[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE26h2LMdEI[/youtube]

Given that merger of StudioPress and Copyblogger, what sparked the interest in the first place?

It’s pretty obvious the reach that Copyblogger and it’s network encompasses… I saw how powerful the marketing channel was, and knew it as a great opportunity. There weren’t any red flags that went up with my early conversations with Brian Clark, so for me it was pretty much a no-brainer.

Let’s dive into WordPress themes. What has been your favorite part of designing and developing themes?

My favorite part of themes is most definitely the child theme development. I leave all of the heavy lifting of Genesis code to Nathan Rice and our incredibly talented moderator team. For me, I really enjoy extending it by way of the child themes. Our designer Rafal Tomal is such a pleasure to work with, as his eye for design is top-notch.

On the flip side, do you have a least favorite part of the process? Maybe something you see that WordPress could do a better job of?

Honestly there really isn’t. We’ve developed Genesis in such a way that flexibility and extensibility are simple. We’ve also made a decision to develop Genesis in a way that just “works” with WordPress functions and user interface. We decided it was far more important to go with the grain, than against it.

Genesis is an awesome framework, with loads of great child themes. I personally use them on a lot of sites now. What are some of the major improvements and enhancements that are coming for Genesis?

Genesis v1.5 will include a completely rewritten breadcrumb function, that will work with custom post types. It also includes a special Genesis Grid loop function that will allow us to create child themes that showcase featured posts and excerpts (in a grid format) on a homepage. Other than that – future versions of Genesis might include shortcode functionality, and some other “top secret” functionality.

SEO is important (to some, not everyone.) Copyblogger Media LLC has
the Scribe SEO product for WordPress. What kind of advancements do
you see happening with the integration into StudioPress?

I don’t know that it will be integrated in any fashion with Genesis or what not – do we offer a huge discount to StudioPress users? Yes, we certainly do as we feel that Genesis + Scribe is a huge publishing combination for new users.

Looking back at everything, would you have done anything differently?
Please talk about maybe one thing you did really well and one thing
that failed that you would have done differently.

Honestly, I don’t wish I did anything differently. Everything happens for a reason, and the ups and downs of my business and business decisions have ultimately placed me into the position where I am now. Which is Partner and Chief Product Officer of Copyblogger Media and I get the pleasure of working alongside some very talented people. As for doing something well, I’d probably say that taking chances was the key. That began with the risk of selling WordPress themes, which turned into the choice of flipping my business model and going 100% GPL. Then became the choice of merging into Copyblogger Media. As for “failure”, I guess one thing I failed at was not taking my business more serious from a legal standpoint – as I had to rebrand Revolution back in the day because I never performed due diligence on the name.

Throwing it back to you, have you ever used Genesis? What are your thoughts on it?

Frederick Townes, CTO Mashable

Frederick Townes is the CTO of the most popular social media news site on the internet Mashable.com. Along with his efforts at Mashable, he also founded W3 MARKUP and is the current CEO of W3 EDGE.

Frederick recently took time out from his busy schedule to talk with me. He gave me a great look into his take on various killer topics:

Dre Armeda – You’re the CTO at Mashable, CEO at W3 EDGE, Founded W3 MARKUP. That’s a pretty tall order, how you do balance your day-to-day?

Frederick Townes – Days are long. In general the skill set I need to manage my various teams and supporting casts are similar. So basically the research I do at W3 EDGE is used to move mashable.com forward and contribute to the projects as needed from a server, user experience design or WordPress performance standpoint. In general, orienting my world around WordPress and being a server junkie / web application performance fanatic makes everything blend together a bit.

Mashable has grown tremendously and shows to the capabilities of building the WordPress platform. What are some of the major customizations that have led to successful growth and scalability?

Mashable.com

Most of the plugins we use always needed some level of customization, even when we work with the original plugin authors. Writing plugins that scale and lend themselves to complex hosting paradigms is not something anyone has really produced a guide for, no tips in the codex either. So we’ve found that fragment caching has been among the tricks that I can disclose. The principle there is that whether the plugin is related posts, popular posts, most commented or even some custom queries for special lists etc in your functions.php file, caching is your best friend. Rarely is there any component of a site that needs to be generated every page view. If you use fragment caching, then the “Welcome User” messages and other personalization functionalities of sites today are much easier to deliver – performance wise.

Design, development, search / social / conversion optimization, the list goes on. You’re involved in some very large scale and popular web projects. What is the one project that really stands out to you as one of your major accomplishments?

Although I have some other projects that I will be announcing soon. I think my years at mashable.com are the most significant. Pete and I have battled countless user experience and server performance issues as we grew. The thing that kept everything interesting is that, as soon as I finished preparing the next infrastructure optimization, there was more traffic to force me to push the envelope again. So again, mashable is among my crowning achievements as a “project.” Two other projects that were particularly fun to work on in the past were interfaces for Yahoo! micro-sites and the blogs smashingmagazine.com and yoast.com; all of them were very unique projects in their timing, scope and goals. All of those guys are amazing to work with and pillars in the community.

