Jason Tucker is a well known name in the WordPress community and wears a lot of different hats. He is the host of the popular WordPress podcast at WPWatercooler.com, runs a professional web design company (based on WordPress), he is the editor of Gadgmatic and he is currently also the Manager of IT at First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton.
Jason Tucker exemplifies the core reason why WordPress was made. He is a geek
who is full of energy and shows dedication towards his work, family and new technology. Jason is someone you would want to work with and have him around you. He is vastly experienced in Information Systems along with Content Management Systems and has, more or less, centered all his earnings around the WordPress community.
WordPress has shaped the lives of many and has attracted many experienced developers towards it. Jason is one of them. In this conversation with Cloudways, Jason shares how he first fell in love with WordPress and since then, there has been no looking back!
Cloudways: Jason, tell us about yourself. When was the first time you used WordPress?
Jason Tucker: Back in 2004, my wife and I were planning to have a wedding website so we registered jasonandjen.com to track our wedding story and keep people up to date on events leading up to our marriage. At that time I was playing with Mambo, which later became Joomla. I was not a fan of their interface (reminded me too much of phpnuke and phpbb), so we ditched that in 2006 and switched to WordPress. Years earlier my wife and I maintained blogs on livejournal.com and I started my personal website back in 2004 using WordPress and migrated all of my live journal content over to my personal site. Its domain changed a few times and I ended up with jasontucker.us which I still maintain today. Before Joomla and WordPress, I ran a site using movable type on an old shell account that had one of those snazzy “~” before the username, those were the days!
Cloudways: Which WordPress version did you start out with? How much do you think WordPress has progressed since the first version you used.
Jason Tucker: I started out on 1.2.1 for my personal site but ran a few b2 sites that were migrated from Movable Type. Back then, moving data from one CMS to another was a bit of a task. But it’s interesting just how much these CMS’s have changed in the last few years.
Cloudways: Tucker Professional Web Services, your agency probably has a list of must have plugins that you use on your projects. Share your plugins with our readers.
Jason Tucker: The best way to keep track of the plugins I use is by looking at the list I’ve favorited on my WordPress profile. We also cover these all the time on WPwatercooler
My absolute favorite plugins are:
All things by Yoast
Advanced Custom Fields
Gravity Forms
Mashshare
Revive Old Post
Author Box Reloaded
WP Better Emails
Pretty Link Pro
Cloudways: With so many frameworks available, do you have a favorite one? Or do you prefer working with WordPress core?
Jason Tucker: I’ve been playing with a few of them. I really love Foundation as a CSS framework and because of that I’ve been using Heisenberg developed by the team over at Zeek. Steve has been taking suggestions for his theme which uses Underscores for the base theme and Foundation for the CSS. So far I like it as I’ve built a few projects using it and it works well with my workflow. In the past I’ve used Genesis and liked it, but I think I grew out of it.
Cloudways: WordPress community is one of the largest Open Source community on the web. What is your advice for getting recognized in the WordPress community? Any advice for beginners and youngsters joining the WordPress ranks?
Jason Tucker: As with most groups of people like this, you really want to find out what others are not comfortable doing that you don’t mind doing or that is your expertise. For me it was doing video. I found that recording our meetups and later streaming them was my niche. I also spoke about this at WordCamp Phoenix a few years back.
Cloudways: You host a new podcast every week on WPwatercooler.com. How do you come up with a new topic every week?
Jason Tucker: I hate coming up with topics, I really do. It’s a group effort between myself and the rest of our “regulars”. Steve Zehngut, Sé Reed and Chris Lema tend to come up with the majority of them. When Steve blogs more than once that year we tend to go with that topic or we pick a day of the week, then a month and lastly a year and talk about whatever Chris posted on that day. Sé works in the trenches of small business so when a lot of her clients come in asking her the same thing she’ll suggest that topic to us. It’s a pleasure doing the show with Chris Lema, Suzette Franck, Sé Reed, Steve Zehngut, Dave Jesch and George Stephanis as all come from different areas of WordPress and tend to have different topics that we can address each week, which really adds to the diversity of the topics we cover on the podcasts.
Cloudways: I understand that taking time out is a tough job when you are developing websites. So, apart from professional life, what are your hobbies and what do you do during your free time?
Jason Tucker: I’m a geek at heart so anything geeky becomes a hobby for me. I have “Technology A.D.D.”, so I tend to jump from technology to technology. I love testing things out and then cranking out a few blog posts about them. I’m a big Disney fan (we live 12 miles from Disneyland and can hear the fireworks at night!). I’ve done a few blogs and podcasts about my Disney adventures. Lately, It has been bike riding and applying tech to get me off my butt more often and ride. I want to be a buff like John Hawkins when I grow up.
Cloudways: WordPress market is vast. Just like the CMS version, WordPress hosting space is also getting saturated with hosting providers focussing entirely on providing optimized hosting solutions. Do you think WordPress community needs web hosting professionals that work to improve WordPress performance or WordPress developers can do it on their own?
Jason Tucker: I think there is a reason for specializing in something. When a web host specializes in something, like WordPress web hosting, they aren’t saying that WordPress can not be hosted anywhere. What they are saying is that by finely tuning the environment WordPress lives in they are able to optimize all the things it’s capable of doing using less resources. The thing I don’t want to see is where WordPress specific hosting becomes something like hosting node.js and people are too scared to pick an alternative like a shared host. Each host has it’s own reason for existing, so when people ask me “Where should I host my cat website?”, I tend to ask “Do you have a lot of followers to your cat website? Will it end up on reddit, slashdot, digg, Huffington Post or CNN? no? then go with what works for you and you can afford!”
The latter part of your question is intriguing. You see I work as an IT Manager and one of my hats I wear is that of a Systems Admin. I would much rather pay someone to host our WordPress website who REALLY knows WordPress and REALLY loves doing system tweaks. I’m more than capable of doing such tweaks on a VPS but it’s not my speciality. Just like how many people in the WordPress space are not video geeks, I found my niche doing that. WordPress devs are not LAMP stack admins and shouldn’t pretend to be. With the number of attacks that happen on WordPress directly, having a hardened stack below is just as important as what collection of plugins you use.
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Cloudways: What is your opinion about Cloudways which lets you host your site on the reliable cloud providers, such as Google Compute Engine, DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services? Do you think WordPress performs better on cloud servers as compared to shared hosting environments?
Jason Tucker: I like the idea of using someone else’s resources to create a company around. 🙂 The idea of taking their environment, their stack of solutions and bringing them together to do web hosting is intriguing. Web Hosts do this all the time with using server farms that they don’t physically own yet put their data on top of. Now your company and your customers can focus on what they do best and leave the hardware/software management to the vendors. People do this now and don’t realize it. Email hosting with Google Apps, DNS hosting with their registrar and the list goes on.
Thanks for the interview Cloudways and be sure to watch my show each week on Mondays 11:00 PT at WPwatercooler.com with Chris Lema, Suzette Franck, Sé Reed, Steve Zehngut, Dave Jesch and George Stephanis
-Jason
Ahsan Parwez
Ahsan is the Community Team Manager at Cloudways. He loves to solve problems and help Cloudways' clients in any aspect he can. In his free time, you can find him playing RTS PC games.
