Recently some members of the Americaneagle.com team headed out WordCamp Chicago, a conference for WordPress users and developers. WordCamps are events organized by the WordPress community to share knowledge, talk about the industry, and help improve WordPress overall. WordCamp Chicago is just one of hundreds of WordCamps that take place globally. The most recent count has 849 WordCamps occurring in 65 countries worldwide. Just like the platform itself, WordCamps are put together by the community and that is where their strength lies.
So why does this matter? What is it that makes the community one of the best parts of WordPress?
For starters, WordPress is an open source and community driven platform. While some may say it lacks an enterprise feeling that other tools have, I would point out that this is a great thing for WordPress. Rather than a couple hundred developers working to make the platform better, WordPress has hundreds of thousands. WordPress gets updates and bug fixes faster than almost any other CMS and, as far as plugins and features go, no other CMS has nearly as many. All of this due to the WordPress community.
Who’s in the WordPress Community?
The WordPress community isn’t a localized group. There are many thousands of users who all take part in discussions to make the platform better. Some people are just users offering suggestions, others are developers offering code. People who contribute to WordPress are a diverse set, spanning the globe. WordPress is used in nearly every language and is represented in nearly every country in the world. The needs of everyone are considered when building the tool that WordPress is and the perspective that a global community brings is amazingly valuable.
A Company that Fosters Community
Part of what makes the WordPress community so helpful and robust is because Automattic (the company behind Wordpress) help foster them. While Automattic officially only has 715 employees, they work with WordPress users around the world to achieve things that other companies simply could not. They host forums to get feedback, they work with their community to fix bugs and improve user experience and, most importantly - they don’t ignore the community when there are problems. Automattic knows that they are maintaining a tool for the community and they respect and support them because of that understanding.
Around the world people everywhere can benefit from the knowledge that is shared among WordPress users. Developers share code, users discuss features, and agencies create better user experiences for their clients. This principle of sharing is the central core to the community. Every day there are people learning WordPress and that’s because there are just as many people teaching others what they’ve learned.
Should I Use WordPress?
For anyone thinking of getting their site started in WordPress, there’s a lot to look at. The community is perhaps one of the strongest indicators to the health of the platform. By joining the WordPress community, you benefit from the work of the thousands of users and developers that were there before you. Your site can be faster and more robust because someone else had the opportunity to share their ideas or even their code. That’s something no proprietary CMS can say.
WordPress is growing every day. Right now there are people suggesting new features, people writing new plugins, others still making new themes. Each day the platform becomes better, more feature rich, and more flexible. The community is currently working to make everything easier than ever for you to be a part of it. When you use WordPress, you’re not just building a website, you’re joining the global community of people who understand the true value of open source tools and an internet made for everyone.
The Next Step
If you’re interested in joining the WordPress community, Americaneagle.com can help you take the first steps. Talk to us today about building a new site in WordPress or migrating to WordPress from another platform.
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