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
   

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2. Go open-source
   GPL
   MIT
   Creative Commons
   Apache
   

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3. Support your users
   Public
   Searchable
   Open-source
   wordpress.org/support
   

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4. Document everything
   Inline documentation
   User guides
   Open-source
   developer.wordpress.org
   

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5. Make it extensible
   Well-documented
   Plugin framework
   Open-source
   wordpress.org/plugins
   

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6. Make it accessible
   Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
   User testing
   Open-source
   make.wordpress.org/accessibility
   

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7. Localise it
   Localisation functions
   Easy to do (Glotpress)
   Open-source
   translate.wordpress.org
   

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8. Organise events
   Do it yourself
   Document your processes
   Open-source
   make.wordpress.org/community
   

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9. Provide a platform
   Live chat (Slack, Mattermost, IRC)
   Asynchronous communication (P2)
   Open-source
   make.wordpress.org
   

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10. Go open-source
    Support your users
    Document everything
    Make it extensible
    Make it accessible
    Localise it
    Organise events
    Provide a platform
    

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11. Hugh Lashbrooke
    hugh.blog
    @hlashbrooke
    automattic.com
    make.wordpress.org
    

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