It is almost a week after the exciting WordCamp Sofia 2012 event. However I have one more interview with one of the speakers on the event to publish – the interview with Hristo Pandjarov. His presentation on the event was named “WordPress, Football and a bit eCommerce”. Now let’s see his thoughts about WordPress and the event.
1. Please tell us with a few words who you are and what you do?
Right now I am working at SiteGround web hosting and I am in charge of the additional resources we provide to our customers. That includes making free templates, writing tutorials and helping people if they need assistance with our free resources. In addition, I try to participate as often as possible in the WordPress forums and I am happy that SiteGround allows me to spend some of my working time doing this.
2. When and how you first found WordPress?
I first discovered WordPress when I started working for SiteGround as a supporter back in 2008. We have many customers that use the application for their sites and I gradually gathered a lot of knowledge while helping different people solve their problems. Then I made few websites based on WordPress for friends of mine and few personal ones which I keep on developing since then.
3. Do you remember the first site that you build with WordPress? How does it changed your work?
Yes, it was a history-related site that I started with two of my friends. They were the ones to create the content and I was doing the design and maintenance work. This project helped me realize how important it is to make sites that you don’t need to intervene all the time. WordPress gave my friends everything they needed to add and format content so my constant attention was not needed.
4. Why should business use WordPress for their sites?
WordPress is a really good choice for starting a business website because it is secure, efficient and easily scalable. Security is really important for all sites and especially for the business ones, and WordPress is one of the few applications you can trust that won’t fail you. Second, you can install it on a regular shared hosting without any performance issues and then grow it with your business without having to constantly upgrade the servers that run it. Last but not least, there is a great community behind WordPress. Sure, it started as a blog platform, but now you can make everything you want with WordPress – galleries, online stores, forums, social networking sites – you name it.
5. What is your favorite part about WordCamp events?
WordCamp is a great place to meet interesting people, share thoughts and have a great time. That inspires me all the time so much. When you make WordPress sites you always look at other people’s work – plugins, solutions to problems, themes, etc. It is great to be able to meet the actual people behind those things. And of course the after parties are not to be missed!
6. What are your impressions of WordCamp Sofia 2012?
It was a great event with something for everyone – for devs, expert and novice WordPress users. It was a well organised event with a lot of visitors and great speakers. Loved the atmosphere and the overall feeling of the event.
7. Where do you see WordPress in the next five years?
For many years WordPress is massively used for so much more than blog websites. Actually it’s one of the best CMS apps out there if not the best. I believe that now the WordPress community has accepted that and more effort will be put towards adding features to the core functionality that we now have to use plugins to achieve. As Matt Mullenweg said in this year’s “State of the Word” speech, WordPress should allow people to build their online applications on it. So I think there are a lot of interesting stuff coming in the WP world in the near future.
8. Final comments
I am happy that I had the chance to be part of this great event. I hope that there will be much more WordCamps ahead for me to visit and more interesting people to meet.
Thank you, Hristo for your interview! This is the last part of the series interviews with the speakers on the WordCamp Sofia 2012. Keep tuned for more useful tips on WordPress coming soon!
