The WordPress community is powered by so many impressive individuals who not only contribute, but get others excited about contributing as well. This list honors and is dedicated to them. If you believe anyone belongs on the list, leave your recommendation in the comments below so we can add them to an upcoming list. Also, if there are any errors below, let us know and we can update the list accordingly.
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Matt is the founding developer of WordPress and founder/CEO at Automattic, the company best known for powering WordPress.
Andrew is a Lead Developer of WordPress and currently works at the U.S. Digital Service at the White House. He was the lead for WordPress 3.9.
Mark is a Lead Developer of WordPress. He makes his living as a web publishing consultant to everyone from individuals to startups to established media companies. His personal goal is to bring intuitive, low-cost web publishing to everyone who has anything to say.
Lorelle is an avid blogger and educator with a passion for UX, social media and online business. She created and edited more than 600 articles on WordPress Codex, produced hundreds of websites for her clients and wrote 4 books. She is currently a professor at Clark College and Portland Community College where she teaches students WordPress.
Pippin is a WordPress plugin developer and founder of numerous plugins, including Restrict Content Pro and Easy Digital Downloads.
Vladimir is the creator of ManageWP, a business that assists people in automating and managing their multiple websites. He is also the president at Devana Technologies.
Jennifer is the founder of Bourn Creative, a company she manages with her husband, Brian. Jennifer largely works with design, web and digital strategy and Brian leads UX design and development.
Michael is a WordPress developer, founder of Semper Fi Web Design, co-author of WordPress All-in-One for Dummies and creator of All in One SEO Pack.
Morten is a staff author at lynda.com and the Director of Pink & Yellow Media Inc., a digital media company based in Burnaby, British Columbia.
Brian is a web developer, writer and consultant based in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the editor at Post Status, a website for WordPress professionals. He is also the owner at Under Vulcan, LLC, a digital products and services group.
Helen is 10up’s first full-time employee and Director of Platform Experience. She is a WordPress core committer and the release lead for WordPress 4.0. 10up enables Helen to contribute to the WordPress open source software project full-time.
Nathan is a Lead Developer at Copyblogger Media, a group committed to producing marketable online content.
Jen is the Master of Suggestion at Automattic. She was the design/user experience lead for the WordPress open source project for 4.5 years and project managed the development team for most of that time as well.
David is a developer at WordPress and BuddyPress. He is an organizer at WordCamp Miami, conferences and meetups.
Joost is the CEO of Yoast, a website optimization site. He is a WordPress/web developer, SEO and open source fanatic.
Carl is a partner at Rocketgenius, the group known for creating Gravity Forms. He got started with WordPress in 2008, and primarily used it to build client web sites while he was doing custom web design and development for clients.
Peter is a core contributor to WordPress and Happiness Gardener at Automattic.
Samuel is a web developer at Audrey Capital, an investment and research company created by Automattic's Matt Mullenweg to help innovative ideas grow.
Konstantin is a WordPress developer at Automattic. When he's not writing themes or plugins, he's contributing to the WordPress Core. His past experience involved software development mainly with C and C#.
Alex, commonly known as Viper007Bond (or just Viper) is a Portland-based developer who works for Automattic. He has contributed to several popular WordPress plugins such as Regenerate Thumbnails and JetPack.
Dan is the co-founder of WPCurve, a business dedicated to helping business owners maintain their WordPress-powered operations with support, maintenance and request for small jobs. Dan also co-founded Helloify, a messaging function, and wrote a book, "Content Machine."
Donncha is a software developer at Automattic. He is also a WordPress plugin developer who has contributed to WordPress.com and WP Super Cache. He also works on Polldaddy.com
Tony is the co-founder and CEO at Sucuri Inc., a company that builds cloud-based security technologies and service that every website can utilize. He is a former Marine Corps veteran, having done two tours in Iraq between 2002-2005 with a total in-country time of about 2 years.
Elliot Condon is a Melbourne-based web developer. He is the creator of the popular Advanced Custom Fields WordPress plugin and many other websites and web apps.
Troy is an online marketing speaker, coach, consultant and podcaster. He is also a professional voiceover artist and voiced campaigns for hundreds of brands including Ford, Telstra, ANZ, Hungry Jacks, Mitsubishi, AFL, Cricket Australia and Cadbury.
