In this engaging interview, Olga Gleckler shares her journey into WordPress, starting as a developer creating custom admin interfaces before discovering the simplicity and flexibility of WordPress. She reflects on her first experiences with open-source contributions, starting at WordCamp Nordic in 2019, and highlights her involvement in the WordPress Marketing team and the impactful ‘Get Involved’ tab project for version 6.3. Olga emphasizes the importance of community support in pushing through challenges and discusses her vision for the future of WordPress, including a redesigned, more intuitive admin interface. She offers practical advice for new developers looking to contribute to WordPress, encouraging growth through incremental contributions and collaboration. Olga also suggests ways to make the onboarding process more welcoming and fun, with a focus on raising awareness of opportunities in the WordPress ecosystem.
Can you share your first experience with WordPress, and what made you choose it?
When I started as a developer it was a side hustle, I was making sites for small companies, usually referred by friends. I made my own admin and styled it to match the front end. I still think it was a good touch. Inventing a wheel is quite interesting but unproductive, so, soon I picked up a CMS that was recommended by experienced developers and quickly discovered that this thing is quite buggy apart from its other complications. It got better over the years, but even paid plugins were no good and looked like developers didn’t want anyone else to understand what had been written. It was the worst code I’ve ever seen. It was painful and frustrating to work with, but our parting was difficult and took years. Looking back, I am convinced that these “experts” were using a particular system because the site owners could not update or install anything themselves due to high complexity. This almost bound the owners to the developer for life.
Somewhere in the beginning of my developers journey, I got a small job to fix a site that was going down from time to time. This site was on WordPress, the developer modified the vendor theme, cashed out and disappeared. I spent the whole weekend digging into how this works and found an infinite loop that needed to be fixed. The actual problem was simple, but the whole thing he did was wrong from the beginning. Still, I got some experience, and further encounters with WordPress and other CMS convinced me that it is the best choice of systems I have worked with so far. I didn’t think about statistics, I just evaluated my experience and what I can do with WordPress for clients and what they can do with it too, including installation of everything they want. And yes, sometimes they can install something that breaks their site and rush to you for rescue.
How did you start contributing to open-source projects, and what was your first contribution to the WordPress community?
I was living in a bubble where there were no such ideas as a contribution to open-source, I didn’t come across it even once. Most likely, I just ignored things that didn’t concern me. I only found my local Meetup group when I felt quite dissatisfied with how the main work was going on (we were switching from WordPress to another system, the same one that I already knew was buggy and difficult). I was seeking an outlet, a group that shares my beliefs and finally found the local community. Then I started to notice other WordPress events.
My first WordCamp with Contributor Day was at the beginning of 2019, it was WordCamp Nordic. I had no idea what it was about. There is no correct translation of the word “contribute” to my native language. It can be translated as ‘taking part’ and didn’t tell me much, but I decided to sign up for everything. There, on the spot I chose the team to which I was unable to contribute anything, but finally, I got an idea of what this was all about and met great people that day and during the main conference. The whole experience was just amazing ❤ ️ So, the first thing I did when I came back from Helsinki was buy tickets to WordCamp Europe in Berlin. There I joined the Marketing team. What I did that day was also useless. Returning home I started to hang out in the Slack channel in meetings trying to figure out what needed to be done, and slowly started making suggestions and contributing small to the content we were producing. The path was steep and uneven, but thanks to Abha Thakor, who helped me a lot, and other great team members, I felt welcome and was able to be useful and grow along the way. I believe that the most rewarding and enjoyable task has been and continues to be the People of WordPress series.
What are some important projects or contributions you have made within the WordPress ecosystem?
The most significant one is the ‘Get involved’ tab on the About page in the admin that went into the 6.3 version a year ago. When I started to work on this ticket it was already 10 years old. It took 4 months to get it into the Trunk. The patch itself was simple, but we polished the content a lot and about 50 people took part in it. A couple of times I felt that it was too much for me to move forward, but community friends were coming to my rescue. The conversation in the ticket can give you an idea about the process, but it is only part of the discussion, there was also a lot in the Make Slack channels. When you know why you are doing what you are doing, you have the determination to push through, and still, it would have been impossible without supporters. This was an immense experience.