When was your first interaction with WordPress and what were your thoughts at first look?

I first looked at WordPress when I switched w3-edge.com from a server side includes based site to a WordPress theme around version 2.0 or so. Prior to that point I’d only kicked tires and so forth. So my first theme was migrating our agency site to WP and at that point I finally felt that WP was a product we could use as a CMS to deliver projects to clients.

In your eyes, how has WordPress progressed over time?

From a WordPress consultant perspective, I think WordPress has taken most of the steps that I wanted. My primary concern is always ease-of-use for the clients and that also means ease of maintenance, quality support in the open source community and the presence of other skilled consultants in the space. All of those elements exist and the product continues to add value as a publishing tool, so I can stand behind that. Such a high quality product is also motivational – making it a wise investment for me to contribute to the project in my own way. Also seeing the various uses for WordPress beyond the typical blog format is of particular interest, demonstrating the flexibility of the framework.

W3 MARKUP offers services around WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. There are significant differences between these platforms and some perceived areas each perform well in. Are you starting to see an overlap as they mature and where do you see gaps these days between these very different solutions?

I’m not seeing any real overlaps, so much as I’m seeing paths diverge. More and more developers are turning to WordPress to deploy applications and Drupal and Joomla are not less popular per se, I just see the focus being more on publishing and less on functionality as the web evolves. In other words, you see more sites with easy to deploy widgets and plugins/modules/extensions making the need to work with frameworks like Drupal or Joomla, less desirable unless those platforms have the offerings you want already baked in, making them a better fit for the same reason.

I also think that that two other factors have shaken up the CMS race as well. Specifically Magento’s foothold as to the go to shopping cart and BuddyPress/bbPress’ growing awareness have taken away from Joomla and Drupal quite a bit.

In your experience with WordPress, what would be a major feature you would love to see added to core?

I think forms and galleries are a major failing of WP and I’d love to see both of those better handled sooner than later.

I want to thank you for giving back to the WordPress community with your development of the W3 Total Cache plugin. We love it here on WPV and would love to learn more about what the future holds for the plugin.

Believe it or not the roadmap hasn’t changed since the beginning aside from priorities driven by the interests of the users obviously. Having said that v1.0 is 70% at the time of this writing. For a couple cool highlights coming before 1.0: Simplified minify configuration, a preview mode so that your changes are not applied until you want them to be, support for more CDN providers, support for more opcode caches and some very cool mobile options.

After 1.0, v1.1 will start the release of a number of add-ons for the core plugin, which will give every blog lots of the goodies that only major blogs seem to be able to implement.

Two words, choose one: Design or Development? Why?

Development today, is design. Seriously, not a cop out, but today’s sites are applications and applications are all about user experience. That trend really started with the proliferation of the JavaScript libraries and development frameworks in addition to the marriage of AJAX to develop richer user experiences. So as user experience and highly interactive applications became more and more in demand and necessary, some of the development paradigms shifted from figuring out how to plan your relational databases and scale your clusters, to determining how to lower the learning curve and wait times on your applications through the careful use of AJAX and manipulation of the interface. Both sides of the table, designers and developers are meeting in the middle in today’s sites and applications like never before. As for me, I enjoy engineering an interface the same way I engineer it’s implementation, I cannot choose or favor one.

I am a firm believer people listen through their eyes, if you can visually attract them, they will listen. What’s your take?

People are fickle. I think instant gratification and ease-of-use facilitate the learning process, so if you’re to drive time on site, adoption rates or conversion rates with your site or application; your focus has to be finding what is troublesome to the user and removing those obstacles. More often than not it’s making sure that who you are and what your site is about are clear to the user upon arrival. Once you have your brand and messaging clear, everything falls into place because inconsistencies become more obvious.

For companies and individuals getting started on WordPress, what are some words of wisdom you can offer to get them going in the right direction?

Worry less about what WordPress does and more about what your users want and how to properly engage them. Like the iPhone, WordPress is at a point where “there’s an app for that” when it comes to finding plugins that give you most of what you’re looking for. So similar to the previous question, engaging the user is easier than ever and with WordPress, you can easily publish, implement and deploy functionality into your blog, magazine or whatever you’re using WordPress for.

There is no one solution that fits every scenario. Can you offer your take on an effective strategy for monetizing a site?

