Today we have Wibowo Sulistio as the guest in our WP-Professional of the Month series. Nicknamed Bowo, he is one of the popular names in the Indonesian WordPress community.
A web designer, developer and the creator of WPNewsboard.com, he now has 8 plugins in the WordPress repository. He is an ardent believer in the Open-Source philosophy and takes care to do his bit for society.
You can connect with him on Facebook, and Instagram
How did you get introduced to WordPress? Can you please explain the journey?
To be honest, I can’t quite remember one exact moment when I was introduced to it. It was probably back in 2006 as I was exploring ways to write online, a.k.a. blog. I landed upon the hosted, multisite setup by edublogs.org and decided to set up a simple blog there. The blog is no longer online, but there’s the first Wayback Machine archive of it on July 2007.
Where are you based? Does your location influence your work?
I’m based in a small town in East Java, Indonesia. I’ve been working remotely since 2008, first as an employee of a US-based NGO, WiserEarth, which has a social networking site for people around the world working towards a just and sustainable future… and then as a freelance web designer and developer since 2014. So, no, location does not really influence my work unless there’s no internet connection there or the connection is patchy… 😅
Please share some of the projects you are currently involved with.
Two projects I’m currently involved with are Re.Search, which is working to help civil society organizations in Indonesia be more resilient, and Komunitas Taufan, a small charity supporting children with cancer and other high-risk illnesses that I co-founded with friends here back in 2014.
What makes WordPress so special to you?
The open nature of it I guess. I can just go into the admin side and start building, go into the code and start creating, and go into the community and start mingling and contributing. It’s a welcoming ecosystem allowing for multi-directional, mutually beneficial relationships of many different kinds. There’s a kinship built via lines of code. Remarkable really, when you think of it.
What is your favorite a) Plugin b) Theme c) Hosting and why? (other than your products)
I’m a fan of Oxygen Builder, which serves the function of both plugins and themes. A blank canvas provides you with the freedom to build many different things on top of it, especially if you know your way around PHP, HTML, CSS and JS. I like that it outputs lean and clean HTML, which you can structure freely in the builder.
As for hosting, I’ve converted to VPS since I started using EasyEngine back in 2015. Nowadays, I like RunCloud as my primary server management panel. Stable, versatile and performant enough for most of my site-building requirements.
What do you think about the future of WordPress?
I think the future still looks bright, despite the emergence of no-code, hosted solutions like WebFlow et al., and also with AI starting to be able to do some of the work designers and developers do. If you need something custom, but not from scratch, it still allows you to go a long way with your builds. The other thing going for it is the community. There’s that proverb, “if you want to go fast, go alone… but if you want to go far, go together”, which I think applies to what’s been powering WordPress into its 20th anniversary this year and which I think will allow it to go another 20 years into the future.
What would you like to see implemented in WordPress as a Core feature?
Being a CMS at heart, I guess having a good UI for custom post types, custom taxonomies and custom fields. We need to rely on plugins so far. Otherwise, GraphQL support that is on par with REST API support.
How do you keep abreast of the developments in the WordPress field? Which resources do you rely on?
I built wpnewsboard.com back in 2014 exactly for that reason. It aggregates the latest articles, podcasts and videos from 100+ WordPress-centric sources. I also subscribe to major newsletters like wpMail.me, The WP Weekly and The WhiP.
What do you think about the acquisition saga in WordPress?
I guess it’s good that there are now more opportunities for dev shops to have a decent exit strategy for the hard work they’ve done over the years, and that the bigger players are doing consolidation to impact the ecosystem in a more effective and significant way. I hope it continues.
What are your thoughts on WordPress meetups and WordCamps? Is the community active at your place?
I love them. I’ve been a WordCamp speaker (Denpasar-Bali, 2016) and co-organizer (Ubud-Bali, 2017 and Jakarta, 2019), and it’s wonderful to be with your peers offline. It’s where you truly get the ‘community’ feel of WordPress. Now that the pandemic has somewhat subsided, I look forward to participating in local/nearby meetups and WordCamps again.
You have several plugins in the WordPress repository. How do you get the inspiration to build a product? Also share some tips for new plugin devs.
I get inspiration mainly by using and trying many different plugins in the .org directory. Usually, when I can’t quite find what I need, or what’s available doesn’t quite work the way I needed it to, I’d go and create one on my own. A good case is my Debug Log Manager plugin. It’s now much more convenient to work with debug.log files. Nothing on the .org directory can do what it does at the time I created it.
I’m actually a new plugin developer as well, starting out on February 2022. However, if I have some tips to offer, it would be to start by building a simple plugin that resembles an existing one and submit it to the .org directory. You’ll learn a lot of things just by doing that. Then, for the next plugin, try and identify a problem for which, no good enough solution exists yet and try and go solve it.
More about his impressive Admin and Site Enhancements Plugin to Improve Admin Workflows
Life has both success and failure. Please share one mistake that you made early in your career.
Not knowing how to debug properly. That could’ve saved many hours and days of getting lost in Google and forums, trying to figure out why my website is showing the white screen of death.
What is Wibowo like away from WordPress? What are your ways of chilling?
I like to cycle and go on day hikes with my wife and toddler. We also started to go camping in the great outdoors.
The WP-Content team wishes Bowo all the very best for his future endeavors and hopes to see him make more contributions to WordPress.
Meet our previous WP-Professionals of the Month – Vikas Singhal, JB Audras, Ellen Bauer, Ben Townsend, Michelle Frechette
I am so glad that I stumbled on your (Jyolsna JE) profile of Bowo. It’s fine to simply download a wordpress plugin like Admin & Site Enhancements, but it’s entirely refreshing to learn the Why’s of Bowo using his talents as a front end developer and an end user to legitimately help others around the world to possibly create impact because as he quotes, “if you want to go fast, go alone… if you want to go far, go together. Thanks Bowo for the inspiration and thank you Jyolsna for bringing out fantastic insights through brillian questions.