Cooking Up WordPress Code: Techniques and Best Practices

Abha: And welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. And in the studio today we have Kim Coleman. Hello, Kim.

Kim: Hello Abha, good morning.

Abha: Now tell me where you’re broadcasting in from today.

Kim: Absolutely. I am in Maryland. WordPress has enabled me to have a second vacation spot, so we can talk about that a little bit. But yeah, I’m in Maryland. We have a place on the Chesapeake Bay, our actual home’s in Pennsylvania.

A combination of cooking and development

Abha: So our last episode was where you were in Africa and now we’re back in the United States. So we do a lot of traveling, but very sustainably on this show. So Kim, thank you for joining us and we’re going to hear a little bit about your wonderful adventure to become a developer. So if anyone who’s listening to this, make sure you have a cup of tea ready, a glass of wine, and you’ll definitely want food because we’ll be talking food as well in this episode. So Kim, as we always do in the show, I’m going to take you back in your journey and we’re going to start with what you intended to be when you were first training. So Kim, what was it that you wanted to be?

Kim: Believe it or not, I went to business school, but I intended to graduate and open a bakery.

Abha: I love it. And of course, bakery, serving food rather than code.

Kim: Oh yes. No code was going to be included in my bakery. We were going to be kind of a breakfast, coffee, pastries and probably some catering, a light lunch.

Abha: So I’m already wanting some food. So I’m just imagining these beautiful pastries and I’ve heard that you are quite a cook, so I’m sure we can weave that into the story we tell today as well. So if you’re joining, this is Kim Coleman and she’s coming from to us from the United States and we are talking all things development and cooking, a perfect combination don’t you think?

Kim: I do think so. I think we’ll see that there’s a lot relating the two together, and if anyone is in the WordPress community really deeply, you’ll see how much all of our community and kind of embraces both sides of life, the developer side and then the creative side of themselves.

Abha: Absolutely. So Kim, you wanted to be a baker and you wanted to own a bakery with your business sense. It sounds like a fabulous career. Was that because cooking was something that you really enjoyed or you’d grown up with?

Kim: To a degree. Our family cooked family meals together. We weren’t one to get takeout very often. We created our own food, we would bake our own birthday cakes and things like that. When I was probably 12, 13, I started doing a little catering for my mom’s office. When they would have an office party, they would call me up and I could make little hors d’oeuvres and little desserts. And then through high school I found a job working at a small cafe in our area. It’s interesting now I have a 14 year old son who’s entering the workforce and he thinks about working at a gas station and I think of myself waking up at 5:30 in the morning on a Saturday when I was in school to go work at this cafe. I don’t know if he has the fortitude to do it, but I’ll be ready to help him however I can.

Discovering eCommerce

Abha: Entrepreneurship, obviously you passed that on, which is great. And just those pastries again and the food, I’m sure our listeners are already turning to their cupboards while they’re listening to this and thinking, “What can we get from there?” Kim, I think you’re one of the wonderful examples that we have in the WooCommerce community of somebody who likes the whole idea of eCommerce being approachable, accessible and for everybody. So when you first discovered eCommerce, when you were studying at college, what was it that made you think that this was the future?

Kim: When I was in college, I was working, not working as in a bakery anymore, but doing some website development from my dorm room through Craigslist, finding people who needed websites. And I saw more and more sites needing e-commerce functionality and this is around the time when WordPress itself was finding its legs as more than a blogging platform, more than a CMS, and something that people could really use as the underbelly of a very robust eCommerce site. This is even before WooCommerce became the eCommerce defacto solution for WordPress today. But I think tools like this give people so much flexibility, so much control at a very granular level about the type of site that they’re trying to build.

It’s not just e-commerce for a specific physical product. We really see these e-commerce tools being used for so many types of products from memberships and subscriptions, virtual products and downloads. So I think from the start, WordPress was seen as a very customizable tool and then move commerce when it became as strong as it is today, also continued to be something that could be customized and could be leveraged in so many ways by people with very minimal development skills.