There are lots of useful plugins out there that do things like allow you to place ad sense (or any ad) on posts of a certain age or referrer or manage affiliate links or ads. Additionally there are numerous ad networks out there like buysellads.com that are thought leaders and very helpful to publishers of all sizes. But I think as far as sustainability is concerned, product (i.e. books) or subscription-based models should be the target for sites that can work out a service or produce content that lends itself to that, i.e. shoemoney.com for example. Of course there’s the (traditional) use of a blog as work history / business card / case study list, which lends itself to the sale of professional services. It seems that the paradigms that exist are pretty straight forward these days – I don’t see any game changes forthcoming in 2010.

Ultimately people visit websites for content right? What’s your biggest tip to designers and developers to keep in mind when creating the next big blog?

One of the smartest trends started by Jason Santa Maria I think is to produce unique post layouts based on the content presented in the post. I think that ideas like this, in additional to producing useful content and demonstrating thought leadership are always going to be the foundation of successful careers and the blogs that showcase them. From there, my previous comments on monetization apply.

You stay pretty busy with some amazing projects, what does the future hold? Are there any upcoming projects you’d like to share with us? Any game changers?

I am baking up a couple game changers for various industries, however nothing I can disclose at this time. More on that next quarter.

In closing, do you have any tips for WPVibe as we continue to grow the site, be gentle.

I think the secret weapon for new sites is BuddyPress, there are many clever ways that BuddyPress + bbPress can be used to create some nice and crisp platforms for conversation and community development. And that’s the trick, being very focused and consistent so that the over time the brand is synonymous with the community and content that lives within. The ability for publishers to own their content and users (if you will) using BuddyPress is also going to become more critical as we move forward.

I think you guys have started off on the right foot, just continue to work on that roadmap and make it clear to your readers where that is and ask for a bit of help steering now and again – that will be a great compass for you. I think PollDaddy would be helpful there.

Feel the Vibe! Thanks a bunch Frederick, always a pleasure.

Do you have some questions for Frederick? Are you interested in learning more about W3 Total Cache or other ways to really get your WordPress site firing on all cylinders? Make sure to leave your comments, it’s always great to hear from you.

Dre Armeda – Since leaving your position with Yahoo! back in 2006 and joining Automattic as the CEO, what are some of the most exciting products/events/happenings you’ve seen take place in the past 3 years?

Toni Schneider - From an Automattic POV I’d say the rise of WordPress.com and the emergence of WordCamps. In the tech industry as a whole, it’s the overall pace of innovation that continues to blow me away.

Toni Schneider, CEO, Automattic

What is one thing you’ve learned while being at Automattic that has made you a better CEO?

A brand new thing that I had never done before was figuring out how to build a distributed company, where team members work from places all over the world. That’s been a great learning experience for me. I love how much personal freedom the distributed model gives people. One of our “Automatticians” told us just yesterday that he is going to Chile for 40 days. He has rented an apartment and will work from there. That’s the kind of thing you can do in a distributed organization. The challenge is to create a sense of teamwork and common purpose despite being spread so far apart.

What are a few big items that you envision for WordPress.com in 2010?

I’d say continued international expansion as well as tighter integration of third party services and content to make people’s WordPress.com sites more of a hub for their online activities.

In your opinion, why has WordPress been so successful without a marketing team?

Simple: Great word of mouth

WP.com VIP has been a huge success, in our eyes. How do you see the VIP hosting solution evolving in 2010?

We’re going to put VIP hosting and support into a more combined offering. That way we can offer VIP level services to people whether they are hosted on our infrastructure or elsewhere.

Automattic employees do not all work out of the Automattic office in San Francisco. What communication tools does Automattic employ and why are they effective? Do you see room for any improvement to make them more efficient?

We’ve tried lots of tools. The two that work best for us are IRC and P2 (P2 Theme). We use IRC for on-going daily group communication (and Skype for 1-on-1) and we have about a dozen internal P2s to discuss and keep track of status of various projects.

When did you first start “blogging” and what was it about?

I started my first blog in 2004 on Typepad. I had gotten my first camera phone and started photo blogging little tidbits from my daily life which was lots of fun.

When you’re not aggressively (viciously, some cool word insert here) working on WordPress, what do you enjoy doing?

I spend as much time as possible with my family. Our kids are growing up fast and I’m enjoying every minute of it. We go boogie boarding, skiing, go-karting, hiking, camping, lots of great stuff. I also like to geek out over cars (in all shapes and forms: toni.org/car-museum)

Can you hint at the next big add-ons and secret features of WordPress.com? Come on Toni, give us the skinny

Nope

What is your favorite car and what makes it so special to you?

Currently it’s my 1985 Toyota Landcruiser. I like it because it’s an iconic design, it’s bulletproof (not literally), and it runs on biodiesel (made from recycled kitchen grease).

Gravatar hit 1 billion gravatars this past March. What other milestones has Automattic hit or are on the horizon?

