One of the WordPress core developers Matt Martz was nice enough to give us a few minutes of his time to interview him. Martz has been using WordPress for three years, and two of those years, he has been contributing core code. His passion for WordPress is evident through his responses to some of our questions below. Here is what Martz had to say.
Matt Martz, a WordPress Developer
Jonathan Dingman: You’re a WordPress developer. Throughout your time working on WordPress, what has been the most exciting thing you’ve seen happen?
Matt Martz: This is kind of difficult. The admin redesign, the HTTP API, the Shortcode API; overall because of my personal interests I’m going to have to go with the addition of the HTTP API.
What’s your favorite part of WordPress? The code? The community? The themes?
To choose out of the three, I’d have to go with the code. To quote a post title from recent, WordPress is a thankless community. I do however enjoy giving back to the community by sharing plugins, contributing to Core, and helping out in the WordPress IRC channel. Themes are, well important, but in the end I am developer not a designer.
If you could see one major thing happen with WordPress in 2010, what would it be?
I’m really interested in seeing WordPress go the way of making PHP 5 the minimum required version. We are close, it will be a good deal of work, but will benefit a lot of people.
How has WordPress impacted your life?
Other than taking all of my free time? It’s given me something bigger than myself to be a part of. Something to put my talent to good use on. Otherwise I’d be writing code that I would never use and no one else would ever see, like before I started with WordPress.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen WordPress do, functionality-wise?
There was a guy in the WordPress IRC channel looking for help not too long ago. He was working on getting all of the common theme functions (the_title, the_content, wp_list_pages, wp_list_comments, etc…) to output in JSON format. The reason he wanted this is he was using WordPress as a backend to a custom CMS application written in Ruby on Rails. I believe my exact response was “wow, odd use…but ok.” He apparently loved the WordPress admin, but also loved Ruby on Rails.