Siobhan is a writer, editor, event organizer, WordPress contributor, public speaker and free software advocate. Her current project is a book about the history of the WordPress project. She contributes to the WordPress core software and organizes WordCamps. She writes for Smashing Magazine and appears on WordPress.tv.
Ryan is the founder of WP Site Care. He is also a WordPress freelancer and theme builder. He started working with WordPress as a freelancer in 2009, and now has a small team of six where his team provides WordPress support and build WordPress themes.
Nikolay is a Meta Engineer at Automattic. He was formerly the first Security Czar for WordPress.org, where he coordinated security efforts, responded to incidents and produced solid fixes to the incidents.
Lester currently works for Tech in Asia as The Tech Guy in-charge of the development and scaling of Tech in Asia and its subsidiary sites. He is the creator of WP-Polls, WP-PostRatings and WP-DBManagera WordPress. He is also a plugin developer who contributed 23 WordPress plugins with more than 14 million total downloads.
Konstantin is a Code Wrangler at Automattic. He is also a WordPress Contributor and 4.3 Lead.
Mike is the co-founding developer of WordPress, which he started in 2003 with Automattic's Matt Mullenweg. Currently, he offers a variety of services ranging from consultancy to training to web developing. He is the co-author of "Building Online Communities With Drupal, PhpBB, and WordPress" and runs his own business, zed1.com.
Mike is a developer at WooThemes/Automattic working primarily as the lead developer of WooCommerce. His biggest achievements include building WooCommerce and WP Job Manager, which are now Automattic projects.
Adam is the co-founder of FooPlugins. He is also a web business consultant and Internet marketing coach who specializes in WordPress and WordPress Multisite. In the past, he's worked with The Ritz-Carlton, Busch Entertainment Corp., and Amazon.com.
Boone is a core committer to WordPress and a lead developer of BuddyPress. He is a consultant specializing in custom plugin development, code review and WordPress/BuddyPress architecture.
Rhys is a Lead Developer at FireCask, an award-winning digital marketing and WordPress development agency. He is also the director at Winwar Media and the developer of WP Email Capture.
Becs is an email marketing consultant at Rivett-Kemm Consulting Ltd. She's worked for several large eCommerce retailers and has freelanced for a number of agencies. She eats, sleeps, and dreams about every aspect of email marketing.
George is a Code Monkey and team lead for Jetpack at Automattic.
Devin is the founder of Thought House and WordImpress, a group that produces themes and plugins.
Scott is a Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times on the Interactive News Team. He is a core developer of WordPress and will be the release lead for WordPress 4.4.
Joey is a Code Wrangler at Automattic who works on partnerships, third party integrations, APIs and other projects for WordPress.
Remi is a WooThemes support technician at WooThemes/Automattic. He develops plugins and themes for WordPress that he sells on CodeCanyon. He also created add-ons for Easy Digital Downloads, WP Job Manager and WooCommerce.
John is the Senior WordPress Engineer at Human Made. He previously worked at Code for the People (now acquired by Automattic) and WordPress VIP. He is a WordPress core committer and was the release lead for WordPress 4.1.
Tom co-founded Human Made with Human Made's CTO, Joe Hoyle. At the company, Tom manages overall company direction, project management and client relationships. When he's not coding for clients he likes to contribute back to the Open Source community.
C. Bavota (whose real name is not just "C") is a premium WordPress theme developer who built a WordPress theme for WooCommerce. He started freelancing full time as a programmer back in 2007. He wanted to share everything he learned, all in hopes that others might benefit from all of his trial and error, and started bavotasan.com.
Dustin is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic and the founder of YourWebsiteEngineer.com, a site dedicated to WordPress education.
Tom is a VIP Wrangler at Automattic and a community moderator on WordPress Stack Exchange.He also speaks at events, writes blog posts and pushes code to GitHub.
Devesh is a WordPress developer and part-time blogger. He's the founder of WordPress Kube, a WordPress Resource blog which focuses on daily news, themes, tutorials, plugins, tips and modifications. He is a former software development engineer II at Amazon.
Charlie first entered the WordPress scene as the founder of Gabfire Themes. His current venture, 99 Robots is a startup focused on developing WordPress plugins for marketers and bloggers.