Looking at code as words

Abha: And I know you’re a great component and advocate for people saying, “Okay, try WordPress, start with your skills from the very beginning and grow,” which is in fact what you did yourself in terms of learning a little bit a time from websites, from other people and I think probably many of us looking at code and trying to work out what it did. Now I know from talking to you earlier, one of the things that you like about code, it is words and when you look at code, that is what you see. Can you tell our listeners a bit more about that, especially those who are struggling or wanting to learn more and how they can use that sense to help them along?

Kim: Absolutely. So WordPress itself in the early days and even to today, is largely built in a language called PHP. And it is a human readable language. If you get over the fact that you’re looking at code, it reads in English words that we all know and we can understand. But I think the hurdle is getting past looking at code and saying, “Oh, this is code. I can’t understand it.” You’re not looking at zeros and ones, you’re looking at words you can understand. For me, I got my start doing graphic design. I was creating print products, I was using Adobe tools to create them.

And over time I started working more with my husband, Jason. He was my boyfriend at the time, building websites. He was studying computer science and he himself was more doing the backend in the code work. I was designing things as kind of a static mockup of the site and then I realized I could go a little farther, I could take another piece of this from his plate, I could do the actual HTML and CSS markup.

Again, both languages that really are human readable languages. And then over time started doing some of the PHP work. I would call myself a front end developer at this stage, but it was really a granular process of using the resources I could find on the internet, using Stack Overflow, using the WordPress, what we call the codex at the time, now, the developer resource library, I guess they call it. And finding examples of code where people were extending WordPress, where people were adjusting the appearance of a theme, copying it, pasting it into my editor, reading the code and deciphering the code enough to say, “Oh, I just need to tweak this one little bit, this ID or this selector or this location to my term and then it will work.” So there’s a bit of a daring aspect to doing that. And it feels scary because you could potentially “break” something, but luckily we can undo things. Command Z, control Z often is your best friend when you are beginning to developing and not quite sure if you’re going to break something.

Tips for starting out to learn and do PHP

Abha: Absolutely. And it is that element, I guess, of a developer that is harnessing that entrepreneurial daring spirit to go and try building something, learn how it goes. I know building AI, it certainly is a case of looking at code, looking what doesn’t work, what did you not like about what you’ve read or seen? And then looking at how to make it better. And that evolving cycle really can build on a vast number of careers and training as you’ve showed yourself. So PHP, obviously that for some developers can sound really scary and they can think, “Oh, I can’t do that.” I know when I started doing PHP, I felt I had to be locked in a little room and if someone spoke to me, it was the end of the world because I’d never find my focus again. For someone starting out and looking and learning PHP, are there some tips that you could recommend based on your journey?

Kim: I would definitely start with something small, some small tweak. WordPress is built with a structure that has a lot of reusable functions. So you’re not writing brand new PHP code. You’re often just adjusting or using an existing function that’s part of WordPress, WooCommerce as well. Both are built to be plugable, to be extendable without editing the code of the plugin itself. So you can use an action hook or a filter hook, we can get into what these are, but basically they’re places within WooCommerce, places within WordPress, places within your theme that say, “Oh, here’s a place you can execute a little something custom, a little something just for you.” That was what I would call a hook. And then a filter being where you would take a default functionality in WooCommerce, let’s say the grid of the shop and you say, “I want to adjust it so that this certain category of products isn’t shown in my main shop page.

That is probably six lines of PHP using a filter in WooCommerce and there is an existing recipe. I guarantee you, if you search the internet search WooCommerce, you will find a recipe that gives you almost exactly what you need. Stack overflow being one of those resources that a lot of people just getting started can use. Find what you’re looking to do. Lots of people are giving their time and energy to share code that does almost what is being asked of them. You would copy and paste that into your WordPress site if you’re using a customizations plugin, if you’re using a child theme and just tweak something like an id, let’s say. In this case I mentioned removing a category of products from your WooCommerce shop loop, that would be six lines of PHP where you’re copy pasting and editing a single category ID in that loop.

