This time we are looking back at some quotes from one year ago, June 2025.
Episode 658 — BobWP
Context: Recorded live at WordCamp Europe in Basel, introducing the Open Channels FM rebrand and its core mission.
“Our mission is pretty simple, to amplify the voices shaping the open web, especially those who don’t always get the mic, but should — because we believe that when more voices are heard, the open web becomes stronger, more creative, and yes, more human.”
Episode 665 — Rae Morey
Context: Journalist and editor of The Repository answering what actually counts as news in the WordPress space.
“Just because something’s exciting for yourself or internally, it doesn’t mean necessarily that it has a broader relevance. Every time news in the WordPress space needs to mean something to more than you and your own team or customers. If you’re putting news out there and you’re looking for coverage, it’s important to think — is this news going to be interesting to that publication’s audience? Are they going to care?”
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Episode 666 — Miriam Schwab
Context: Head of WordPress at Elementor, discussing the strategy of hiring local community managers and why localization is the key to global reach.
“When you want to go global, you actually have to in some ways go local, to really become a tool that people in certain locations feel comfortable using. WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in Japan, for example. Probably a lot of it has to do with the fact that it was localized into Japanese. People in Japan feel much, much more comfortable using a product in their language.”
Episode 669 — Tammie Lister
Context: WordPress core committer, on the Open Source Reach episode with Adam Weeks, defining why contribution matters and what companies owe back to the ecosystem.
“We all gain from open source software and that’s amazing. But if we all took from open source software and never gave anything back, then there’d be dust everywhere, there’d be lines of code, there’d be bugs, things would not be dealt with. Contribution is paying forward, paying what you owe from having had this awesome software.”
Episode 666 — Tole (Tihomir Dmitrovic)
Context: Old-school web developer who built an AI-powered MCP server for WordPress, reflecting on the platform’s future in the AI landscape and why its existing business ecosystem gives it an enduring advantage.
“WordPress has that huge amount of existing businesses and websites. So this is a good thing and it will not just fade away just like that because people are thinking about business, not technology. It was that way all the time. So we have some time here. MCPs and actually the feature API, which brings WordPress more closer to AI, is a very good step to keep us in the track, in the game.”
Episode 669 — Zach Stepek
Context: Making the case for micro-sponsorships as an accessible entry point for anyone who has benefited from open source but isn’t ready to contribute code or time directly.
“Any financial benefit you’ve gained from using open source software came from somebody else’s work. And so if you can give back to that by simply going on GitHub and finding a core contributor that you have enjoyed the work of, and they have a sponsor button on GitHub and you can hit that button and give them money, do it. It’s not hard. You don’t have to be an agency or a hosting company or a plugin company. You can be an individual who just isn’t at the point where they’re ready to contribute to open source, and you can contribute by just financially supporting a few of the people whose work has impacted you.”
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