Ben is the lead developer at WebDevStudios and an organizer at Seattle WordCamp. With more than 15 years of experience working with open source communities, Lobaugh is an active contributor to the WordPress Community.
Shayda is a Product Marketer at WP Engine and has been to more than 30 WordCamps. She loves the WordPress community for its generosity and helpfulness. She is an avid traveler and food blogger at her website, Dine With Shayda.
Leland is a domainer, web developer, WordPress coder, writer, and speaker. He runs the online community WP Chat, sells WordPress plugins at Pluginferno, makes WordPress themes at Metrocraft and co-organizes the WordPress DC meetup.
Takyushi is the creator of WordPress plugin Contact Form 7 and the founder of WordPress agency Rock Lobster.
Ben is the co-founder of sidekick.pro, FlowPress, and WPUniversity.com.
Travis is a partner at digital design agency Westwerk. He refocused his skills to lead WerkPress, the agency’s WordPress division.
Kiko is the co-founder of Prestige Conference and the owner of InGroup Consulting. He is well-known in the WordPress community as a core contributor, frequent speaker and WordCamp organizer.
Austin is the CEO of Alley Interactive, a group that provides consulting and web development expertise to the media, education and entertainment industries. Prior to working at Alley, he worked at About.com and was the lead developer for The Economist's website.
Frederick is the co-founder and CTO of real estate website platform Placester and the former advisor and founding CTO at digital news site Mashable. He created W3 Total Cache for WordPress.
Steph is the lead developer of Strategy11, a company specializing in WordPress plugins. Formidable Forms and Display Widgets are a few of Strategy11's most popular projects.
AJ is the founder and lead developer of website marketing group Zan Atlantean, admin of the Advanced WordPress group on Facebook and WordCamp presenter.
Stephen is a programmer, graphic designer and founder at ServerPress. He has a background in front end graphics, 3D, and traditional back-end software engineering.
Yaron is the co-founder and Chief Software Architect at Crypteron, a cloud security company, and the director of technology at Trestian, a web development, digital design and marketing group. He is a graduate of Yale University with a degree in computer science.
Dave is the CEO and founder at CMS Code, a group that specializes in building fundraising websites and content management solutions for non-profit organizations.
Konstantin is the founder of the largest WordPress aggregation website, WP Clipboard. Yelin's latest project is "They Made a Promise," a website that monitors politicians in the UK to keep them accountable.
Tom is the founder at leaveworkbehind.com, wordcandy.co and beginnerblogging.net. The three blogs respectively address making money online, blogging solutions for WordPress businesses and learning to blog without coding.
James is the founder of IncSub, Edublogs and WPMU DEV, a group that provides WordPress themes, plugins and support.
Thomas is the moderator of WordPress Stack Exchange and manager of the largest WordPress group on Google+. He also develops plugins for Market Press.
Comment below with their Twitter handle and we'll look into it! Check back later to see how the list has changed!
99 Robots is a results-driven web development and digital marketing agency ready to help you launch, run or grow your business.
Nile Flores – @blondishnet
You missed her by miles on this list.
Wow! Thanks for pointing her out – we’ll definitely look into adding her to the next list :)
I think you missed out Ahmad Awais https://twitter.com/mrahmadawais/
Thanks for sharing! We’ll definitely look into adding him to the next list :)
Yes, you missed my two champ WordPress community managers.
https://twitter.com/sewabs
& https://twitter.com/AhsanParwez
Thanks for letting us know! We’ll definitely look into adding them to the next list :)
Decent list, but my listing is incorrect. #59
This line is not true about me and seems like it’s about someone else in the list—>
“He was previously a Senior Front End Developer at LampsPlus, where he utilized HTML, CSS, and OOP Javascript to create and manage all of LampsPlus corporate eCommerce websites.”
Thanks for pointing that out! We’ve updated your bio, let us know if you have any changes. Sorry about that :)
Sounds like me :) Wait no.. pretty sure that is on my LInkedIn
If you are basing this on twitter followers, you missed me :D @ideag
Not strictly based on Twitter follower count, but we’ll take a look at adding you to our next list :)
Some folks I would have definitely considered for this list:
Andrew Norcross @norcross
Mario Peshev @no_fear_inc
Curtis McHale @curtismchale
Carrie Dils @cdils
Chris Ford @ci_chrisford
Rebecca Gill @rebeccagill
Angela Bowman @askwpgirl
Karim Marucchi @karimmarucchi
Shane Pearlman @justlikeair
Steve Zehngut @Zengy
Remkus De Vries @DeFries
Mike Schinkel @Mike Schinkel
No list is perfect. There will always be people that get missed.
