My name is Jeff Chandler and I’ve been writing about WordPress since 2005. I landed my first paid writing gig in 2007 when Mark Ghosh, founder of Weblogtoolscollection.com, one of the largest sites devoted to WordPress news and information at the time, contacted me with an offer. In fact, here’s a link to the first post I published on the site.

On November 19th, 2008 Kyle Eslick of WPhacks.com published a blog post where he offered the domain names WordPressTavern.com and WPTavern.com for sale to his audience first. He then offered the domains for sale on various sites but no one purchased them.

I contacted Kyle regarding the domains in December of 2008 and found out they were still available. After acquiring the domains in 2008, WPTavern was launched on January 23rd, 2009. WP Tavern would go on to become one of the largest and most recognized news and community sites devoted to WordPress. In 2011, it and WP Candy were added to the WordPress Planet newsfeed putting published articles into millions of WordPress Dashboards across the world.

In the Summer of 2011, I sold WPTavern to Matt Mullenweg, the co-creator of the WordPress project. I stayed on board as a part-time employee and then a full-time employee for Audrey.co,  Matt Mullenweg’s personal research and investment company with the primary duty of creating and managing content on WPTavern until August of 2019. In that time span, I published hundreds of articles and produced more than a hundred episodes of the WordPress Weekly podcast.

In 2021, I created WP Mainline to be a collection of commentary, news, and community related to WordPress. I also host the WP Mainline podcast where I discuss the news of the week. The scope of the WordPress community and ecosystem is vast and there are few independent voices who are able to keep folks apprised as to what’s going on in a fun, friendly, and inquisitive way. This is the primary purpose of this site.

Please join me on this journey as we take a train ride through the WordPress landscape.