6 WordPress ‘Celebrity’ Developers You Should Pay Attention To

As the popularity of WordPress continues to grow, you will find there are a plethora of great developers who not only support the product but are also great figures within the community. From those who contribute to the WordPress core, to developers creating plugins and themes, there are lots of talented people who you can gain a great deal of value from.

So whether you are a WordPress newbie or a seasoned veteran, here are six WordPress celebrity developers you should be listening to.

1. Matt Mullenweg

I couldn’t think of a more influential WordPress ‘celebrity’ to start this list out other than Matt Mullenweg. As a founding developer of WordPress, Matt is somebody in the blogging industry that you certainly should be listening to.

Besides being one of the original developers of WordPress, Matt founded the benevolent deity of WordPress that is Automattic. This company has brought us many well-known applications across the blogging world, including WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, Jetpack, Polldaddy, and much more.

Read more about Matt here or follow him on Twitter: @photomatt.

2. Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk is the creator and owner of Yoast.com, a hugely popular business within the WordPress community that helps to optimize WordPress sites. They offer services and products that help make websites more user-friendly, easier to navigate, more reliable and have faster load times.

Joost is a WordPress developer and SEO expert who has built many popular plugins. Yoast SEO alone is a free plugin with currently over 14 million downloads. If you are wanting to follow an expert WordPress developer specializing in plugin development and SEO, then Joost de Valk and Yoast.com are a good place to start.

Read more about Joost here or follow him on Twitter: @jdevalk.

3. Andrew Nacin

Andrew Nacin is a lead developer for WordPress. As only one of a handful of lead developers, Andrew is certainly someone you should start listening to when it comes to the WordPress community.

As if that is not enough, he also currently works at the U.S. Digital Service at the White House. Anyone who is tasked by the U.S. government to help power the country’s digital systems is worth listening to.

Read more about Andrew here or follow him on Twitter: @nacin.

4. Mark Jaquith

Mark is yet another lead WordPress developer to make the list of people you should start listening to. Besides being one of the lead developers of our favorite open-source platform, Mark is also an independent WordPress consultant with many years of experience.

He has also written many popular plugins for WordPress and has contributed numerous patches to the WordPress core.

Read more about Mark here or follow him on Twitter: @markjaquith.

5. Cory Miller

Are you looking for expert advice on building, maintaining, and securing WordPress sites? If so, then you certainly will want to pay attention to Cory Miller, founder of iThemes. The company builds WordPress themes and plugins, and offers training for any type of user imaginable.

Besides starting iThemes, Cory is the co-author of the book WordPress All-in-One for Dummies and blogs regularly about entrepreneurship and career advice.

Read more about Cory here or follow him on Twitter: @corymiller303.

6. Bill Erickson

In addition to Bill making a few contributions that have been added to WordPress core, he is a contributing member to the Genesis framework – one of the most popular WordPress themes available today.

Not only does Bill develop WordPress code and themes, he has also written many technical tutorials for other developers, helping them to solve problems. In addition, he has also published many different WordPress plugins that help other users of the platform.

Read more about Bill here or follow him on Twitter: @BillErickson.

Wrapping Up

The WordPress community is full of very talented people, including developers. From lead WordPress developers who contribute to the core product to those developers that have created awesome plugins and themes, there are lots of people who you should pay attention to.

Individual bloggers, small businesses, and even large corporations are using WordPress today. The contributions of those listed above, along with many others have made this platform a great place for us all to use.

Which of the ‘celebrity’ WordPress developers do you currently follow? Who else would you add to this list? Please share in the comments below.

Image Credits: Michael Dorausch, John O’Nolan, Randy Stewart