WordPress owes its booming and continuous success to its closely-knit and family-like community. The experienced community moderators and members are always there to guide you at any stage of your career.
Under the selfless guidance of community gurus, it is not much difficult to plan your career path. One of the most amazing features of WordPress is that it provides users with flexible architecture and interface coupled with incredible themes and plugins. So, one should not hesitate to pursue a career in WordPress, the leading content management system (CMS) in the world.
William A. Adams is one of the most dedicated WordPress users who, despite a lucrative career as a lawyer for more than 20 years, fell in love with WordPress and its open source community at the very first sight.
He is one of the earliest members of Advanced WordPress group on Facebook. In this interview, he shares his WordPress story and other interests of his life. William also tells the names of people who have inspired him throughout his life. I hope you’ll like this interview.
Cloudways: There are many other CMSes available as open source. Why WordPress? What made you choose and stick to it?
William A. Adams: The primary reason – great accessible development community.
Cloudways: Being a lawyer, with almost 13 years of experience, how do you feel to completely change your profession and become a WordPress developer? How did you find WordPress? Do you still practice law?
William A. Adams: Actually, I’ve been a lawyer for approximately 25 years. I’m still a full-time lawyer and not at all a developer. I’m more of a WP power-user and DIY’r. I enjoy customizing my website’s themes and functionality.
Cloudways: You are the member of Advanced WordPress Facebook (AWP) group. Now the group has grown up to 10,000 members. You are also working on arranging a meetup. Tell our readers about this massive growth in the community. How AWP is benefiting the WordPress folks?
William A. Adams: I’m an early member of AWP – probably in the first couple or few dozen of people – back when it was just the local San Diego WP community. I’m a fish out of water in the group because the dev-speak is way over my head. But I do check in and track the conversations periodically.
Cloudways: You have attended two WordCamp events, i.e San Diego and Chicago. How was your experience? Do you think these events are essentially effective for WordPress? How these WordCamps are helping in building the WP communities?
William A. Adams: Actually, I’ve attended three WordCamps: one in Chicago and two in San Diego. I love them. I’ve been invited to speak on legal issues at the next San Diego WC. I posted a recent question on AWP asking what legal issues AWP members were most interested in. GPL came in first – there hasn’t been a lot of call for that in my legal practice so I’m ‘boning-up’ on it now.
I’ll also touch base on copyright and trademark, employment law, contract law, disabled access law (yes, there are web-development implications), and a few other things. To me, WordPress is all about the community and the camps are a chance for the community to actually meet, teach, share and learn.
Cloudways: On the lighter side of life, how do you manage your time with family and work? What sports do you like and what you do in your spare time?
William A. Adams: I’m married to the princess of my dreams and have two rambunctious and loving boys (aged 6 and 9). Although, I work more hours than I like, I’m lucky to be able to come home every night. I try to always read a bedtime story to my kids and reserve the weekends for non-work things.
Surfing and backcountry skiing in Southern California are my passions, but work limits the former to once a week and climate change made the latter impossible last year.
Cloudways: What is story behind UrbDeZine.com? Why you started this multisite and multi-author blog for the architectures and urban planning?
William A. Adams: I’ve always loved places, which turned into a love of cities and architecture. This is reflected in both my law practice and volunteer positions. Among other positions, I was on San Diego’s Centre City Redevelopment Project Area Committee, chaired the Gaslamp Quarter Association in the early 90s, and currently serve on the boards of the San Diego Architectural Foundation and the San Diego Historic Streetcars Organization.
I’ve always been impressed with the eloquence of architects when discussing the built environment. When I became familiar with WP multi-site (multi-user, at the time), it seemed a great idea to recruit architects and other design professionals to write about their views. It also became possible to open chapters in several cities, while at the same time integrating them into a central website.
Cloudways: Name the five people who inspired you the most in the WordPress industry. Why do you follow them and how they are serving the WordPress community?
William A. Adams: These five people inspired me the most:
- Chris Lema (He is amazing with his blogs; disciplined and intelligent.)
- Adam McLane (He is equally amazing with the blogs; again disciplined and intelligent)
- Ansel Taft (He is WP jack of all trades. Prolific I must say.)
- Ron Rennick (He is the multi-site guru.)
- Michael Cabral Poubel Bastos (He is the AWP founder and command line commander.)
Cloudways: Now that you have a great experience working with WordPress, where do you see it in next five years? Any major changes or updates that you expect?
William A. Adams: It’s been a great movement and community so far. Almost cultish! Now, it’s become more mainstream, and there have been a few signs of rebellion. Overall, I think the next 5 years will be a period of stability and refinement.
I worry sometimes that free-plugin development is withering a bit, so I hope that area remains vital. It’s tragic when a great free plugin stops getting updated because of developer burn-out. Any support that Automattic can give free plugin developers would be nice, especially in terms of donations. It can be a quasi-premium program to require donations after a certain number of downloads or something along those lines.
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Cloudways: Which are the WordPress plugins that you never forget to install when you configure your WordPress website? Which is your favorite theme.
William A. Adams: My favorite plugins for WordPress:
- MailPress (It’s a robust mailing and newsletter plugin)
- Author Avatar List (It puts nice avatar displays.)
- WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages (It is an amazing multisite plugin to feed content to main blog)
- Status (It’s a WPMUDev premium plugin that emulates Facebook by generating thumbnails and excerpts from links)
I use Genesis child themes. They seemed to be the best a couple of years ago when I did the research. I’ve got the Genesis developer package, so I haven’t researched themes recently.
You can follow William A. Adams (@urbdezine) on Twitter.
Owais Khan
Owais works as a Marketing Manager at Cloudways (managed hosting platform) where he focuses on growth, demand generation, and strategic partnerships. With more than a decade of experience in digital marketing and B2B, Owais prefers to build systems that help teams achieve their full potential.