So it sounds very scary to talk someone through that, but often if you’re already at this place, you have WordPress setup, you have WooCommerce installed and set up and you just want to tweak one small thing, it’s hard to find a developer that is going to charge you less than $500 for that small thing because it’s just not worth someone’s time to get involved in your project in such a small way. But if you’re creating the shop yourself, think of all the hurdles you’ve encountered as an entrepreneur to this point. Maybe craft like custom painted wine glasses and you’ve encountered hurdles with that. I’m sure you’ve broken a wine glass, you’ve run out of paint, you’ve had a product smear, you’ve had a shipping concern, and you’ve always troubleshooted them yourself. So coding shouldn’t be any different and there’s so many resources out there to support you.

Abha: Absolutely, and I think the one thing that Kim and I, we love the idea and definitely talking in terms of recipes, having been on the release documentation team again and I was taught to look at code in the same way that I would cook. My mother, that’s how she introduced me to programming. Sadly, she found that I, at the time, I was a better programmer than I was learning her amazing cooking skills. But now she knows if she puts recipes into programming language, I get it straight away. So I think that there is so much overlap and if for the people listening, if you are nervous about making that jump and going from just tweaking existing themes to actually understanding the codex, understanding the structure of how WordPress and WooCommerce work, it is well worth the journey.

Integrating WooCommerce with membership sites

As Kim has said, “Those hooks and filters were certainly things that were brought home to me really early on that you needed to really understand.” And Kim, that neatly takes us onto the other things of what you have been doing. So when you went on from building these sites into building membership sites, and I’m really interested to know why WooCommerce is such a good platform to integrate with for membership sites and you might want to just explain how that works too. So I know some readers will find that very interesting.

Kim: For sure. So WooCommerce itself, their slogan is kind… I think the last time I checked was kind of “sell anything beautifully.” That might not be their current phrase, but it is a phrase that they use because when we think eCommerce, we think, “I go to Amazon and I order a pair of jeans,” and that is not the eCommerce that WooCommerce represents. WooCommerce represents such a broad range of types of things that we can sell, including memberships. I represent a membership plugin, Paid Memberships Pro, we integrate with WooCommerce, but we also overlap a lot and compete with WooCommerce in some ways. I can talk about how we integrate with WooCommerce. If you have a membership site with users, with a membership purchased either through WooCommerce or through Paid Memberships Pro, we offer integrations so that your members can get a discount within your store or can obtain products for free.

Often these are knowledge based products like a downloadable file, access to a course or something like that. So you can do that with Paid Memberships Pro, integrated with WooCommerce. You can do that with WooCommerce natively. And I will caveat here that memberships are different than courses. A lot of people think membership and assume eLearning, assume course. They think, “Oh, I can use WooCommerce to sell my course?” Yes you can. But membership can be a lot more than that. Membership can be a premium podcast, membership can be access to a resource library of videos or post content in your WordPress site. It can be access to a community type feature. So it could be using something like Buddy Press or Buddy Boss to interact with other members. And then in our plugin ecosystem, we often see people doing association type memberships, which often combines all of these things might have a directory component.

So there are tools within WooCommerce to do all of this. There are separate plugins that integrate with WooCommerce that can do this. Super interesting. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges WoodPress builders face is piecing things together and making the right plugin decisions, the right software decisions to build on and build with because it can be very challenging in the e-commerce environment when you’re building to switch platforms. So the last thing you want to do is switch when all of your payments, especially in a membership environment are on a recurring basis and switching platforms can be super challenging, so making good decisions up front is something we all have to really think about and get the right answers.

Abha: And I think going on from that, I think that listening to what other people are doing, so tune into the various, do the Woo shows where you can hear what people are doing, but also the WooCommerce community that might exist in your area. And if that doesn’t have a local group already, then maybe start one. I know Kim, you’ve been involved with doing that too and helping merge other ones and say that you can reach audiences that may not be being reached already. In terms of subscriptions and integration into, or just general integration into WooCommerce, if people are looking to start going down that route what, from your learning, would you recommend?

