Finely Tuned Consultant – Alex Denning

Hello! I’m a WordPress developer, specialising in producing tutorials, screencasts and documentation. I run WordPress tutorials site WPShout.com, which I founded just before my 16th birthday. I’m a stickler for good, solid documentation regardless of what a product is. I spend a lot of time interacting with WordPress users and fixing common problems working with the WPZOOM support forums.

Onto Alex’s answers!

When was the first time that you really got excited about WordPress and at what point did you decide to make it your career?  

The first time I used WordPress was back around 2.1 or 2.2. I was 13 at the time and had just built my first website, which was a flash games portal of sorts. I decided I wanted an easy way to post updates, so I looked at the ‘easy install’ options my host offered and I ended up choosing this thing called WordPress. I remember looking through the options and nearly going for another blogging platform which looked more friendly, but I went for WordPress because it looked like it had a more active community. Of course, I now know it has an amazing community, and that was the big factor for me that made me go for WordPress in the first place.

Where do you go first to get your WP news, insights, and updates?

One of my big WordPress ‘eureka’ moments was when I found WPHacks. It made me realise there was so much more I could do with my site and ultimately got me where I am today, as I started becoming a contributor there. Sadly Kyle doesn’t have time to update the site much anymore, but I’ll choose it anyway 🙂

What WP consultants deserve more love than they get? Who should we be paying attention to?

Honest, I’m not saying this because he’s my boss, but Ben Gillbanks deserves far more kudos than he gets. Through his work with Darren Hoyt, Ben essentially pioneered the ‘magazine theme’ style that propelled WordPress’ popularity. Magazine themes have gone out of fashion a little recently, but they played a huge role in making WordPress very popular, very quickly. And Ben deserves kudos for pioneering both that style (with Mimbo Pro) and giving everyone the tools he adapted for the job for free (with timthumb).

What performance tips would you give to other pros (as related to speed, scalability, security, plugins, backup, etc.)?

This is a simple one. Always have a backup of everything and know where that backup is. That’s it, just make sure you actually do it.

Confess to us your biggest moment of WP fail?

I’m not sure if I’ve actually not had too many fails or I’ve just erased them from my memory, but probably my biggest ‘fail’ would have been writing pretty poor code in tutorials when I was first starting writing. That wasn’t too good.

If you were going to spend this weekend creating a plugin that doesn’t exist, what would it be?

I’d quite like a Gravity Forms addon that detects the content of the message and sends an appropriate intelligent auto response. This would help cut down on my emails considerably 🙂

Do you use Themes & Child Themes, Roll your own, or both?

I roll with my own framework, but framework in the Hybrid Core sense. I’m currently trying to build in a set of modular CSS styles I can just use again and again. I’d love to see ‘major’ frameworks start to adopt the modular style as it’s a huge time-saver.

What’s your favorite theme or theme framework? Why?

I’m one of WPZOOM’s “support experts”, so I spend a lot of time working with the ZOOM Framework that’s inside nearly all of WPZOOM’s themes. This makes it super-easy for me to support, as regardless of which theme it is, the file structure and a lot of the code is the same. If I had to pick a single theme, Horizon is a really, really nice looking theme.

Favorite plugin?

That would be Yoast’s WordPress SEO. A fantastic plugin that everybody should be using!

Least favorite plugin?

When I’m doing support forum work, I often see a lot of plugin conflicts. My least favourite plugins are ones which are badly written and break everything!

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done with Custom Post Types?

The backend on WPShout’s WordPress screencasts section is pretty damn cool. I made it super-easy for me to add all of the various bits of info I need when posting a new screencast – the embed code, running time, download link etc – and these bits are all taken and automagically displayed where I need them. I’ve not quite yet started on any screencasts for WPShout, but when I do, they’re going to be super awesome!

What do you think is the biggest challenge that WP consultants will face in 2013?

A big problem at the moment is because themes are so cheap, people still expect customisation to be cheap. Sadly, this seriously often isn’t the case and unrealistic forum requests are going to bug the theme community. Some innovation in the “theme customisation” space would be much appreciated, please.

If you could change one thing today about WP, what would it be?

I don’t like how Automattic get special treatment in the Plugin Repistory with Jetpack, but plugins like WooDojo are apparently rejected whilst offering similar functionality. A bit more open-ness about that kind of thing would be good to see.

Where do you see WordPress going in the next 2-3 years?

WordPress has spent the last two or so years shaking off the “blogging platform” name and is now widely accepted as a “fully fledged CMS”. The new Twenty Twelve default theme epitomises this, I think, and in the next two or so years I very much think it’s going to continue along that kind of path.

Tell us a story where you saved the WP day for yourself or on a client project.  What made the difference for you?

I’m sorry to disappoint, but I don’t think I really have a good story where I’ve heroically saved the day. If I did have such a story, it’d involve “I had a backup”.

What’s the biggest misconception you encounter about WordPress, and how do you clear it up for your clients?

A lot of clients think things like SEO are very important and that they can just get someone to ‘fix’ their SEO for them and they’ll shoot to the top of rankings. In practice, of course, we know you can’t really just hire someone to “fix” your SEO. WordPress, themes and plugins can provide bits of the SEO jigsaw, but it’s the great content which is the missing part of the jigsaw a lot of the time. I wrote a post on WPShout, “WordPress SEO Tips“, which goes a long way to explaining what makes up the SEO jigsaw and what you need to be doing to get solid rankings.

If you were interviewing another WordPress developer for a job, what is the first question you would ask and why?

“How did you get started?” A lot of us WP folks have come from the same kind of place: pulling together websites using HTML and horrible web editors… and then we found this amazing platform and the penny dropped right away. If that’s your answer, you know you’re working with somebody hugely passionate about the platform.

What did I miss?  Here’s your chance to fill in the blanks and add something you want people to know about you!

If I may plug a couple of things, I’ve got a free eBook The WordPress Blogging Guide which you should check out. I’m also on Twitter, if you’d like to say hello. Thanks to Austin for arranging the interview 🙂

Thanks for dropping by, Alex! Y’all roll on over to WP Shout, check out the tutorials and then see if Alex can do some work for you!