After our last interview with Taco, community manager at Yoast, it’s time we introduce you to our new guest: Ángeles Portillo. Ángeles is a designer with a great passion for WordPress. She’s a member of the Spanish community and her contributions to the project include translations, tutorials, support in forums… If you want to know her, just keep reading our interview with her!
Thanks for the interview, Ángeles. It’s a pleasure to have you here! For those who read us and don’t know you, please tell us something about you and your relationship with WordPress.
Thank you David for inviting me ?. As others did before me, I started with WordPress when looking for an easiest way for publishing content, moving away from plain HTML solutions. I think I started to work with WordPress back in 2006 or 2007, and from the very beginning the help and assist the community offered me was outstanding. I also started to contribute to the project as much as I could—I translated parts of the Codex, WordPress itself, and WooCommerce, I published some tutorials, I participated in forums… Shortly after those first contacts, I started to attend to several meetups, sometimes as a speaker. Nowadays, 95% of my work (or more) is directly related to WordPress.
WordPress is constantly changing and evolving. How do you stay up-to-date? Who do you follow?
It’s difficult to keep updated with the always-changing Internet and WordPress. I have several feeds that talk about WordPress (about 60 or so), as well as other feeds focused on marketing, e-commerce, and SEO. Lately I’ve been especially interested in WooCommerce, productivity, and conversion analysis.
Some of my favorite sites are WP Tavern, Chris Lema’s blog, wpmudev, and RemiCorson. In Spanish, I’d recommend Ayuda WordPress, which I guess everybody knows, and Nelio Software (ES).
What’s the contribution or development you’re most proud of?
Tough question! I honestly don’t know… ? My contributions are all prety humble: reporting bugs, supporting users, sharing code snippets, talking, reviewing themes or plugins… ?
Sometimes we make things look easy, when they aren’t… Why don’t you share an epic fail with us?
I did a lot of things wrong in the past—but I don’t recall any! I have bad memory… ? Usually, I try to be very careful before using anything in production—I test plugins and themes thoroughly to prevent epic fails from happening.
WordPress is highly customizable, thanks to both plugins and themes. What plugins and themes do you recommend? Do you miss anything in WordPress?
I recommend any plugin that solves the problem you have without creating new ones, that does what it claims it does, that is properly supported, and that is lightweight. Some examples of such plugins are Akismet, WooCommerce, WP Rocket… WP Super Cache is also a great plugin, and works perfectly well with CDNs such as Cloudflare’s and other plugins like Autoptimize. There’s thousands of options available! Now, I’m usually more picky with themes—I want them to be simple, lightweight, and fast.
I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in WordPress, especially in theme management—you should be able to quickly access its documentation and preview a demo site with just a few clicks. The Dashboard also has some accessibility problems, in terms of menu order and so on… but I guess this is quite complicated to fix!
The thing I miss the most in WordPress is plugin compatibility with multi-site installations, as well as a tougher quality control and best practices in theme and plugin marketplaces.
There’s plenty of people working on WordPress (or considering to). Do you think it’s possible to make a living out of it? In your opinion, what business opportunities are there?
Sure! A lot of people, including me, do it ?. I think that the upcoming future is bright for freemium plugin developers.
Where do you see WordPress in 2 to 3 years? How would you like it to evolve?
I honestly don’t know. We’ll probably focus on internationalization and front-end customization.
Finally, who should we interview next? Tell us 3 WProfessionals you want to see here.
I see you already interviewed all the people I cherish the most ?, including some girls like Rocío Valdivia… but, if I have to mention someone, I’d like you to interview Darío Ferrer, one of the best developers/designers I know, and Samuel Aguilera, because of his outstanding career path.
Thanks Ángeles for finding some spare time in your tight agenda and answer all our questions! And, as always, thank you, dear reader, for following us and making these interviews one of the most visited content in our blog.
Featured image by Almusaiti.
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