Today, I’ve got David Laietta stopping by the blog. David is a great Genesis Developer that I knew by his work and got to meet in person during Contribute Day at WordCamp SF, this year. David had flown in from Orlando, Florida, where he lives and works. David focuses mostly on the dev side of WordPress, but his design work isn’t bad.
David was born in Italy, his father’s family is Italian, but he grew up as an army kid moving a bunch until he decided to make Orlando his home. David is a WordCamp Orlando organizer in addition to running his development shop.
In David’s own Words:
I generally do contract work for other agencies. I find that I don’t need to do any marketing of my own services, or hunting down new clients, as they tend to find me on their own, and this keeps me pretty busy.
Now onto David’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?
I began using WordPress at version 2.5, back in early 2008. At the time I was still in college and had been doing static web design since high school. The company that I worked for at the time built static sites, but had requests from clients to be able to update their on content easily. I was tasked with incorporating CushyCMS onto some client sites, and started using the (new to me) magic of PHP includes to scratch my itch of making it easier to update headers and footers without having to edit every single HTML file.
Enter WordPress! I started with a few pre-made themes, then realized that I could skin them on my own. I had virtually no knowledge of PHP at the time, but I found that it was easy, even then, to find answers to some of the common questions that I was having. It wasn’t too difficult to convince my employer to start using WordPress for some client sites, though at the time we weren’t touting it as a specific solution, just a way to get the job done.
At the start of 2009 I opened my freelance business. I still worked for other employers, but was able to take some of the work that wasn’t a fit for them (which generally meant that it wasn’t high enough to warrant a full team’s fees), and make a few extra dollars on the side. From the start, I was doing WordPress, then began working on a few other platforms. I realized that I did not have a taste for them, and decided to scale back to doing the one thing that has brought me joy, as opposed to becoming a jack of all trades and master of none.
Where do you go first to get your WordPress news, insights, and updates?
Twitter is definitely my go-to source. I’m very terrible at keeping up with blogs regularly even with RSS feeds, so I usually get what bubbles to the top of recommendations, or what I happen to catch via someone’s feed. Combining this with my love of storing on Pocket or Instapaper to read while biking, and I often catch onto stories a bit too late.
Specific blogs that I often read are Brian Krogsgard‘s PostStat.us, WP Daily when it was active, TorqueMag and the WP Engine blog. I also regularly read a few personal blogs, such as those of Tom McFarlin, Chris Lema, Matt, and of course yours. (ED: Common courtesy prevents me from adding that URL here…)
What WordPress consultants deserve more love than they get? Who should we be paying attention to?
There are a few people that I look up to that already have received attention here and elsewhere, but I’ll name a few that I personally interact with and admire. Mason James of WPValet and Adam Warner of FooPlugins both have a specific trait that I admire: getting things done. There’s no “Hey, this might be cool if it happened one day” going on there (at least not what I see), but there is plenty of “This is what we’re doing, get on board or get out of the way”, which is an attitude that I try to emulate and hope to become more proficient at. We complain enough about potential clients that are just tire-kickers or take too long to deliver. It turns out that many developers (myself included at times) can be the same way if we don’t manage ourselves well.
Additionally, I can’t say enough good about some other friends, like Josh Shashaty and James Tryon of Easily Amused. Both deliver consistently great work, and have personally helped me in terms of getting or sharing client work, fixing bugs or managing Orlando WordPress events.
What performance tips would you give to other pros (as related to speed, scalability, security, plugins, backup, etc.)?
I steal all of my good tips from the pros out there, and spend most of my time teaching and consulting with newer users, so I think I can speak more to that crowd. The easiest way to get all of those features handled efficiently is using a managed hosting environment like WP Engine. This isn’t a silver bullet, but is a great way to get started.
I have to handle the “I heard that WordPress isn’t secure” debate as well as jump into a great number of client sites with versions of plugins and core that are out of date. A few months ago I unearthed a gem of a site that predates my involvement with WordPress, having not been updated since v2.4 In that case we determined that it was best to build a new site from scratch to maintain content. My one piece of advice is this: update, update, update. If you are worried about your site breaking, something was done wrong in the first place.
Confess to us your biggest moment of WP fail?
