A while back Pankaj e-mailed me to ask me if I’d be willing to answer a few questions for a Hindi blogzine Nirantar he was working on that was going to concentrate on WordPress. I was more than happy to answer the man’s questions. The catch was of course that the final interview would be in Hindi. You can see it right here in all it’s glory. However if your Hindi is a bit rusty like mine, then here’s the English version. To spice things up I’ve decided to include some early mock ups of Manji so that you can see where I was originally heading with the design.

1. Tell us how you started with WP Started off with WordPress over a year ago. This was right after Moveable Type decided to sell out and shoot everyone who contributed to the initial success of the product in the foot. From the plugin developers, to the beta testers, etc, it just felt really wrong to continue using that system even though it was a pretty good looking package.

I started hunting around, and came down to Textpattern, WordPress and one more system which I can’t for the life of me remember. At that time there was a lot of reviews popping up all over the place with people jumping ship. I actually actively started hunting down for an alternative the very same night, even though, and I remember this clearly I’d just finished skinning and learning the basic tag structure for Moveable Type.

There was a bit of confusion at the time regarding the license for Textpattern, and I was not having that again, so I went for WordPress, mainly because it was fun to install, and funnily enough, with Scripty Goddess jumped ship to the same platform, I didn’t need any more endorsement than that.

2. What prompted you to come up with Manji Originally I used to only post on the Showcase section of the forums, mainly because that was one area I knew I could contribute to. If someone came up with a design I might be able to help them out. Now around this time when I began getting to grips with everything Michael released Kubrick, and the Internet was never the same :).

Problem was that Michael did such a good job of it that EVERYONE and their dog had a Kubrick themed blog. Nothing wrong with that, but variety breeds for a healthier environment, which is why it’s good to have alternatives.

Another reason, and really the main reason for Manji was because I wanted to contribute to the WordPress community. I felt that this was a community that really deserves my attention and I wanted to give something back for this code that others where spending hours upon hours perfecting and tweaking etc. It’s the great things about an open source community, you can have as much or as little involvement as you care for.

3. Development cycle of Manji was an interesting one(secret site) tell us about it and how different team members interacted. Okay so I wanted to give something to the wordpress community. What the hell are web standards? Why is everyone soo keen on not using tables? I threw myself into reading up on these things, and came to the conclusion that well, I’m not a programmer. There was a lot (still a lot) for me to learn and implement in a good and useful way. Sure I could come up with a nice pretty design, but my code would have been aweful.

So I took a page from my day job. Architects design, Engineers make it happen. Except I reversed the roles in this case, and I was the architect. Hanging out on the forums it was very clear who could css himself out of any situation, and that was Root.

I contacted Root and asked him if he’d be interested in this little endeavour. He was well up for it, and we started work. He originally wanted to just watch and add and tweak, but after I started making a complete potato of the design (see the original Manji mock up), it became clear that I should stay away from the original structure, and come in later and add and tweak to suit the design, you know all the details that designers have to get right.

We started development when Wordpress was still in version 1.3 Alpha 2 or something like that, the theme changer had just been implemented and so I set up a dev blog that we both had access to and got to work.

At the peak of production I remember one Sunday where we spent 14 hours solid online (barring toilet breaks and food) till we got all the structure sorted out. It was truly amazing to watch where we started to where we got to in the course of the day.

Root unfortunately had to leave when we were 80% complete, and so I had the daunting task to try and finish off the coding. In the process, David Prince came aboard and helped me out sort a few things, and it was nice to have someone else to talk to as, I’d gotten used to is.

Finally Joshua stepped in since he was making loads of excellent comments upon the initial release of Manji, which I’d like to add was the first theme for 1.5 apart from the classic and default, Chris Davis came back with Persian converted like a day later, but still, beat you by a day Chris :P.

4. Have you got a better understanding of how online communities interact by getting into WP. Do you think online communities add to our understanding of how in general we talk. I’ve been online since 1997. When I say online, I mean part of a message board or whatever. Blogging has created something a lot more personal. All those messages that I wrote have been lost into the ether, whereas the words on my blog are mine forever. I put a lot more attention and effort into them and as such a lot more of me comes out.

5. In what ways you think WP can be improved. Are you doing any thing about it. WordPress is being improved as we speak. After the theme I got to thinking that the one thing I don’t like about WordPress was the administration panel. So I contacted all the people I thought would be interested in doing something about it. A little later Michael got the same thought, so I contacted him and asked him to join in on the project, to which he was more than happy to do. That’s when the message got skewed and Matt thought that we were actually forking. After explaining that this wasn’t the case Matt’s come on board as well. Joen joined us just after, and we’ve got some lurkers (notably Ryan Boren) as well chipping into conversations here and there.

We’ve got a mockup of the admin panel, but it changes every time it gets sent around but I will say that everyone on the team is pretty excited with the initial ideas we’ve been throwing around and everyone can’t wait to start using it.

By the time we’re though there won’t be any reason for anyone not to use WordPress, it will be the classiest LOOKING and functioning weblog authoring tool on the net. Free and yet Priceless.