Here’s a little bit about how that happened and what it means to me:

In 1999, I got what I consider my first job in the web industry. I was hired as an “HTML Engineer” at InsuranceMyWay.com.au (now defunct), a company that allowed users to compare different insurance policies online and then complete their purchase via the web. It was pretty cutting-edge stuff back then, especially in little old Western Australia. At that job, I started playing with PHP and MySQL and both technologies just clicked for me. Since then, I’ve worked with the LAMP stack pretty much exclusively and have never looked back.

Fast-forward to around 4 or 5 years ago, when I installed and themed my first copy of WordPress at the job I had at the time. I was in charge of making most technology-related decisions there and chose WordPress as the ideal platform for our company to launch a customized blog with a unique theme, integration with a specialized search system and a basic categories implementation (tags were only available as a plugin at the time!). I had seen and heard a lot about WordPress, but I’d never worked with it directly until that point.

After that initial project, I was involved in a few smaller projects here and there with WordPress for friends and some smaller clients (I’ve always done consulting work on the side), but never anything too serious. In amongst all of this, I had read up on WordPress MU — the multi-user/blog-network version of WordPress. When I quit my last full time job, I used WPMU as the backbone of MyBabyOurBaby.com, which at the time was probably one of the most customized installations of WPMU around. That gave me about 7 months of doing nothing but looking at WPMU code, figuring out the internals, integrating with bbPress and just generally becoming a bit of a WordPress Pro.

With the publicity from MyBabyOurBaby, I spent the next year working on WordPress projects of one variety or another pretty much exclusively. I did everything from small one-off plugins to do some custom RSS feed work, to working with sites like Mashable.com to help them tune, optimize and scale their very large installations.

I got very used to the freedom and flexibility of the freelance life, but somewhere in amongst all of this, a little over a year ago, I sat down in Huntington Square Park and asked myself “if I were to go and work for a company, full time, which one would it be?” I wrote a list of names down on a card in order of preference. The first name on that list was Automattic.

And so – 3 days before Christmas last year (normal calendars start to blur and not mean much when you’re not on a normal schedule), I finally got around to officially applying for the “Code Wrangler” position listed on the Automattic Jobs page. I didn’t hear anything back, and figured I wasn’t up to scratch. Chance was on my side though, because Matt was speaking at an upcoming MySQL meetup being held at CNet. I accosted him there and asked if he’d seen my application, which he apparently hadn’t. A few days later he got in touch with me and we worked out a contract agreement to do some test projects so that we could both see if I was a good fit for Automattic and vice versa.

That was in January. A few weeks ago I signed my full time contract, so now here I am, starting my first Monday as an official Automattician, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve met a bunch of the people at the company and so far they are an incredibly smart, passionate and dedicated group of people. All of them.

Today I start with the customary 3 weeks of user support for WordPress.com that all employees start with. I’m guessing that by the end of the 3 weeks, I’ll  know the WP.com platform pretty intimately After that, I’ll probably continue working with the IntenseDebate guys on their impressive comment/reputation system and then we’ll see where things go from there.

You could say I’m excited.

I’m not going to go into great detail on how to actually implement all of these ideas, I’m just putting them out there.

Real-World Examples

Content Management System

According to Matt Mullenweg, over 50% of people who are downloading and installing WordPress now use it as a CMS rather than a blog. If you look around on this site you might notice that everything here is actually managed by WordPress. All of the pages outside of the blog are actually “Pages” in WordPress as well. The tools and plugins available for using WP like this are improving every day, so expect to see a lot more of this.

Address Book

Use WordPress to store and manage your Address Book/contacts list? Why not, Simon Wilson does. He made a WordPress Address Book plugin that you can download and install to do the same.

Prologue

This is an interesting experiment from Automattic (the company that “sponsors” WP development, amongst other things) that turns a WP installation into something resembling a private Twitter. It has turned out to be very valuable for them for internal communications and they use it to keep up with what everyone in the (distributed, entirely virtual) company is working on. You can download the Prologue Theme and install it to try it out.

