WordPress Complete Author Interview

"All works are announced, decisions taken, brainstorming performed via WordPress. If we can manage such a big development process with WordPress you can imagine what other ways we can use it in. Blogging has grown in popularity and it will certainly become one of the biggest news sources. Alongside text blogging, podcasting and phlogging, WordPress brings awesome value to the blogging culture." Read more in the interview with Hasin Hayder, author of the newly released, WordPress Complete.

    Hello Hasin. Thank you for taking the time to answer some of our questions.

1. Could you please share a little about yourself, what is your background, where do you work?
   
   I graduated in Civil Engineering from the Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology in Bangladesh. And I am a Zend-certified Engineer and an expert in localization.
   
   I work at somewhere in… as a web application developer. somewhere in… is a Norwegian-Bangladeshi company that specializes in  mobile commerce, social networking, and is a partner of "Escenic", the leading content management engine for newspapers worldwide. I developed the largest localized multi-user blogging platform for Bangladeshis under somewhere in…  
   
   Had I been familiar with WordPress at that time as I am right now, I would have developed that tool completely in WordPress.
   
   I also work for Pageflakes—one of the leading Ajax-based start page Companies, as a Development Engineer. With Pageflakes you can build amazing start pages and share them among your friends. I develop flakes (the small widgets which you see at www.Pageflakes.com) and fix bugs in flakes developed by other developers. A few days ago I also modified the issue tracking system of Pageflakes.

2. What made you write a book on WordPress?

I was inspired to blog by Arild Klokkerhaug, CEO of somewherein… and Ashikuzzaman Fahim, Senior Software Engineer at Phillips. Arild was pushing me to start my own blog since May 2005, and soon I started research on some blog engines.

At that time, I was looking for a blog engine which I could customize easily. After working with couple of blog engines and hosted solutions, I found WordPress to be the best for me. Thousands of available themes and plug-ins and a huge supportive community made me fall in love with WordPress.

Moreover, WordPress code can be understood so easily that anyone can play around with it. After being a great fan of WordPress and playing around with it for a long time, I thought it would be great to share my experience with people. This is what inspired me to write a book on WordPress.

3. Who is the book aimed at?
   
   Beginner to Intermediate. This book is not focused for advanced users, because they usually tend to look for more hacks, code snippets, and shortcuts. But they can definitely pick up a couple of topics from it.
   
   This book presents materials to kick-start blogging. It is a step-by-step guide on how to set up, customize, and market your blog using WordPress. If only I could have found a book like this one earlier, it would have been easier for me to start my blogging.
   
   I am very happy with the way the theme development chapter has turned out. As a beginner, I had spent considerable time looking for some easy theme development resource and couldn't find it easily.
   

4. Is "WordPress Complete" your first book as an author?
   
   No, I co-authored another book named "Smarty PHP Template Programming and Applications" with Lucian Gheorghe and Joao Prado Maia. "Wordpress Complete" is my second book.
   
   
   
   
5. You have also developed a Smarty Cheatsheet. Tell us something about it?
   
   Smarty is an extremely easy and powerful templating engine for PHP developers. Other than its dedicated user-community and an awesome manual, I thought it would be great to have a compilation of most frequently used information for easy reference. Besides, developers will use one of my works for everyday use—what an amazing feeling that is!!
   
   You can find the Cheatsheet at my blog:
   http://hasin.wordpress.com/2006/06/10/smarty-cheat-sheet-version-20/ or at the books' Free Online Edition at http://smartybook.packtpub.com/
   

6. You have also developed several themes and plug-ins for the WordPress Community. Which is your personal favorite and why?
   
   Yes, I did. Some of my favorite themes are "FlyHigher2", "Iceblue", and "Meteora". However, the plug-in, "RSS Processors" tops the list of my favorite plug-ins. I have written a detailed discussion of the plug-in in the book. There are many users who use it with their WordPress blog.

7. In Chapter 8: Community Blogging, you have mentioned Flavors of multi-user blogging. What is that about? Can you brief us on that?
   
   Multi-User blogging is one of the best features of WordPress. It's so fantastic that I installed it at somewhere in…
   
   We continuously track our development process, in-house activities, and promote our company through WordPress. In WordPress you can easily maintain a blog, where authors can publish their articles without disturbing another set of author articles. We use it in all our company activities, to brainstorm new ideas, to announce a notice, to track development histories, to publish regular articles, and also as a great media for publishing knowledge base. This is possible only due to the fact that WordPress supports mutli-blogging.
   
   www.WordPress.com is developed over another flavor of WordPress, called Wordpress MU (Multi-User). It handles tremendous volume of user data. So one need not bother about the scalability issues with WordPress.

8. How do you foresee the future of blogging and what part would wordpress play in it?
   
   In every process of somwhere in… we use WordPress. All works are announced, decisions taken, brainstorming performed via WordPress. If we can manage such a big development process with WordPress you can imagine what other ways we can use it.
   
   Blogging has grown in popularity and it will certainly become one of the biggest news sources. Alongside text blogging, podcasting and phlogging, it brings awesome value to the blogging culture. WordPress is playing a very vital role among these, and not only with blogging. You can also develop multi-purpose websites using WordPress. That means WordPress is great even as a CMS for general purpose websites.
   
   

9. What do you do when not blogging, photoblogging, etc.?
   
   I live here in Bangladesh with my wife Ayesha and my son Afif. So while not blogging or office work, I usually spend some quality time maintaining my PHP group, phpexperts (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phpexperts), or with my family members. I am also a great fan of animated movies like "Ice Age", "Monsters Inc", "Over the Hedge", and "The Incredibles". And yeah, you will always find me watching Tom and Jerry with my son on Cartoon Network.
   
   

Thank You Hasin!!

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