What are your thoughts on the current state of WordPress development, and how do you see its future?
WordPress has a well-designed, robust core with great abilities, but this is not its full potential. Its admin needs a redesign, and as far as I know, this work is in progress, but I believe that until we don’t have a new cool look inside, people will think about WordPress as something unmodern. Some inexperienced users are frustrated with a lot of options, so I wonder if the new design can reduce their overload. It would be great to make it simple, intuitive and fun so that even a child could easily and willingly work with it. Or we can have a child-friendly mode, which would be something completely new. Think about the ability to change your admin style like a separate theme for the admin. For example, if you like images and animation like in Mailchimp, you can draw your own for certain actions — post is saved, published, deleted etc., and if you are purely about business, you can have a minimalistic view without any funny things, just a good intuitive UI to make thinking quickly and effective but style everything in your preferred colours. How cool it will be if different users have different themes inside the admin? Of course, if this is a corporate site, they most likely will have their company theme, but the ability to choose makes people happy. No one wants some ordinary rental place as their permanent home, and making your side inside as nice as the outside can make a huge difference.
Another thing is that we have to embrace the best from frameworks and other technologies and approaches. We should have community-supported dockerfiles for development and production, installation from the console via composer with all dependencies from composer.json or our configuration file. Playground can configure WordPress similarly, but this is a testing tool and not an environment for day-to-day development.
There are many features we can implement, but performance, security, robustness, and compatibility are areas that WordPress developers are constantly working on, and there is still room for improvement. A system that requires constant maintenance due to breaking changes with each version, adds new features at the expense of performance or evolves so quickly that it can’t fix bugs is not a good choice for any website owner. WordPress shouldn’t be on their side.
What advice would you give to developers who are new to WordPress or open source?
Contributing to open-source is a great opportunity to learn at your own pace, and collaborate in a similar way that you would have worked on a large project in a company but have no deadlines or sprint plan hangs over you as a Sword of Damocles. Some people only want a Core badge believing that this will be a plus to their CV, but it will not, if you took a good first bug to add a point at the end of a string and was done with your contribution it isn’t benefiting you, it most likely shows that you are in a hurry to easy wins and are not serious. The two main reasons to contribute are to make an impact — to do something wonderful and help people and develop your skills, learn from more experienced developers. So, I am recommending everyone to start with a good first bug to warm up, plan time for your contribution as it would’ve been a course for studying and each time pick a more advanced ticket than before. This way, contributors can grow and make more and more significant things. It will be even better to work in a group to help each other, discuss tickets and collaborate on solutions. Right now we have so many tickets that regular contributors and maintainers can easily overlook your patch or testing results, so having your working group can help to speed up things. Bring your friends and learn to solve issues together
How do you keep up with the latest trends in WordPress development, and what resources would you suggest for new developers who want to get involved?
Following the releases is a great way to stay on top of things. It is worth reading carefully Field guides for each release and checking if new things are working for you before the release. By testing Beta and RC releases on your staging or local sites (please, not in production), you can be confident that when the time comes, your sites will be updated without any hiccups and if you come across a bug, it can be addressed in time by the release team, and you can contribute to fix as well.
Developer Blog is also a must-read source for all developers who are serious about their business and performance (no pressure).
In your opinion, what are the best ways to engage and attract new developers to the WordPress community, and how can we make the onboarding process more welcoming and inclusive?
This is not only about developers, everyone can contribute to WordPress, bringing unique experiences and different points of view. This is valuable. The problem is that many people don’t know that they can contribute to WordPress, this is just beyond their attention and day-to-day occupation. We need ways to raise awareness of the ability to contribute in different ways to people who have no idea that this opportunity exists, that you can take part in some interesting things with people from all over the world. But I suspect such an ambitious goal needs a lot of support from companies that own media resources.
With developers who are already working with WordPress, this can be a bit easier. We need to offer to get involved in places where developers are searching for the information and possibly create a guide for them to get started, like a step-by-step instruction in pseudocode. And we can add a bit of gamification with scores, achievements and the ability to embed your contribution widget into your site. We can be creative, and developers like fun, we all do.
