Today Is International WordPress Day

The fine folks over at WPCandy.com have come up with something they call, International WordPress Day. This is the one day out of the year where users are encouraged to blog about WordPress by sharing tips and tricks related to the software, thanking Automattic, writing about how it’s helped your business or perhaps why you prefer using WordPress over a competing CMS.

With that being said, I think I’ll partake in this international celebration with a little speech of my own.

First off, a hearty thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the rest of the development team for the WordPress.org project. But the development team reaches far beyond those who have committ access to the core and I applaud every single one of you out there who has taken the time to create a patch for a feature in WordPress, to fix a bug, or to plug a security hole. Thank you for making things easier on the core dev team, as well as for those who have no idea how code (such as myself).

Thank you Automattic for being a company that fully supports open source software. Although Automattic is a privately held company which is in business to make some coin, they have used some of that money to further the development of the free version of WordPress.

My thanks goes out to Matt Mullenweg for creating WordPress as a framework, rather than a “this is the way I like it so deal with it” piece of software. Because of the decision to create this framework from scratch, it’s enabled folks from all over the world to use WordPress in ways that were not envisioned, such as user directories ect. This powerhouse of a framework is one of the reasons why so many people have been able develop additional functionality through themes and plugins.

This is starting to feel like ThanksGiving, but I wanted to give my last heart felt thanks to the community that surrounds this piece of software. What a hell of a community it is. People are always willing to help each other through their trials and tribulations. With podcasts, tutorials, how-tos and the awesome WordPress Codex maintained by volunteers, the WordPress community is one of the best communities I’ve ever had the pleasure of being a part of.

I think that will do it for this years International WordPress Day. Awesome idea from the guys over at WPCandy. Looking forward to participating next year. If you haven’t done so already, I highly advise you to participate in this event on your own blog.