I’m originally from a city called Portsmouth on the south coast of England. From a young age, I knew that English weather wasn’t my cup of tea.
I remember living in Mexico as a university student and being amazed by seeing sunshine for several years in a row. So, you could say that my early years were dominated by finding a nice warm place to live. I spent time in Mexico, Japan, Australia, and other countries before finally coming to the United States in 2004.
My family lives in Florida now, just south of Tampa. I did eventually get the sunnier weather I was looking for.
The Journey Began
My first jobs in the USA were teaching, first as a high school teacher then as a middle school teacher. I loved the work, but couldn’t make enough money to support my family. So I started a web design business, working in the evenings after school, and soon it was making more money than my day job.
I spent about a decade working with Joomla and Drupal. We sold Joomla extensions via Joomlashack and then ran a training company called OSTraining that taught people how to use Drupal. We even produced a series of books on WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla and other platforms, plus coding languages such as PHP, MySQL, Javascript, and Flexbox.
This is a normal Drupal training class at the annual DrupalCon conference
Back in 2013 we were feeling very proud of ourselves. We had dozens of customers that included most major USA government departments. We were training everyone from the White House team to the Department of Energy to NASA. Then suddenly the government shut down.
We realized that we didn’t have dozens of customers. We had one customer, and they had just shut for business. The government immediately postponed all our contracts and we had to start again from zero.
In the following years, the training market became more difficult. For years we had taught people in classrooms. We were teaching Drupal to large companies and government agencies. But now we were often asked to train people over Zoom, rather than in a classroom. That just didn’t work. People couldn’t learn remotely, and we weren’t having fun any more.
We had never been able to build a training business on WordPress because everyone said it was too easy and they didn’t want to pay to learn. But we did see some opportunities in the WordPress plugin market, and it was open source. The one consistent element in our work over the last 20 years has been supporting open source software.
The Need for “PublishPress”
A lot of our Drupal training customers had chosen that platform simply because it had really good access control. That was the deciding factor for them.
Many of them were corporations, government agencies, and universities who needed to make sure their content was 100% accurate. So that was our starting point.
We decided to bring Drupal levels of access control to WordPress. Our customers told us that this was a real pain point for them. They needed to have detailed control over who could edit which content on their site. Our solution was two plugins: PublishPress Capabilities and PublishPress Permissions.
When you enter a new market, it’s tough to find the right niches. They might seem similar, but nothing that we’d learned from Joomla and Drupal applied to WordPress. We experimented with a lot of ideas before finding a set of features that WordPress users wanted and would pay for.
We learned a lot from the Yoast team with their focus on branding. We leaned in heavily to using 3 purple penguins in all our advertising. We’ve reduced that a little in recent years, but those 3 penguins still appear in many places on the PublishPress website.
Advice for Business Owners
First, you will probably get the first 5 or 10 ideas wrong. We tried several plugin ideas before finding a successful niche. We sold some of those plugins, we retired some, and some we kept.
That’s one reason we have about a dozen plugins now!
What’s different today is that AI tools allow you to try and fail quickly. In our early days, we’d often have to wait 6 to 12 months for market feedback.
Second, build something you use. If you’re not using the product every day, you won’t understand the pain points or be motivated to make it better.
I would recommend going up-market in 2026 and look to build professional tools. It’s very difficult to build mass-market products now, but there’s a lot of demand for excellent plugins that are too complex to vibe-code.
I believe that WordPress will continue to be strong with power users and those who want control and ownership of their software stack.
WordPress & Beyond
We will keep moving towards the enterprise section of the market. I believe that’s where the growth and opportunity is for WordPress. Vibe-coding and SaaS tools will be competitive at the lower end of the market. But WordPress remains an excellent and unique solution for companies that want a serious publishing platform.
My Friends From WordPress Community
I’d love to hear more from Sergiu Radu who builds the Blocksy theme, which is a great product. And for the same reason, I’ll nominate Mike McAlister from Ollie.
Connect With Me
I post most frequently and find the best conversations on LinkedIn at the moment: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveburge/
