Author: Thomson Muriyadan

WordPress has more than 50,000 public plugins. Should you build the next one? Will it be worthwhile maintaining it over the next five years? How will people discover your plugin? What activities can suck you away from building great plugins? How do you land up with great reviews for your plugins? Does it make sense to listen to customer feedback? How do you run a business around WordPress plugins and make money?

Those are some of the questions you will get answer for, in Nirav’s session.

Nirav is on an entrepreneurial journey for last 17 years – creating a series of successful (and impactful) businesses on the way. He started India’s first electronic magazine – while still in college, founded a top notch web services company, localized Linux and OpenOffice to Gujarati, authored two books, and took a business from 0 to six figures in two years. And then he ventured into WordPress. This session is going to highlight some of the biggest lessons he’s learned facing the ground realities of building a business around WordPress plugins.

Modern websites like Facebook and Youtube keep you hooked all day, while you visit most WordPress blogs only on occasion. What’s the difference? Social sites allow you to participate in the creation and sharing of content, so of course you stick around! Learn how to use BuddyPress to turn your own visitors into highly engaged participants, who regularly log into your site to produce content. With this power, you can build sites for collaborative education, social blogging, social commerce, social portfolios and more, all on WordPress.

Michael is a BuddyPress enthusiast, with experience designing and building themes and plugins.

He is co-founder of BuddyBoss, a company that helps entrepreneurs to create successful BuddyPress communities. He previously managed the development and growth of SongLyrics.com, one of the most highly-trafficked websites in the world with over 100 million annual visitors. He has spoken at WordCamp Pune, WordCamp Miami, BuddyCamp Brighton (UK) and several universities about BuddyPress and web design.