Kim: Yeah, I think I would do a lot of research of what extensions already exist because the WooCommerce marketplace for extensions is gigantic and they’ve made a concerted effort in recent years to grow the extensions library more and more. They’ve given a lot of visibility in the WooCommerce installation process in the install wizard to certain platforms and plug-ins that add features. So they’re not necessarily written by automatic, but they are plug-ins that for certain use cases are very crucial. So we’re talking for a membership use case let’s say, WooCommerce memberships and WooCommerce subscriptions are prompted as part of the install process of WooCommerce. So if you’re looking to build an integration, I think the first thing you need to decide is, are you competing with an existing extension or is there an opportunity for you to become part of that install wizard and to become a crucial platform for one of the use cases that WooCommerce is identifying as next level for them?

Through the pandemic, we saw how subscription type businesses, membership based businesses really took off and that’s the time that we saw WooCommerce build that into their install process. So if you’re looking to create your own plugin and platform, you can release it through the WordPress.org repository for free. You can release a premium extension through the WooCommerce extension store. It’s an interesting place. I have not made the decision to put any of our platforms of our plugins within the extension store because I like the open source model. I like using WordPress.org and making our plugins as much as possible free for most people to use with other monetization behind it.

Starting the journey as a developer

Abha: I think there are lots of models and some of those things that you’ve just talked about are examples of how you can contribute to open source. So it doesn’t just have to be one model fits all. As we know you can contribute in so many different ways, but you’ve also been a WordCamp organizer along the way. So what made you come into the WordPress community as part of your journey as a developer? When was that moment that you felt, actually I want to do something more in that direction?

Kim: Yeah, I definitely started by attending WordCamps and WordPress meetups. In my area in Pennsylvania we’re based in Reading and we have a meetup an hour west, north and south of us. So we have a Lehigh Valley meetup, a Philadelphia meetup, and a Lancaster meetup that are pretty thriving communities. So I was able to attend those. WordCamp Philadelphia was a pretty flagship location for WordCamps in the US that I was able to attend. My journey into the WordPress community also was my journey into motherhood. So my first child was born in 2008. So it was interesting to watch the community around us grow and at that time a lot of the events that were happening, I didn’t attend early on until after I had my second child in 2011. Probably by 2014 I was getting more involved in the community and attending more events.

I was just at that place in my life that it was more feasible to travel to things with my small children, being a little more independent at that age, but definitely got involved and attended WordCamps and you just get inspired by the energy of the people who are contributing and doing these things. And some of them are developers, some of them would call themself developer, but a lot of them wouldn’t. A lot of them are people like just curious and interested running their own WordPress sites, happy to have found a community of people because a lot of us do work remotely and independently. We don’t have workplaces, we don’t have the water cooler and other places to interact with one another. So I appreciate that events exist that people give their time freely to contribute to these events. Not just for the knowledge building that you get by attending sessions or attending a meetup on a weeknight here and there, but also for that energy that you get by meeting other people who are trying to crush the same problems as you. It’s really exciting to be a part of.

So I did try to start a meetup in our city, but I realized I was pulling the same community from those other three meetups I identified and it didn’t take off and I stopped doing it, I think in part because it was hard to get new energy, get new presenters when it was already these other three communities that were doing their best. My city is very multicultural, Reading has a very large Hispanic population and I thought that by having a meetup in our location we could attract more local people and help people create more financial independence through becoming a freelance developer or building a WordPress business of their own. But I wasn’t the right person I think in our community to lead that effort. So it fell flat. Maybe if I have more time in the future it would be something I revisit, but for now it hasn’t been the right choice.

Abha: But I think that’s the point of contributing isn’t it? It needs to be what’s right for the person at that time. And I know especially if you’re donating all of your time to the project or any time to the project in fact, it should be joyful as much as it can. It needs to be complimentary to the rest of your life. And because in the project it doesn’t help if we lose people through burnout. Very easily done in any volunteering project. But also I personally feel that as you mix with other people, as you come out with different things that you’re doing from WordCamps to maybe working on a release to maybe working on teams or just one of my favorites at the moment to promote is WP Photos, taking a picture, giving the context and sharing it. There are so many different opportunities and they might fit you at different times and I think that all helps as well and it helps the health of a project grow. It helps us work and meet new people and understand different environments and different experiences that people might have.

