I’m a big fan of WordPress and have been developing sites on and off with it for about five years. During that time, I’ve come to realize one of the best features of WordPress is the community. If you need help, more often than not you can find it if you look in the right places.
But for those new to WordPress or with limited development skills, it can seem a bit intimidating to ask questions on the WordPress forums or to seek out advice on platforms like Twitter (an excellent source of help by the way). While WordPress the software is opensource, many businesses have sprung up around the software, whether its’s premium themes, plugins, hosting or other niche services. These services are great if you have the ability to pay but not so much if you’re bootstrapping an idea or don’t have a large budget for your website.
People who are in this community share resources all the time, more often than not they do it for nothing because that’s the WordPress way. But for people new to the platform, it’s difficult to find an entry point when asking for advice or when looking for a deal on a theme or plugin. So I thought about the potential for creating a barter network for the WordPress community where people could feel comfortable offering some form of non-cash payment for WordPress products and services.
The idea is not about replacing the natural goodwill that exists among WordPress users who often share their expertise with no expectation of a return. It’s about celebrating this fact, but also about raising people’s awareness to the potential for alternative forms of reimbursement for services or products in the WordPress ecosystem. For some, this could mean something as simple as offering to trade a blog post about a developer’s product in return for some assistance, or an offer to help beta test a new plugin for a point in the right direction. Like any barter network, the items that could be traded are limited only to your imagination and the idea is to keep it simple, lighthearted and yet, helpful at the same time.
So with that, I launched a preview of my idea at wpswap.com. For now, I’m hoping to open people’s eyes to the potential for a network to share WordPress resources by using the #wpswap hashtag on Twitter where appropriate. I’ll also be adding some new features to the preview site in the next week or so while the full site continues to take shape behind the scenes.
So in return for a link to this post, I’ll swap you a retweet or two on Twitter. #wpswap
