Tag: Matt Mullenweg

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Drupal and WordPress at SchipulCon: One Stage, One Open Source Love

Open Source Discussion with the Founders of Drupal and WordPress from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co.

“People being told what to do and working for money are never going to match people working for passion and a community.”
~Matt Mullenweg

“With every cell in my body, I believe that Open Source is the way forward.  Especially when it comes to websites, but also beyond just websites.”
~Dries Buytaert

We were beyond honored to host Drupal founder Dries Buytaert and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg at our SchipulCon 2011 event.

Guided by David Stagg, the open source conversation survived epic microphone turmoil  years of open source competitiveness to showcase the true brilliance and passion of these open source leaders.

Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg share the SchipulCon stage

Around Designers vs Developers Flocking to WordPress and Drupal (Respectively)

Matt:  “I learned a ton about code and programming and back end systems… mainly because I had sort of a vision of something that I wanted a user to realize…. and so we made certain design choices from a technical view that to me are more intuitive.

There were two big pressures early in WordPress’ life:  1) everyone wanted us to adopt a templating system because everyone at the time had one  and 2) they wanted us to go a strict object oriented model.  So you could extend everything WordPress does through classes essentially.

We took an action oriented plug-in approach… which is perhaps not as correct from a programmer’s point of view, but easier for beginner users.”

Dries:  “When I started Drupal, I was in college to get a computer science degree – almost an engineer.  So I wasn’t too concerned about user experience – more obsessed with the architecture and the right APIs and all of these things.

When I finally released Drupal as open source, it really attracted an audience of developers.  The initial community was a developer community and began to expand to more and more developers.  That emphasis on architecture was reinforced.   [We’re] trying to change that and it’s slowly starting to work – it’s very much historical.”

>>> Cool side notes:  Matt has been a Drupal member for 8 years and one week.  His interests on his profile include typography and simplicity (the only person to include this in their profile).  Years back,  Matt gave a credit to Drupal and reminded Dries that he had some code in WordPress very early on — time for Matt to contribute to Drupal!

Wordpress and Drupal at SchipulCon

What Do you Wish you had Done that the Other Did?

Dries:  Matt did a lot of things right, he started his company sooner, WordPress.com is a tremendous asset to get more people involved and his focus on design and usability is key – a very important thing to do very early on.  In a way, Drupal is paying the penalty for not doing this early on.

Matt:  When I look at the Drupal community, the thing that I like is that the software runs the community itself.  The bug tracker is Drupal, the forum, the issues – everything is Drupal.  Also the 3rd party developer community – even though WP has more websites, we have fewer of the large consulting firms.  Drupal has a lot more large development firms building these giant websites, that’s not as common with WordPress.

How Do you Benefit from the Other Existing?

Dries:  If WordPress wins, Drupal wins.  Because that means Open Source is winning.

Matt:  Competition is good.  Anytime any firm or product does something amazing, the bar has been raised.

Want more SchipulCon brain candy and memories?

Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg jumping like mad

We’ve got some great SchipulCon speaker videos going live in the next couple of weeks, just be sure to keep an eye on our SchipulCon video gallery! Matt and Dries chat photo album has lots of great photos of these great guys and be sure to find yourself in all of our albums from the event.

Thanks again for being such a special part of SchipulCon!

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Matt Mullenweg + Dries Buytaert on the SchipulCon stage!!

With SchipulCon starting in only one day, we have our most exciting announcement yet!!  Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) will be sharing the Friday luncheon stage with Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal) – for the first time ever!

Their discussion, moderated by Schipulite David Stagg, will cover the two enormous open source communities’ growth, development and future direction.

Learn how both geek-preneurs have cultivated their very unique development and user communities, as well as what the future holds for open source in general.  THIS is not a discussion to be missed.

Join us for an amazing look at two of the brightest minds in technology today!   With Drupal, WordPress, Facebook, NASA and so many other great speaker organizations stepping up to share their brain candy – you’ll grow your brain as never before at SchipulCon.

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Thanks for a great Wordcamp Houston 2010!

Matt Mullenweg CEO of WordPress
Photo thanks to Ed Schipul

This weekend marked the very first Wordcamp Houston event at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.   As well as being a Community Sponsor, the Schipulites were active participants as coordinators, speakers, volunteers and excitable (what’s new?!) attendees.