What working with WooCommerce and WordPress has taught Kim

Abha: So Kim, I’m going to fast forward you a little bit to some of the work that you’re doing now in your day job because you’ve got quite a few exciting projects with Woo at the moment as well. And I wanted to particularly talk about how in the WordPress and WooCommerce space you can be a task juggler and that momentum that you get from that is a positive thing. But I know you’ve talked about before, so yeah I know your Twitter profile even lists you as a task juggler. What do you think that working in Woo and WordPress has taught you about that?

Kim: Well I think being a business owner, being a founder, we wear a lot of hats and we have to be able to jump between different tasks pretty quickly. Often we can’t stay in one silo and specifically work in one area, especially if you operate as a CEO level or a manager level, you’re doing lots of things and responding to your team and unblocking them on things. But at the same time you’re also watching the greater landscape of the direction of WooCommerce, the direction of WordPress. And you need to be aware of where changes are going. You need to provide input if they’re things that you foresee breaking a functionality for your own products, for your own business or for the people building with your products. At this stage, our main plugin has over 100,000 installs. That’s a large number of people who would be impacted by major changes in WordPress that we’re not aware of and we’re not advocating for them.

So WordPress gives you the ability to be as involved as you want in the direction of the product. And a lot of people will say like, “No one’s listening, only the sponsored contributors are getting their voices heard.” That’s not really true. You can advocate for your product and for the people using your product in a way that people building just heads down and the WordPress space can’t because we’re so in touch with the actual people building the sites, using the tools, building sustainable businesses. They might only make $10,000 a year on their membership site, but that’s a huge amount of money to a lot of people. So their voice matters and what they need from the project matters. So definitely within your team, your juggling tasks. Working from home has so much task juggling for me. We have a dedicated office space on our property in Pennsylvania that Jason goes to every day.

I stay in our house because my desk is in our kitchen, so we talked about baking, I can be starting dinner, I can be doing loads of wash, I can be with my dogs and juggling my life and my work in a simultaneous way. I was reflecting earlier, I recorded a video yesterday for our product and I felt myself multitasking in my head thinking ahead to what I was going to say next. And this is kind of sick. I’ve become this deep hardcore task juggler that I’m even juggling my words while I’m speaking. So scary. I don’t know what will happen to me when I actually retire. My brain might melt out of my ear. I don’t know. Some people say multitasking is a lie, that it’s not true, that you can’t multitask. I think that I can multitask but maybe not everyone can, but that’s a story for another day.

Choose your lifestyle, choose your career

Abha: I just love the idea of you working on code in your kitchen. That is something that I’m sure a lot of our listeners will relate to. I know we’ve been doing a lot of research and work with developers all around the world because we are do the Woo. We are really keen on making sure the voices of those you don’t always hear from are reflected and are her too. And I really had some wonderful stories where people are working in their kitchen. I was talking to somebody the other week who we’re going to have on the show next year and she was that afternoon making paella at the same time as writing code and she was doing code on a screen and she had the other hand was just stirring so that the rice didn’t stick and it was just this wonderful image. Luckily she was on video, I was talking to her as well as I could see this kitchen.

It was fabulous. But it is part of everyday life. And I think one of the things that I know is keen, you’re keen to highlight as well is that being a developer allows you to have different aspects of your life that you may not be able to have with a conventional older type of career and that you can find new ways of doing things. And I know about a story you’re going to share as well is that as we all move into this new post COVID world and travel and everything gets so much more expensive to do, being able to have that flexibility is absolutely crucial. But Kim, when you did settle on a career as a developer and particularly in this space, how much of the open source environment and how much of the ability to not necessarily conform, but to be able to pick and choose your lifestyle, how much of that really governed your choice of career?

Kim: Oh, I would say 100%. I’m definitely a person who enjoys life and wants a lifestyle business to a degree. I’ve tried to preserve that as large as we’ve grown. And it’s challenging because the train is going and the train is going fast. And especially through the pandemic, how much our products have grown, it’s been hard to manage and intentionally keep your team small, intentionally stay focused. There are opportunities all over the WordPress space, especially in the membership space. There are opportunities for us to take investment and build something bigger, faster, better. But for now, that’s not the lifestyle that I want and it’s not the example I want to set for my kids. We’re at that point. They’re teenagers, we need to be around with them. And there are so many people I talk to who are my peers in products or in anything within WordPress that make similar decisions that decided that they didn’t want a corporate career, that they couldn’t go see a school play at noon at their preschool, that didn’t want a life where they were absent mostly from their family.

