WordPress Developers – How Do You Make A Living [Poll + Discussion]?

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:33:45 +0000

The Question

I'd like to pose this question to all WordPress developers – plugin, theme, as well as core ones:

How do you make your living?

And, for clarification, by this I mean: "what are your primary sources of income?"

Open Source

Open source is a beautiful concept but it often comes with a price tag or, rather, the inverse price tag: most of the time you are not being paid for your time (of course, there are exceptions, such as companies hiring dedicated open source developers and keeping them on their direct payroll).

Everyone has to make a living, however, and everyone has their ways.

Developers can benefit from such income sources as:

advertising on their sites, fueled by boosted Alexa and Google PR ratings
freelancing and consulting work directly related to their open source project
presenting at developer conferences
creating products based on the open source projects they're involved with, as the technologies should be very familiar to them

WordPress

Since I've always been interested in WordPress development, I feel connected to the WordPress community and would like to get some insight into the lives of WordPress developers.

Therefore, in addition to the main question, I have some follow-up questions:

does Automattic pay WordPress core developers salary?
are there many WordPress core developers working for Automattic full time, besides Matt?
how about you, plugin and theme developers – are any of you successful enough that you can make a living off your plugins or themes?
what are your secrets?

So in your responses, please state whether you're a core or plugin/theme developer, and answer the questions above that you can.

Of course, it goes without saying that any extra bits of advice would be welcomed as well.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Update: this post is now sponsored by Wirefly Learn, where you can find a ton of cell phone tutorials, comparisons, and videos.

IntenseDebate Introduces Plugins

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:22:33 +0000

IntenseDebate, a popular WordPress comment enhancer recently acquired by Automattic (the creator of WP), just announced plugin support. It’s a nice touch to the already useful commenting system that allows threading, easier comment moderation, reputation, voting, etc.

Let’s have a look at some of the announced plugins. Here’s what the comment block looks like with plugins enabled:

PollDaddy

This plugins allows you to add a poll to your comment. By the way, PollDaddy is also an Automattic brand.

Seesmic

Seesmic enables video comments that you can record right off your webcam.

YouTube

I think this one is self-explanatory – you can easily insert youtube videos into your comments.

Smileys

Adds smiley support.

You can activate the plugins by going to the IntenseDebate dashboard and clicking the new Plugins tab.

In conclusion, here’s a nice WP hosted video that explains the new features:

beer planet » automattic