More than once I’ve worked on a live, production site. I wish I could say the same didn’t apply to how often I’ve taken a live, production site offline.
If you were going to spend this weekend creating a plugin that doesn’t exist, what would it be?
I have a list of these that I keep, with the promise that one day I’ll get them done. A few on this list involve a way to get better user demographics, an easier way to link affiliate books in a reading list and a simple way to integrate social icons onto your site.
I do a bit of custom plugin development, though this isn’t requested quite so much by clients. I do have a few projects in the works that I hope can be announced soon.
Do you use Themes & Child Themes, Roll your own, or both?
I generally work with frameworks when I build new sites. Why start from scratch when most of the time those code libraries will suit you just fine. For the few times that I don’t use a framework, I roll with a starter theme, currently the _s golden child.
This is as good a time as any to plug my new project, Amoeba. A few friends and I are working on a new theme framework, as I have the belief that there is still room for a framework that can handle heavy changes by developers who are used to a standard hooking system, as well as end users who want a simplified method for customizing and making their site stand out. My background is in education, and my goal is to make changes easy to describe and implement, with documentation for as many features as possible. Users don’t purposefully make poor choices, simply under or misinformed choices.
What’s your favorite theme or theme framework? Why?
When it comes to frameworks (besides choosing Amoeba of course), I would have to say Genesis. It has served me well in client work over the past few years. I do have to give a special shout-out to Ian Stewart and Thematic. That theme introduced me to so many new concepts, from hooks to child themes. That was the theme that got me to realize that there was more to making your what you wanted it to be than choosing a theme and being done of it. I can’t thank Ian enough for the code that he has committed over the years, as well as the active community he has fostered and tutorials that he has written.
Favorite plugin?
Gravity Forms. I not only call this my favorite form building plugin, but my favorite plugin period. The team behind this has entrenched themselves in a highly technical and highly necessary part of most websites, while making the end product both simple and delightful. Even now, I regularly discover new features that take the plugin a step higher for me, not to mention the active add-on community (I love using this term when applicable) that surrounds them.
Least favorite plugin?
Any plugin that breaks a user’s otherwise logical and properly implemented site, or does not gracefully upgrade. I cannot claim to have never implemented my own jQuery in a site or done upgrades that change key features or layouts, so I can’t be too hard on devs that do. There is definitely a learning curve, with plugins being uploaded by authors on all ends of that scale. It’s one thing to be uninformed (see above), but to be aware of proper implementation within the WordPress project and still flout standards because you want to avoid doing heavy work – that’s a form of laziness that I do not condone.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done with Custom Post Types?
I don’t have any amazing stories of something off the wall that I’ve done with CPTs yet. I’m all for their use in certain situations, but can never come to a great consensus of what those situations are. I definitely advocate that they be portable in some way, or used in ways that make sense to a specific situation, but not be required to make a theme function. Users will eventually want to change themes, and I’d like to avoid artificial barriers to data portability wherever possible.
What do you think is the biggest challenge that WordPress consultants will face in 2014?
Being business minded. I am by no means living it up, but I am comfortable and get to devote time to my passions, as well as my side projects. There is still a great deal that I can learn, even after nearly five years, of running a business properly. I usually have a fairly laissez-faire attitude when it comes to doing business essentials, from keeping invoices and paperwork up to date to handling contracts. This is something that I’ve been working on rectifying lately with more standardization across projects, more regular communication with clients and coworkers, as well as pre-booking my time.
Managing expectations is another killer. I’ve regularly gotten calls from clients past 9PM on Sundays thinking that I have open availability. I generally try to set the tone early in client relations that I have set business hours that I maintain, as well as defining the terms of agreements that we make, from billing cycles to production schedules. I think that most consultants struggle with this from time to time, especially the one person shops out there.
If you could change one thing today about WordPress, what would it be?
I would love more community involvement. Don’t get me wrong, the community that surrounds various parts of the WordPress project are amazing, and are the number one reason that I keep coming back and am addicted to this paradigm shifting magic making machine. I do think, however, that on a local level we can stand to get a bit more motivated. I co-organize the Orlando WordPress Meetup as well as WordCamp Orlando, and despite us being one of the largest tech groups in the city, I feel this is more by numbers than by impact. We can all do so much more with minimal intrusion into our lives beyond taking initiative on something that interests us and saying “I got this”.