Thanks for your input! You’re right, no list is perfect, but we’ll definitely look into adding these folks to our next list :)
John-
Thanks for the mention. +1 for everyone else you suggested.
Great list! Found some new faces that I need to meet.
I would also add Adam Silver (@heyadamsilver). He runs the South Bay WordPress Meetup in LA and has a fantastic podcast, kitchensinkwp.com. Along with those creds, he started the ConciergeWP.com WordPress backup & security service and is a co-organizer of WordCampLA 2015. He is a must add for the next list.
I’m glad you found some new folks! Adam seems like a great choice, we’ll look into adding him our next list. Thanks for your input!
Thank you for featuring me (Shayda Torabi) but you have my last name spelled wrong! Can someone please update that?
Thank you
Sorry about that, seems it slipped through the cracks. Thanks for letting us know!
Suzette Franck @suzette_franck
Se Reed @sereedmedia
Dee Teal @thewebprincess
Thanks for sharing! We’ll definitely look into adding them to the next list.
You missed Kim Doyal http://twitter.com/KimDoyal http://thewpchick.com/
Thanks!
Thanks for letting us know Steven!
I not-so-humbly nominate myself for the list, if you go by Twitter followers: @andersnoren.
Just to echo James from earlier, this list was not going by twitter followers. We first curated the list using our own criteria, but since we didn’t want to actually rank the list, we just used twitter followers to do so :)
Emil Uzelac TRT and original developer of Responsive https://twitter.com/emiluzelac
Dovy Paukstys lead developer of the Redux Framework. https://twitter.com/simplerain
I would suppose you also missed me, Trent Lapinski. I did found CyberChimps, one of the largest WordPress theme companies on WordPress.org. Then again I did sell it. https://twitter.com/trentlapinski
In loving memory to Kim Parsell http://wpmom.org/ who contributed much to WordPress. She is definitely worth a mention.
You Missed Tareq Hasan https://twitter.com/tareq_cse
https://profiles.wordpress.org/tareq1988/
Interesting list, but it seems more like a Twitter popularity contest than a list of influencers that are well, influencers. Why rank people by the number of Twitter followers if the # of Twitter followers are meaningless? I am sure there is a far better way to rank contribution, reach, resources, influence, value to the community, activity, etc.
Hey Michael,
We’re open to suggestions on how to rank similar lists moving forward! We curated this list based on all the criteria you mentioned but we couldn’t come up with an objective scoring system that made sense to quantify everything.
You know what more important then stupid lists about who the “important” people are.
BREAKFAST!
Seriously join the real conversation here.
https://twitter.com/robertdall/status/637347999232823296
https://twitter.com/royboy789/status/637297439964196864
Don’t forget Wes Crychel. @weschyrchel
Gonna add another nomination for @norcross.
Great list! I’d love to see Mike Schinkel and Rarst on the list.
Great to see a lot of good friends on this list, many many worthy influencers. Quite a few missing though… awesome to see the influencer list so broad and wide and still missing folks.
Exactly! There are just so many considerably influential people it’s practically impossible to fit them all in a list.
So few women on this list…why is that?
I’m not sure why. Do you have any suggestions of other people to add? We’d be happy to look into including them in our next list!
Good to see lots of old friends and new faces on this list. I’d say you missed @jb510. He’s done a ton of work with WordPress meetups and the first WordCamp Maui.
Thanks for the suggestion! We’ll look into adding him in our next list.
These influential women too should be added to the list:
Nile Flores-@blondishnet
Carrie Dills-@cdils
Rebecca Gill-@rebeccagill
and many others.
http://bit.ly/1ZwBFir
THanks Akshat for the additions. Looks like we need another list to add these wonderful folks.
Great list! You have mentioned some big names and here is a list of WordPress influencers to follow in 2017 https://www.cloudways.com/blog/top-wordpress-influencers/