And it’s amazing how many people who are creating their own paths with WordPress have those similar values. I also cook while I’m developing and a big thing of that is my interest in creating sourdough through the pandemic. My father has always been a person who made sourdough bread and people will joke because the number of people talking about sourdough starter and making and nurturing their starter through the pandemic was kind of funny. If you were on Twitter watching people taking photos of their bread and sharing their designs of their bread that they cut and all this stuff. Even within our own team, our other developer, Andrew got very interested in it through the pandemic. We have a gluten-free team member who makes a sourdough. So we have a lot going on in… We have a water cooler channel in our team’s slack that we… It’s mostly bread unfortunately or fortunately for that case.

But it’s been a cool thing to nurture as a side hobby through the pandemic and something that lends itself well to my lifestyle and my work style because I’m in my kitchen and a lot of my sourdough process is kind of come back and forth to it. It’s not a focused many hours making bread. It’s do a little, go do something else, do a little, go do something else. And that’s probably a good thing for anyone to do who is struggling or coding or doing anything. You can’t bang your head against a wall too much.

Abha: 100%.

Kim: Yeah.

Abha: And we were talking about this yesterday and that actually when you are writing code or you’re starting that journey to be a developer, there are times that you just need to reflect to look at the code. If you hit a hurdle to take some time out and come back because that’s the way we learn as well. And reflection is a big part of learning. And I know as a trainer it’s one of the things that I always say when we are doing courses is that, “Don’t try to synthesize all that learning in one space or if you’re stuck on a project, give it time, go and get some air, do something else because our minds carry on working. That’s the whole part of cognitive process. So absolutely, and Bob will be very pleased to hear that Kim and I have a plan for a very good show all about sourdough and developers and it doesn’t involve dancing this time.

So for those who listen to this show regularly, they know we’re also trying to find creative ways of bringing in, we build a story. So if you are a sourdough developer outlet, let me know. Or if you have an equivalent in your culture, maybe you make chapatis that way, maybe you make some other kind of unleavened bread. I want to hear from you and let’s see how many analogies that we can do into that. We may have to wait until Bob’s adventure to Porto so that we can have him cooking at the same time. But it will be an interesting show.

Hiring developers globally

Kim, I’m just going to bring you back to your team at the moment because you have expanded a lot and now you have 14 team members across the world, which is a lovely number and you and Jason still keep your work in as developers as well. And I know that’s very important to you to continue to do. Why did you decide to take your company global and to have a team that is not just based in your home country?

Kim: Our first hires were US based and then we put out a job offer and someone from South Africa, Andrew Lima, who’s been with us now, I think it’s his sixth year with us, which is a very dedicated team member, invaluable team member, reached out for that job opening. And it was interesting to us because we had only worked with two US based contractors. We were nervous about what does it mean to hire internationally? What are the tax implications? What are the business implications? How will we for half the year operate seven hours behind one of our people who’s doing development? How will we be async like that, because Jason and I had worked together for so many years, just the two of us side by side at desks that faced each other, oddly enough. So for us it was uncanny to imagine not having that very close face to face interaction with our team or even being within a relatively close time zone.

So that was interesting, but at the same time, it was the best candidate for the position to hire. We hired actually another person in South Africa right at the same time. And once you enter a certain area, South Africa has a vibrant development community. It has a vibrant WooCommerce community also. Some of the origins of people who work high up in WooCommerce are South Africa based, Johannesburg. So once we had established a relationship with that contractor, it was through his friends and his connections and his local meetup group that we were able to expand and have more people within that community work for us. So I think things happen for a reason. Things happen in kind of the way that they should roll out. And if you’re looking to hire internationally because you think it’s a financially smart decision, you can pay people less, throw that out the window.

