The other day, Dion Hulse (known by his username, dd32) gained core commitment access to the WordPress platform. Having made just over 200 Trac tickets, uploaded 530 Trac patches, commented 3100 times, and 5 commits (already), you could say Dion knows his stuff. He’s also Australian, and the first with core commit access to come from this side of the hemisphere. I decided to ask him a few questions, the result of which is below.

What are your thoughts on the future of WordPress?
I don’t see WordPress being replaced anytime soon, I can’t see many users leaving the platform, I can only see more coming on board. One day WordPress will be a “true” content management system for sure, rather than being focused on blogging as many critics complain about, but blogging will always be an important part of WordPress.

Every month someone brings out another project which shows off what WordPress can do, WordPress MU and BuddyPress are just the first 2 major examples that I can think of… but then look at what other plugins and themes have achieved. It’s impossible to forsee what the community at large will do with WordPress next. It’s the users that determine the future of the project in my mind.

How did you get involved with WordPress?
Google Summer of Code, well, indirectly. At the time I was writing a CMS for myself (as all PHP developers do at one point in their life) and spotted SoC 2007 was going to be run in a few months time, I started looking through the list of mentoring organisations for PHP-related projects, that narrowed a field of a dozen or so projects. While it was quite a long time ago now, I can remember looking through the various applications and being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of code and confusing practices some organisations had.

And so started me using WordPress. As time went on, dSite was discarded (I think I still have it around here) and WordPress was used more and more, this was about the same time that I discarded my free web-hosts, and moved onto a proper domain and host.

And so started my WordPress journey.

I was playing around with and using WordPress for a few months before SoC started/application was submitted (shame to look back and find my first Trac ticket closed as invalid ) and learnt a lot from that time, which lead me to submit my SoC application, and years later, I’m still here, SoC did its job and brought a new developer to the project.

Over the past 3 years my involvement has been varying – but all over, it has slowly increased to what it is today. Over 500 patches & 3,000 comments on Trac later, I’ve got commit access, which I find a huge “+1″ to myself! Sure, Over that time there’s been many stupid patches, comments and probably tickets too, but I like to think that the majority of my time has been spent helping other users of WordPress. Be that automating a manual process which used to take forever, cleaning up the experience for the user, or simply by fixing a bug which was nagging them.

What would you suggest to WordPress newbies?
Just jump in the deep end and take the plunge, the water may be very cold and daunting at first, but you’ll soon find the warmer waters and what you’re comfortable with. Patching bugs (and dreaming up ways to break other patches) is a great way to learn the internals of WordPress. Before you know it, you’ve learnt how to chase the rabbit down its hole, and learnt that you can get there faster by jumping through another hole.

What I’m saying is that WordPress is a big application. There are many different code paths which are taken for similar requests, it’s impossible to sit by and expect to learn what is happening under the hood, you have to dive in, and grab at the heart, if something dies, you know what you’ve changed, change it back and look at that in a different light.

Of course, if coding isn’t for you, then there are plenty of other avenues I’d suggest. Graphic design, documentation, writing tutorials, helping others use WordPress – it all makes other developers lives easier. With over 2 million downloads of the latest release, every hand can find a job

A huge thanks for Dion for taking the time out of his schedule and answering these questions, and we look forward to bringing you more interviews.

I thought I would give a bit of an introduction to what’s going on with WordPress in the pacific reigon of the world.

To date, there have been three WordCamps in what is considered “Oceana” – or, Australia, New Zealand, and the surrounding pacific islands. James Farmer held the first WordCamp in Australia in 2008 in Melbourne, and me and Sam Bauers followed in his footsteps in November of 2009 with WordCamp Australia in Sydney.

There are currently no plans in action that I know of for a WordCamp in Australia, and the association that ran the initial WordCamp is in the stages of being disbanded as it never came to good use.

On the New Zealand front, WordCamp New Zealand happened in August 2009 at the Victoria Bowling Club (yes, a bowling club!) with free wifi and the next WordCamp New Zealand is in it’s initial planning stages and more will be announced in the coming weeks. My role in the next WordCamp is going to be limited, but rest assured you’re going to hear heaps about it.

Business
There are several WordPress-oriented businesses that work in the Australia/New Zealand region. There are a few major players that I personally know of that have a very significant role in the way WordPress does things.

Instinct - instinct.co.nz
Instinct makes the WP-Ecommerce plugin – and based on this side of the tasman, they’re quite an interesting bunch of people. They develop a few plugins and are centered around plugin development.

Incsub - inscub.com
WPMU Guys – they’re behind WPMU.org, Blogs.mu, and countless other major projects. Based in Melbourne.

Envato – envato.com
Behind the “tuts” series of books and also behind ThemeForest. Kick-ass in General, I’m a real fan of what they do. Also based in Melbourne.

Core

As of this morning, Dion Hulse (dd32 – dd32.id.au) has become a core contributor to the WordPress project. Jeff Waugh and Jeremy Visser have their names on the list of 2.9 contributors. I’m planning on assembling a list of Australasian WordPress plugin developers (commercial and non-commercial), so if you’re keen in getting on board, get in touch.

If you’re interested in contributing articles, tutorials, or whatever, I’d love to have you post something up here and I’d love to see how things can grow around this blog.

With that, I’m excited as to what this blog is going to bring, and I’m even more excited with where the WordPress project is going. It’s an honour to be involved with such a great project.

I’ll be updating this post accordingly throughout the week.