Yeah, Gravatar serves billions of avatar requests a day, which is amazing. Another number that blows people away is that over 220 million people visit a WordPress.com blog in any given month. That makes us one of the 10 largest web sites in the world. PollDaddy has been growing really impressively as well. It reaches over 117 million people a month!

Through your eyes, what has been the greatest invention of 2009? (not just with WordPress, but of the entire world)

Too early to tell. Check out this cool engine though: EcoMotors

Can you tell us a little bit about CodePoet and what your vision is for the WordPress consulting world?

CodePoet is a hub for WordPress related consulting services. Today, it’s a place to find people who can help you build a beautiful WordPress site. Over time, we’d like to make it a great resource for consultants who want to learn how to get the most out of WordPress as a platform.

Thank you Toni for vibing out with us!

Do you have some questions or comments for Toni? Feel free to leave comments below and we’ll see if we can get Toni to answer a few

Travis Ballard

Dre Armeda – How long have you been programming with PHP and developing on WordPress?

Travis Ballard - Do we have to go back that far? I’m starting to feel old. i started back with PHP 3 back around 1998 and ended up taking a couple years off before getting back into it and doing it full time. I have over 10 years under my belt but I’ve only been freelancing full-time for the past 3 years. The last 2 years, my involvement has been primarily around WordPress Themes, Plugins, and providing custom functionality to the award winning platform.

So you’ve been working on WordPress for a few years now, what do you feel the most significant advancement has been in that time frame?

I think the biggest enhancement I’ve seen so far was the overhaul on version 2.5 but now with 2.9 around the corner, I really like the addition of the image editing tools. I’ve always been a design guy and a lot of what got me started involved creating ways to present portfolio items and gallery images. So with that being said, anything that makes my job a little bit easier and saves me a few minutes in post-production is good with me. I’ve created ways to do this on my own in the past and now that it’s built in, and there are APIs available, that’s a huge advantage.

You’re regularly helping folks out in the WordPress IRC channel. There are various mechanisms in place to help WordPress users like the Codex, forums and IRC, what’s your take on how effective these tools are?

Well I’d like to start off by saying that without IRC, I wouldn’t be where I am today. The people I’ve met over the years have all inspired me to step it up a notch and I learn something new every day because of them. With that being said, I love to give back when I’m in a situation where I think I can help. The codex is awesome, incomplete, but there are people adding new references and definitions daily. I use it every day and it’s an essential tool in my arsenal. Same goes for the PHP cross references that are available for WordPress.

So you’re a PHP programmer, Photo bug, and Design guy. You must stay busy, what do you find yourself involved with most these days?

Well I would have to say PHP these days pretty much pays the bills as I haven’t actually done much design in months, and I really enjoy it too. I did get to shoot some pregnancy photos and a couple weddings over the last month; those were a lot of fun.

Diversity it great, and you dabble in various areas, what is your passion?

To be honest I would have to say I’m more passionate about design than I am PHP. I say design because I haven’t done it in a while, if I’d been designing for the past 6 months, I would probably be more passionate about PHP right now. Each one has its perks and its draw-backs but I love them both. I enjoy creating something new and the challenges that are brought forth while trying to make my visions come to life. I might step into the Stock Photography industry one day but I haven’t found something to set me apart just yet, we’ll see.

I had the opportunity to take a lot of photos when I lived in Italy, what are a couple of places you like to shoot? Do you do portrait work as well?

This is a tough one, I recently had the opportunity to see the west coast and i absolutely love the beaches out there, they’re gorgeous. I’d love to do a model shoot there on location or something one day. Apart from the west coast, I also really enjoy shooting in Ybor City, Florida, also known as Tampa’s Latin Quarter. There’s so many places that I couldn’t name them all I don’t think. There’s something beautiful no matter where you are, sometimes it’s just harder to find. As for portrait work, that’s where I strive to do my best. I really enjoy artificial lighting and the challenges that it brings to the table so-to-speak.

Your online handle is ansi/ansimation, can you give me a background on that? I find it quite clever.

Yeah definitely, it all started back when I first got into graphic design, I was really into ANSI art back then, I guess because it was different, not many people did it any more. It was an old school art form that is almost forgotten. I created some member applications for underground groups and my ANSI graphics were used as the splash pages, I wasn’t half bad with 8 colors and a limited char set. Ansimation is the animation of those ANSI graphics mostly done by scrolling line by line through a console to create the animation effect. Somewhere along the line I wanted something not so cheesy for my online handle, so because of my background, that’s what was chosen. At the time my handle was KaRt0oN based off of a character in the movie ’187′.

Thanks to Travis for taking time out to vibe with us.

It’s always great to hear from talented designers and developers like Travis and we hope you enjoyed his interview. Reach out to Travis via @ansimation on Twitter, or visit him at TravisBallard.com.

If you are interested in an interview or would like to contribute a great interview to WPVibe, make sure to contact us.

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.