That is not the way that you should think about international workforce. You should think about international workforce in a way that’s, look at the pool of talent I can attract, look at the pool of people and their skills that I can work with and let that be why you explore international teams. If you have a reason to work physically in the same office with people, sure, you need to go local. But when you can expand and look globally, there are some time zones that’ll be very challenging to work from like someone in the Philippines. It would be completely opposite us to be able to work for them. At this stage, I think I’m confident that I could do it because I’ve learned how async works, how remote works and how to succeed with that with certain things. But within seven to 10 hours of your time zone, if you can overlap with someone for three hours a day or less even, that’s about our overlap with Andrew and our other team members in South Africa.

You’re kind of at that point that you need to be. They’re finishing their day when you’re starting, so you’re able to review what they’ve done and queue it up for them when they’re starting the next day. So it does work. And like I said, this is an invaluable team member that we wouldn’t have been able to attract if we didn’t think globally. We were only thinking locally.

What is exciting terms of developments with WooCommerce

Abha: And it’s that idea of encouraging different ideas, different views, different approaches, and it’s all valuable. It makes our businesses much more creative and probably much more successful too. So thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Kim, now you’ve worked on a lot of amazing WooCommerce projects. What for you is the most exciting project that you’ve worked on and what are you also most excited about in terms of developments with WooCommerce?

Kim: One that stands out to me, we talked earlier and I think of all the people who have no development skills, who are just entrepreneurial, just even a creative craft person, a creator. The creator economy is kind of a cliche term nowadays, but it is true that people are creating amazing things with their hands and they’re realizing they need to sell it online somehow. So recently I was troubleshooting an issue for a person that creates 38 inch wall clocks, diameter wall clock. So very large wall clocks. And they were having a problem with our sitewide sales plugin and some strike through pricing for a flash sale they were trying to run. But I often stop and think, “Wow, I could never make a clock, first of all. That is not a skill that I have, but this person can, and this person can also build a website.

And when you are doing support for someone, when you’re faced with an issue, you focus in on the issue like, “Wow, they have an issue.” They also might be focused in on the issue they’re having. They’re thinking like, “Oh, it’s broken.” But what we need to do is reframe that in their mind and take them back many steps and say, “Wow, you built your own website. You built an e-commerce website that accepts payment, that makes you money and appreciate that and recognize that.” I think often in support we focus on the roadblock that the customer is facing and we don’t rewind a bit and say, “It’s awesome that you’ve gotten this far. It’s awesome that you have this thing that it exists on the internet and appreciate that.” The same with products and if you’re developing products, you often don’t think of all the people you’re helping when you get a bad review, when you get a negative email from someone.

You can let that ruin your day or you can step back and say, “Wow, my product is used on over 100,000 sites. We’re making people millions of dollars that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to make without the platforms that we enable them to do it without WordPress as a platform that enables them to create.” So rewind a bit and think to that, “That’s pretty amazing.” So yeah, that was a cool eCommerce site. A creator who is entrepreneurial is a designer, decided to build their own website, wanted that finite control, was entrepreneurial not only in what they’re selling but also in how they’re selling it. So it’s really amazing.

Abha: And often those smaller projects are the ones that we take with us. They’re the ones that we’ll always remember and inspire us to keep going. If you’ve been inspired by Kim Coleman and all the things that she said today, then why not give WooCommerce and development a shot? It could be something that changes your life. It’s changed many of our interviewees lives. Then we’ll continue to share their stories. We’re always wanting to hear from developers all around the world. So if you have a story of how you became a WooCommerce builder and some of the wonderful things that you’ve been able to do through that, do let us know and we will be very pleased to hear from you. Kim, where can people find you if they want to continue the conversation?

Kim: Absolutely. I am pretty active on Twitter, ColemanK83 or you can visit our parent company websites, strangerstudios.com. There’s a contact form there to reach me and also links to all of our products for WooCommerce and WordPress in general.

Abha: Thank you. And if you’ve been listening to Kim Coleman on the do the We Builder stories, so make sure you tune in next time and if you have a story to tell, you know where to come. It’s do the Woo.