Our next speaker in this interview series is Dwayne McDaniel. Dwayne is scheduled to talk on WP-CLI: Don’t Fear The Command Line, at WordCamp St. Louis. Here’s a little about him and his journey with WordPress.
Interview with Dwayne McDaniel
NILE FLORES: When did you start using WordPress?
DWAYNE MCDANIEL: 2014
NILE FLORES: What are a few takeaways that attendees will get from your talk?
DWAYNE MCDANIEL: Git has a bad reputation as being only for ‘developers’. Truth is, anyone who ever needs version tracking for any kind of document at all can use the power of git and collaborate better with others! Git also has a reputation for having a zillion commands and parameters and it is ‘hard to learn’. In truth 90% of the time it is 3 commands and the rest is super well documented.
NILE FLORES: WordPress is turning 15 years old. What would you like to see in the future for WordPress?
DWAYNE MCDANIEL: Even more people using it as the free and open source software to manage all their content. Especially in a world of more and more decoupled architecture, having the scalability, stability and security of the underlying content store is going to become even more important as we move from the desktop into AR, VR, and applications we can’t even dream of yet.
NILE FLORES: “And just for funsies”, over the past few years, the WordPress community has seen the rise of the cute Wapuu character? Heard of it? And if so, what’s your favorite Wapuu? (Wapuu Reference: https://wapu.us/ )
DWAYNE MCDANIEL: My favorite Wapuu of all time has to be the one from WordCamp Baltimore 2017 speaker gift hoodie. Can’t find it on wapu.us but I see that little critter every day and have not yet anyone who didn’t immediately love it.
NILE FLORES: What is your favorite area of the WordPress admin?
DWAYNE MCDANIEL: To be honest I use WP-CLi so much I have not logged into the admin for some time. But I think the upcoming camps is the coolest feature 🙂
NILE FLORES: What are the top three WordPress plugins that you believe every WordPress user should have installed?
DWAYNE MCDANIEL:
1. WP-CFM, for configuration management of a site between multiple environments
2. Any Captcha, I use google-captcha, but in the age of the bot and IoT, I sleep better with this on.
3. http2-server-push, but only if your host supports HTTP/2. Parallel asset loading can take a site with a lot of JS and CSS and make it load a heck of a lot faster with no manual tuning. Otherwise I am going to say SMTP plugin of some kind. I use gmail-smtp, but lot to choose from. More reliable than wp_mail() in my experience and makes your site very transportable, as PHP mail() can get confused on certain setups.