Ever since I started out with mtwoblog.wordpress.com I have been fascinated by the whole WordPress ecosystem. Among many factors like the platform, the themes, the plugins, it also largely includes the active, growing community behind WordPress. One such community is WordPress Colombo which is essentially a group of WP enthusiasts in Sri Lanka on meetup.com.

The main organizers of the events are Dasun Edirisinghe and Mahangu Weerasinghe who take great interest in the talks as well as the audience who attend the meetups.

Meetup #2

My introduction to this group was with ‘WordPress Sinhala and Introduction to Theme Development’ held on November 24, 2015 at Royal College.

Dasun spoke about what a WordPress theme is and went on to discuss about how to create a good theme. Next was about how the Sri Lanka community can contribute to adding Sinhala as a language in the next WordPress update.

Overall it was a useful event for me and we also got some WordPress stickers – and I love them.

Meetup #3

The latest meetup, Introduction to WordPress REST API was held a few days ago (April 5) at John Keells Auditorium. Prasath Nadarajah gave an intro to REST API itself and them discussed about its implementation within the WordPress platform. One advantage is that it will open up the Front End of the platform allowing for various implementations. This is because the CMS will no longer be coupled to its default Front End.

The event was indeed insightful as it gave us a look at where WordPress is heading in terms of the API. I managed to learn a lot and in essence ‘WordPress is here to stay’

The discussions were useful as well since the audience themselves were able to participate and share their ideas and experience. One of the discussions was about the WooCommerce plugin – which apparently powers over 37% of all online stores. There were also discussions about introducing it to schools to get students involved with development using the WordPress platform.

Mahangu mentioned about ‘If you are thinking about scaling, you are doing something right’. This is something that’s gonna stick with me for some time.

Conclusion

WordPress as a platform powers about 25% of the websites in the world, (including this one). I am happy to have found it and to see the platform grow stronger serving a better Web for us all. Looking forward to see how WordPress Colombo can be part of the contribution towards it!