Ryan Peel – WordPress Developer
Following on from our previous WordPress Wednesday post, this week I’d like to introduce Ryan Peel (Twitter), a WordPress (WP) developer from Durban but based in Cape Town since 2005.
Ryan Peel built his first website in 1998 but has only been doing web development at a full time capacity since 2007. He’s been working with WP since around 2005 but only focusing primarily on WP based projects since 2008.
Javascript is Ryan’s coding language of choice as he specialises in UX (User Experience) and front-end development. More recently he’s been working with the latest CSS3 and HTML5.
His plugin called AnyFont was released to the WordPress repository in 2009 and it has since been downloaded 36 000 times. This plugin allows you to use any font you wish to use on your personal WP site. The plug-in has been featured on design sites such as Smashing Magazine as well as in the May 2010 issue of Website Magazine, a print magazine sold in the US and Canada.
He’s also released a widget called last.fm LIVE! which shows what the owner of the site is currently listening to via last.fm.
One of his biggest plug-ins to date and the one that apparently took him almost a full year to complete is the Family Tree Builder which Ancestry24.com released earlier this year. The plug-in was designed for BuddyPress and it was written primarily in Javascript as the main requirement was that it had to be as interactive as its Flash-based counterparts, but without using Flash.
Apart from all the lines of code and the lack of sleep, he enjoys making furniture items out of wood, gaming on his Xbox360 and spending quality time with his staffy puppy or attending live music shows with his girlfriend.
If you are interested in working with Ryan, he is a freelancer and can be contacted via his blog 2amlife.com.
His advice to new WP devs is “Read the available documentation online and stick to the standards to maintain compatibility with all the other plug-ins/themes out there.”
If you are a WordPress developer who would like to be featured in this series, please contact @anastacia on Twitter or simply post a comment below.