The folks at SKT Themes asked to interview me related to my involvement in the WordPress community.

Here’s an excerpt:


Q. What interesting feature do you think you would like to see in WordPress and is currently missing?

A Configuration management. Every time you change the site configuration or build new functionality on a live site you’re taking big risks.

Best practices say that work should be done locally or in a development environment. But if you’re clicking buttons in the UI, that info gets saved to the database. How do you get that work back to production?

You could overwrite the live database, but that could be even riskier on a live site. You could write a script to update the correct database records, but that’s beyond my expertise and too inconvenient for most people to do regularly.

The WP-CFM plugin accomplishes a lot, but it doesn’t cover everything. If configuration management was in WordPress core it would unlock many interesting possibilities.

You can learn more about configuration management generally as well as what the Drupal project does for this in my presentation from DrupalCon 2020: https://youtu.be/S9GLT4ssj2Q.

Q. Out of the current plugins and themes which one do you like the most and why?

A I don’t know if I like it the most per se, but there’s one plugin you may not have ever heard of that I use on every WordPress site: Content Views.

content view

I have a background in the Drupal Community, where the Views module allows you to build lists of dynamic content very easily. Content Views is about the closest thing I’ve found in WordPress and it’s such a hard worker.


Thank you to the folks at SKT Themes for asking for an interview and putting this together. You can read the full interview here: I Take Every Opportunity I Can To Meet My Heroes In The WordPress Community.

Categories: WordPress

David Needham

David Needham is the Team Lead of the Technical Curriculum Development team at Datadog. When he's not blogging about productivity and faith at davidneedham.me or speaking at conferences, you can find him streaming on Twitch or playing fun board games with his wife and kids in Champaign, IL.

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