a very big step toward ease of use. WordPress has a huge plugin and theme support. There are tons of great free and commercial themes that are available for everyone and there are numerous designers like myself who are willing to take Custom WordPress Design orders. WordPress is coded very well and the way it communicates with Search Engines gives it an edge over other software. There is SPAM Protection available such as Akismet which is a core plugin. I do not see any limitations in the script itself because it can be turned into just about anything you really want.

Currently one of the limitations of WordPress community is that a lot of plugins are being developed by one person who may sometimes abandon it due to personal problem. This issue is being addressed with the idea of core plugins where a group of developers come together and contribute their codes and support to make a more powerful plugin. Then this plugin can be the one that WordPress would recommend for key functionality such as contact form, or twitter integration etc.”

Is WordPress suitable for anything more than an online brochure, blog or showcase such as an ecommerce website?
“WordPress can do a lot more than many people give it credit for. Not can do it, but it can do well. We wrote an article on WPBeginner about 15 unconventional uses of WordPress which deserves a read: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/15-unconventional-uses-of-wordpress-in-action/

WordPress can make an excellent ecommerce site with the right plugin(s). Look at icondock.com mentioned in the article above to see howWodPress can be used. WordPress is a powerful script that can be turned into anything.”

Are there any ‘essential’ plug-ins you recommend people should install upon set up (and why)?
“Yes there are a few plugins that I would like to recommend for all users to use. Akismet is always my first recommendation to users who are thinking about enabling comments on their site. This plugin will save a lot of your time by putting SPAM comments in the SPAM area, so you don’t have to delete them one by one.

The second most important plugin in my list is “All in One SEO”. If you plan to take advantage of Search Engine Traffic, then you need to have this plugin installed.

Contact Form 7 is the plugin I recommend for everyone to use to add a contact form. I think contact forms are a must have on every site. This plugin is very easy to use and it does the job well.

WP-Super-Cache is the plugin that I recommend users to add if they are planning to be smart with their server resources. If you think your site will receive a lot of traffic, then install this plugin otherwise your server might crash. I will not go into details with functionality but basically WordPress generates each page when someone requests it. There is no built in caching, so every page is dynamic. If there are thousands of requests being sent all at once, your database will be overloaded and your site will crash. This type of traffic on most blogs come when they get popular in the social media sites like digg, stumbleupon etc. By enabling this plugin, you are telling WordPress to show a cached version of that page rather than calling the database every single time asking it what to show.

WP-DB-Backup plugin is extremely essential for every site. I think it is essential to keep backups of the WordPress site because you never know when your host might be hacked and all files are wiped out. This plugin automatically makes backup for your database and you can schedule it so it sends those backups via email. There are other plugins but these are the ones that I recommend every user to use. ”

Because of its popularity WordPress is a high profile target for hackers to find vulnerabilities. Are there any precautions webmasters can take to reduce these risks?
“WordPress is open source software which means the code is available for everyone. That does mean that a lot of hackers are trying their best to find vulnerabilities, BUT there are thousands of testers who are also looking to find vulnerabilities. Most of the time, it is us the testers who will find the vulnerability before just because of the numbers advantage. Having that said, I think WordPress core is pretty secure, but YES there are few extra measures that one can use to reduce the risks. I gave a presentation at WordCamp Atlanta recently about WordPress Security, I recommend everyone to check it out: http://www.slideshare.net/wpbeginner/protecting-wordpress-from-the-inside-out”

An entire industry has grown around WordPress but it is becoming very competitive, are there still opportunities for developers and designers to carve a niche?
“Yes there are plenty of opportunities for new designers and developers to carve a niche. WordPress is growing faster than ever and there is a need for more. I believe in the concept of survival of the fittest. WordPress is very community oriented, so you want to make sure that you get involved in the community, network with your fellows, make connections and you will see clients and work. If you do not do that and just put an online portfolio, chances are that you will not see any work.”

There are too many free and premium WordPress themes websites to count, which ones are your pick of the best for people to check out?
“Yes there are tons and tons of free and proprietary themes. I am getting in a habit of not calling commercial themes premium because premium reflects quality not price. There are tons of quality free themes as well. One piece of advice I would give is pick only those that support GPL! After talking with Matt Mullenweg and understanding his ideas and why he is going for this GPL push, I have decided to support him 100% by doing all what I can. The only place to find safe and good themes is WordPress Theme Directory. Now before I get bashed for saying that let me explain why I said that. There are too many themes that require the users to have backlinks in the footer. These themes do not support the GPL, so you cannot remove those backlinks. Now this theme might look great, but I do not think it is worth having the link to Credit Card Company and SEO or some other spammy link in your website footer just for the sake of your own search engine ranking. The themes in WordPress theme directory have been reviewed and all of those are GPL supported. Meaning there is no such requirement like that, and you will find some really good themes in there.

For commercial themes, I personally recommend StudioPress themes by Brian Gardner. Firstly because all of them support GPL and secondly, they offer great support. If you buy the theme, you are really paying for the support fee, not the theme. Because there will always be someone in the support forum replying to your questions and helping you out. Now I have worked with many themes including Woo Themes, Elegant Themes etc, but I did not find a single theme that supports GPL and has superb functionality in terms of site load time, looks etc.”

We have just seen WordPress 2.9 released, what features would you like to see in WordPress 3?
“I am looking forward to the merge of WP-MU and WordPress which now allows users to run many blogs on one installation. But if I have to say one feature that I absolutely cannot wait for is Custom Post Types that should be included in WordPress 3.0. Some features that I would like to see included would be a Core Plugin for Twitter integration that utilizes twitter RSS feeds rather than Search API to get the results because search API can time out, but if you are parsing RSS Feeds, you can cache it and even if twitter is down, it will not affect your site’s load time.”

Are there any resources on the internet you use that you would recommend for beginners and advanced WordPress users?
“First, I would recommend all beginners to check out WPBeginner.com (Shameless Plug). For advanced users, I would recommend looking into the codex. It is really helpful and there is tons of useful information there. I personally look at the codex a lot. I would recommend Smashing Magazine because Vitaly and crew has done a great job in producing quality and useful content. Beginners who are looking to get into blogging, I recommend you check out Darren Rowse’s blog called Problogger.net.

Thanks for asking me all these questions. I hope these answers were helpful.”

Tags: Interviews, WordPress

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.