Houston Museum of Natural Science
Photo thanks to Ed Schipul

Didn’t get to make it this year and wondering what you missed?   Here are some of the highlights of the day at HMNS, in the Schipulites’ own words:

David Stagg at Wordcamp Houston 2010
Photo thanks to Brett Morrison

David Stagg (who taught the swell WP 101 class)

I was honored to be given the chance to speak; it was a pleasure leading the WP 101 class, setting up Monica (aka Cosmopolitician) and Chris Everson—two incredibly talented people—for the 102 class. I felt honored to teach some new people from the Houston Zoo, Noah’s Kitchen, Reliant Energy all about how user-friendly WordPress truly is. The class was lively, had some great questions, and was genuinely curious about how to further their WordPress knowledge. Since it was the inaugural WPCamp Houston and it sold out quickly, I can only imagine what it will look like next year!

Albert Hughes

My thoughts:

  • Kelsey Ruger is a genius and I heard a lot of people agreeing with that statement.
  • I saw several people including Matt Mullenweg wearing ‘toe shoes”
thisisnotapril's shark
Photo thanks to April Kkyle

April Kyle
I really enjoyed having HMNS at the host. It was such a neat backdrop for us; and as part of being there I personally was exposed to things in the museum I’d never seen before. In the break times and lunch; we got a chance to play around a bit and have some fun’ totally cool for breaks as opposed to had we been in just a conference center or hotel. It was just super neat seeing the kids learning, and we played around with the exhibits too. Plus, there was a shark.

Eloy and Matt Mullenweg at Wordcamp Houston 2010
Photo thanks to Eloy Zuniga

Eloy Zuniga
My favorite moment was sitting next to Matt Mullenweg during a session simply because I said “I saved you a seat”.   He is ridiculously nice and humble.   I’m glad he’s a Houstonian.

Derek Key and Susan Saurage photo by Ed Truitt
Photo thanks to Ed Truitt

Derek Key (who led a great panel with client Susan Saurage)
My favorite sessions from WordCamp were Kelsey‘s ‘Rebirth of Slick” and Bill Erickson’s ‘WordPress Beyond Blogging”. Kelsey’s was incredibly fun as always and made me think about websites in general, not necessarily WordPress, and Bill’s was very informative and relatable to what we do for clients.

I think the two biggest takeaways are:

  1. Shopify‘ ecommerce solution for WordPress that can be easily updated graphically to match a site and is easy to manage on the client’s end (from Roby Fitzhenry’s session)
  2. Custom post types and custom taxonomies in WordPress (from Bill Erickson’s session). Allows for more than just pages and posts so you can actually call different content different names… very Drupal-esque.
HMNS IMAX theater for Wordcamp Houston keynote
Photo thanks to Ed Schipul

Michael Coppens (from his @urbanhoustonian Twitter account)

Not sure how I didn’t know WordPress founder @photomatt is from Houston. Makes it a perfect home for Urban Houstonian

 

Wordcamp Houston 2010 at HMNS
Photo thanks to Erin Flis!

Chris Minor (our fearless intern and videographer)

My favorite session was Kelsey Ruger‘s presentation about design called ‘Rebirth of Slick”. Kelsey weaved his valuable insight into designing a website with a multimedia experience featuring music like hip-hop and jazz that made his presentation not only enjoyable but relevant and understandable in our society. WordCamp was also the first time I have been exposed to a real-time Twitter conversation. Many times I found myself staring at my twitter feed watching all the participants sharing what they were learning and I gained valuable brain-candy from the many passionate developers and users of WordPress.

Katrina Esco
The major takeaway I got from Wordcamp:  We understand things in story so we should be able to tell a meaningful story about a brand or company.

Christine Portillo

Kelsey Ruger’s preso was a highlight, and in a slide asking audience which of many companies listed had the ‘cool factor,” Schipul client IKEA was one of the few (along with Virgin Airlines, Zappos, and more). Best PHYSICAL takeaways: nifty, comfy, stylin’ T designed by Ben G and boasting Schipul on the arm and the bounteous bags of M&Ms provided by the blogger track’s ‘Whose blog is it anyway?” session.