Prologue Theme for WordPress

MyBabyOurBaby

One of my own projects, MyBabyOurBaby, took WordPress MU (the multi-user version) and wrapped it up in a completely different skin, modified all sorts of things, and created a shared environment for people to capture and store memories about their children. Most people have no idea it’s based on WP until I tell them because it’s completely hidden beneath the hood.

MyBabyOurBaby - scrapbooking for babies

Ideas For Other Applications

Task Manager

I’ve long been on the look-out for a decent online task/project management tool that I can use to keep track of what I’m doing. I’m yet to find the perfect solution, so at one point I got to thinking – what if I built one using WordPress as the core?

• Categories could represent Projects
• Each post would be a task/something that needed to be done
• Post even support “parent posts” for nested lists of tasks
• Meta fields could be used to apply priorities, due dates, etc
• There’s already a user management system in there
• Themeing is handled obviously, but you’d want to build a very customized one to handle this system
• There are plugins available for email notifications and other features that you’d want along the way

It could just work.

Job Application Manager

Of all people, I was talking to Matt Mullenweg (lead developer of WordPress) and he mentioned that they don’t have a good system for dealing with job applications (all emailed to as single mailbox, then they have to rely on someone to check that and sort through them). That got me to thinking, why not use a  WordPress installation to store them? It could work something like this:

1. Instead of applying by email, applicants would fill out a simple form.
   1. They would enter their personal details (stored as custom meta-fields) and
   2. Write a cover letter, which would become the body of the post
   3. Either copy-paste their resume (which would then become “Page 2″ of the post) or upload a file perhaps (upload into media library and link to this post).
   4. They would select which position they are applying for from a list of positions (which is actually a list of Categories from WordPress)
2. Once they’re done, they would submit their application and it would just automatically get added to your WP install. At this point you could:
   1. Get notifications via RSS by simply subscribing to the feed for the whole blog
   2. Subscribe to a specific category if you’re only interested in applications for the position
   3. Use something like the Post Notification plugin to send out an email to anyone in your company who’s interested in hearing about new applicants.
   4. You could even change this process to make use of something like Peter’s Collaboration Emails to post applications as Drafts until someone approves them
3. Now you’ll build up a “blog” full of applications, which you can search, filter, display however you want (custom themes could provide clean list views, or any other variation), and if nothing else, you’ve got your information in a database-powered backend. You can even comment on applications using the normal commenting functionality, and possibly use tags or another category to shortlist suitable people.

I suppose imitation is the greatest form of flattery right? So we should take this as a compliment?

The idea of the site is to give parents and families a secure place online where they can compile a journal of memories for their children. We’re focusing primarily on photos right now, but hope to include video and audio as we progress. Here’s a couple of the things that I think make MyBaby unique or worth a look:

• Unlimited uploads (backed by Amazon S3)
• You choose to have your book open to the public (for reading), or completely invite-only.
• Once they join your book via invitation, other people can add their own photos and stories to your book as well
• We have some really beautiful book themes (and more coming) care of Ray Hernandez/Stoodio
• We’ve created a forum on the site as well to allow people to interact across books (anyone who’s a member can post) and ask each other questions etc.
• You can try it out for free!

Right now, people get 3 weeks to try it out for free, after that, if they like it, it’s $8 a month to continue using the service. This covers you for as much as you (and all the members of your book) want to upload. You can pay for more than a month at a time and get a discount as well. We’re trying out a slightly different method of payment where subscriptions aren’t actually available in a traditional set-your-details-and-forget way. What we’re doing is allowing anyone who’s a member of the book to contribute by paying for as much (or as little) as they like. We’re hoping that rather than the parent having to pay every month, other people in the family will chip in and cover the cost of keeping the book running if they see value in it.

Ray and I are really excited now that it’s live, and very nervous to see where it goes. We’ve spent a lot of time working on this and refining things, so it’s great to finally have some other people using it.

Now for the real work — keeping it up and running and constantly improving it for our new users!