Cal Evans from Pantheon gave us an inside view of the Nashville wordpress community during an interview at Wordcamp.

Evans explained how Pantheon successfully launched its WordPress offering in April, a month or so before WCN14. Their platform provides customers with three distinct environments: development, testing, and production.

The environments allow developers to work on new website versions and WordPress updates
in development, then move it to a different “space” for testing. There, they can share it with clients and ensure it will function as expected in an environment identical to the production environment. The final stage, production, pushes the website out live.

For developers who’ve manually managed WordPress updates and site changes through these stages, the service is revolutionary, Evans says.

He estimates PHP is the core programming language for about 50 percent of the web, and WordPress (which uses PHP) accounts for nearly 19 percent of the Internet’s websites. Drupal, another popular content management system (CMS), runs about 8 percent of the Internet. Each has its place, but one perk of using WordPress, especially in Nashville, is the extensive tech community around it.

For example, the leaders user groups in Nashville get together to work out dates and time so WordPress and PHP groups don’t meet simultaneously, to inspire as much cooperation as possible. Nashville’s community of tech developers and users converge at Podcamp and BarCamp; monthly WordPress Developers’ Breakfasts discuss the newest updates and tips and tricks to get the most out of WordPress. WordCamp focuses a lot on new and intermediate users but also empowers those wading into development, and more advanced sessions try to speak directly to developers with case studies and coding examples.

Cal Evans travels a lot, and has observed tech communities in cities across the country. Few, he says, rival what’s going on in Nashville’s.

This interview was provided by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company that connects buyers and sellers of business technology through meaningful relationships. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.