Nur Ahmad Furlong has been involved with WordPress since 2006 and WordPress training at Friend Of Design.
How did you get into WordPress? How has WordPress been involved in shaping your career?
I first found WordPress when I became interested in reading sustainability blogs way back in 2006 and I noticed one of my favorite blogs has a “Built with WordPress” link at the bottom. That’s when I rushed off and did some investigation which resulted in my first WordPress.com blog site. In fact it’s still online, only has 4 posts, LOL. – http://nomadone.wordpress.com/
Later I used the blog to speak about my career, and when I could not longer modify it by merely adding sidebars I knew I needed to go the self hosted route.
Since then pretty much my entire career has been increasingly centered around WordPress. I was involved in hosting some of the first WordPress meetups in Cape Town a while back and through that initiative established many WP relationships. i.e. People who know me due to WordPress. I can honestly say it’s the one introduction into my career which has made the biggest difference.
Then came the opportunity to teach basic WordPress theme development at Friends of Design Cape Town. The great thing about writing a curriculum was that I had a chance to actually delve into areas of theme development I hadn’t touched yet and learn it myself before teaching.
Tell us about your experience in WordPress training. What type of people are drawn towards WordPress, and why do you think they are?
I’ve taught formal classes and given informal training one on one in coffee shops and even taught the Botswana Auditor Generals Office staff through Friends of Design. Really it’s very varied, though of course those most interested are the ones who are interested in taking their web design & development careers forward. People I’ve trained range from content editors, consultants who run their own blog, accountants, guest house owners, designers of course and yes, even government staff.
I think the main reason people are first drawn towards WordPress is because it’s buzzing around all over, once you know what a blog is it’s not too long before WordPress pops up in a conversation. The reason why people are spreading the Word about WordPress is because, unlike many of the other Open Source CMS’s out there, it’s benefit range is extremely wide, and it can cater for the absolute newbie with very minimalistic requirements right through to someone building extremely complicated websites. It does this very elegantly, and I would say ease of use is one of WordPress’ most salient features.
To be honest I only have very limited experience with Joomla and Drupal, but just getting started with those was an extreme mind bender for me and that wasn’t the case with WordPress. It’s like WordPress slowly reals you in step by step until you require more and more and it keeps giving. 
You can hear I’m a little bit obsessed
Have you had some experience working overseas with WordPress.
I’ve had some varied experiences of using WordPress outside of South Africa though mostly when I had been traveling my skills were not where they are now and I think my travels may have been very different if I traveled with the knowledge of WordPress I have now. I do however work with a US based client whose entire business is running on WordPress base products from simple sites to extremely advanced data management systems all powered by custom themes and plugins.
I think locally people generally have simplistic needs and those who require some more advanced development generally don’t understand what it takes to make WordPress do whatever you want it to do.
Are you attending Word Camp Cape Town? If so, what are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town?
Most definitely attending. I’m most looking forward to interacting with other WordPress crazies like myself, it gets lonely out here when no-one else around you understands what you’re on about. I would be keen to hear anyone’s thoughts on security as there have been some serious hacking incidents going around and there’s still too much speculation about what the best approaches are to secure your WordPress sites.
What is your favourite WordPress theme and/or plugin, and why?
Favourite Theme, wow, what a question. Though I am really no fan of Theme Frameworks, I must say I’ve really enjoyed working with Genesis over the last few months.
It allows me to quickly build a wide range of different types of sites without coding everything from complete scratch each time.
I’m also really loving the range of new responsive themes which Automatic have been releasing, Duster, the precursor to Twenty Eleven being my favorite. They’ve really put a ton of effort into releasing some top class example themes lately.
Favourite Plugins include Backup Buddy, can’t live without it right now as I manage a ton of WordPress sites and sometimes need to move or restore them to previous states.
I’ve even built a deployment package with theme, settings and plugins to roll out on sites which have the same common elements.
Advanced Code Editor Plus – really makes logging in to the dashboard for some quick theme edits super easy. I’ve also got my eye on Managewp, the new service which allows you to manage multiple sites from one location. I’m still hunting for my silver bullet in terms of WP security, though bullet proof security plugin looks like it covers quite a few bases.
Please share one WP tip.
Backup & Upgrade, that’s all I can say. There’s some really scary situations people are getting themselves into by not having backups of theirs sites or by not keeping up with the latest versions of WordPress, themes or plugins.
Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?
In an interview post a while back where I asked some of the top WP developers Worldwide this very question, and now with the question being posed at me I understand what it was like for them.
Here’s what they said back then.
I think an area which has been experimental for some time but is starting to surface a bit now is the WordPress as an App. Meaning sites which have application appeal and manage different types of data like for example a task management. I’ve already worked on a few projects of this nature and I can see it’s coming. We’ll probably see way more themes catering to other devices as well.
A the wide range of Builder themes and other non WordPress site builders shows that people are looking for something they can easily beat into shape themselves. Entrepreneurs, bloggers and the like are all interested in DIY, taking a hands on approach and some of the products being released now are really amazing in terms of catering for that. I think that will mature quite a bit in the next couple of years. I’m still no fan of building a Theme with drag and drop but maybe I just haven’t seen it done the way I imagine it should work best yet. I have some of my own ideas about that but lack of time & advanced development skills still preventing me from tackling it.
Lastly in terms of enterprise use, there are loads of really serious projects being run with WordPress, and though there are still some doubts about whether it’s the appropriate platform, I see way more energy being put into hardening and expanding WordPress to cater for enterprise level needs including security, document management, systems integration, CRM, payment etc. I can’t believe the amount of services which WordPress can now be integrated with, it’s really amazing what people are doing out there.
