Growing your product by building a community

I gave this talk at PHP South Africa in Cape Town on 28 September 2017. The slides are fairly bland out of context, but the talk was about encouraging people to build a community around their product in order to grow usage and development. The points are all lessons taken from the WordPress project.

Transcript

1. Growing your product by building a community Lessons from WordPress
2. Go open-source GPL MIT Creative Commons Apache
3. Support your users Public Searchable Open-source wordpress.org/support
4. Document everything Inline documentation User guides Open-source developer.wordpress.org
5. Make it extensible Well-documented Plugin framework Open-source wordpress.org/plugins
6. Make it accessible Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) User testing Open-source make.wordpress.org/accessibility
7. Localise it Localisation functions Easy to do (Glotpress) Open-source translate.wordpress.org
8. Organise events Do it yourself Document your processes Open-source make.wordpress.org/community
9. Provide a platform Live chat (Slack, Mattermost, IRC) Asynchronous communication (P2) Open-source make.wordpress.org
10. Go open-source Support your users Document everything Make it extensible Make it accessible Localise it Organise events Provide a platform
11. Hugh Lashbrooke hugh.blog @hlashbrooke automattic.com make.wordpress.org