Chris Wiegman has a great post on his site where he outlines and defines four types of communities in WordPress. The four communities are Idealists, Personal Brands, Workers, and Users. These communities overlap and form the Global Community. Upon reading the post, I have decided that I fit into the Idealist group.
These are the people who may make a living in WordPress but didn’t get into WordPress for the money. They are the volunteers and other folks making their way because they believe in what they’re doing.
For some this means they are building a site with a mission that they agree with or offering their talents to build many sites for an external community that shares their values but doesn’t necessarily have the money they would like to build out their site.
Chris Weigman
I never got into WordPress for the money. Hell, I didn’t think I could make a living using WordPress until 2009, a few years after getting involved with the project and writing about it on a daily basis. At the time, it was all about chronicling what was going on in the WordPress scene, and the fact that I could be paid to do it was a bonus. Today, things are a bit different. I feel like I’m a mix of Idealist, Worker, and User.
The Global Community is important to me but generating revenue is also important. The two can go hand-in-hand without detracting from each other. After reading Chris’ post, I’m interested to hear which communities you’re in.
I think I belong in that Idealist community as well, although I probably fit in all of them to some degree. Overall, WP is something I’m passionate about and I’m thrilled that I get to work with every day. And I really enjoy connecting with others who are in this space.
As good as it sounds to be in the Idealist group, I’m probably in the Worker group.
The incredibly wide adoption of WordPress makes it the best choice for a) Serving the largest number of people in my niche market and b) Subsequently, providing me with the best opportunity to support my family and achieve personal goals. A particularly useful bit of my code is used on a million websites at no charge but that’s more a credit to the GPL than to me as some kind of WordPress-loving volunteer. I simply solved a problem for my users and it got spread around. That was more a result of pragmatism than idealism in my case. A neat side-effect.
There’s little doubt that if another CMS dethrones WordPress in terms of market share, then that’s where I’ll end up. I may have a few warm fuzzies but there’s no WordPress tattoo on my arm. I don’t see WordPress waning any time soon but without a total rewrite (oh how I wish that would’ve happened before 5.0 and Gutenberg), it’s hard to see it leading the pack for another 15 years. Thanks for sharing this article, Jeff.
Is there a part of you that wants to see something else lead the pack or be exciting enough to work with for you and countless others that it strips away WordPress’ marketshare? For curiosity’s sake, I’d like to see that.
A part of me wants something totally new, fresh and modern to work with. But a bigger part of me wants WordPress to continue leading so that I don’t have to make any drastic changes. I suppose that’s fear of change, even change for the better. I hope Mr. Mullenweg will consider a total rewrite by 2030 and a massive overhaul of WordPress.org. That would magnificently exciting.