My goal is for the varied and expanding WordPress community to flex our muscles outside of just making websites for clients. Find other projects that can overlap to become involved in, and share your findings on both sides of the field. Determine something that is wrong locally, and how your network can be a force for change to fix it. Be the change that you wish to see in the world. Then write a plugin for it 🙂
Where do you see WordPress going in the next 2-3 years?
The community is growing to a point where WordPress will take on a variety of new forms over the next few years dictated by the most vocal of users. The stigma of building with “that blogging site” has all but been eradicated. We don’t look to projects like the Dallas Museum of Art suite that WebDevStudios put together and wonder why they didn’t start from scratch, but marvel at how they’ve bent this tool to their needs. I see more companies utilizing the extensive code library that is available to them with a few function calls, as opposed to starting from scratch. WordPress as an application platform is not just a buzz term, but a natural extension and expansion of the community.
Beyond my obvious love for the WordPress community as a support group, it is my love of the meritocracy that it has become that shapes my opinion. I made my first trip to San Francisco this year to attend WordCamp, and I was energized more than any other conference that I’ve attended, tech or otherwise. This is because State of the Word was not Matt showing of a new gizmo and saying “here is the new product that we, the elite, bestow upon the masses”. Rather, he was saying “here’s some new ideas that we have, and we would love for you to help us make these dreams a reality.” The quip that he used on leading 3.8 saying that “it will either be amazing or a huge mistake” is an honest, self-effacing gesture of humility from someone who realizes that to lead the way, he must be bold.
I don’t think that WordPress will specifically try to upend traditional organizations, like journalism. Rather, I think the Automattic forays into verticals like government and education sites are an indication that integration, not ingratiation, is the future of WordPress into a variety of industries.
Tell us a story where you saved the WordPress day for yourself or on a client project. What made the difference for you?
I’ve had clients who know that I work on websites, but don’t understand any of the underlying architecture, or even the difference between WordPress and a static site. Getting a question that can be answered confidently, and rolling out a feature with the install of a plugin is magic in the eyes of our clients. I’ve yet to come across a request that is truly so unique that it has not yet been considered in some capacity by the WordPress Borg.
What’s the biggest misconception you encounter about WordPress, and how do you clear it up for your clients?
The idea of WordPress security and efficiency is something that I have to deal with most (the “just for blogging” debate is all but dead in my dealings). I haven’t yet thought of a truly clever or simple analogy to explain that one bad plguin can do more harm than running one hundred good plugins, or that WordPress is secure, and poorly developed themes and plugins give the project a bad name among certain potential converts. I simply do my best to say that this is an open field, which means that you can have endless choice, but at the cost of standardization and universal adoption of best practices.
If you were interviewing another WordPress developer for a job, what is the first question you would ask and why?
I would ask them to tell me about some of their previous work, and what they thought of it. Not just of how the final product looks and functions, but what they felt of the process of birthing this new creation; the challenges and joys of turning an idea into an action.
As I said before, I’m a big fan of people who just plain get things done. I want to hope that I can feel out the bs artists (there are a ton out there!) from those that can make a plan and stick to it insomuch as they’ve accomplished somehting. A great portfolio is always nice, but a willingness to go the distance is vital to someone like me making a hire, which is as much a gamble as anything else.
What did I miss? Here’s your chance to fill in the blanks and add something you want people to know about you!
One of my first personal sites (which I keep promising myself that I’ll bring back eventually) was devoted to my love of the video games of my childhood. I’m a Legend of Zelda nut, among other series, and of the few games that I still make time to play, it’s several cherished titles in that series. My opinion of what is fashionable, in clothing or otherwise, can easily be swayed by a tastefully applied Hylian crest. Between that series, Pokemon and Portal, I’ve got my toy and game collecting covered for the next few years. If you visit my house, you may be forced to sit while I show off some of my favorite finds.
Thanks David!
Check out the work David does at DavidLaietta.com, and see if he’d be a good fit for your next project!
Leave a Reply