Profiles

Accessibility, art, music, exploring other cultures, AI

I had to dig deep to really find the correct year, but now I can tell you that I touched WordPress for the first time in 2007. I was used to building static pages with Dreamweaver. On and off I tried to work with WordPress, but at that time I wanted to create all kinds of things that would have required me to learn how to code with PHP. Stuff that required relational fields and such (and of which, at that time, I didn’t even know what it was called). Then I left that alone for a bunch of years, and only occasionally used it to create blogging sites.

In the meantime I was using CMS Made Simple™ as my go to Open Source CMS to create funky stuff with, because using Smarty was easier for me than “from scratch” PHP. I have dyscalculia, so coding is a nightmare for me anyway. But… When WordPress 5.x series came out, I came back to it. And the day I discovered I could create almost anything I wanted with custom fields (2019), and that I could immensely speed up my on the fly design / front end process with a Page builder, is the day I fell in love with WordPress again.

And now that Full Site Editing has made such progress, I’m a happy camper working with FSE Themes. I left page builders behind in 2022. Since 2026 my new stick horse is that you REALLY don’t need a page builder to create a well designed WooCommerce web shop. It can be done with a block theme, based on the TT5 core theme. Been there, done that. It improved site speed like crazy, and revenue went up by 21% compared to the year before.

Now I am a very happy active WordPress community member, online globally, and offline mostly in the local Düsseldorf community but also traveling all over Europe to speak at WordCamps and meetups. Almost every year you can find me at the larger events in Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland and The Netherlands.

I can’t believe there was a time when I had forgotten how much fun being an active member of this magnificent open-source community actually is!