Volunteering as a Member of the WordPress Community for Years

Evangelia Pappa

Today we are going to conduct an interview of Evangelia Pappa from Greece. She is a member of the Accounts and billing team at WPMU DEV.

She is volunteering as a member of the WordPress Community from so many years. She also mentioned in the interview that she loves blogging, traveling, and customer care.

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My name is Evangelia Pappa and I come from a city in the center of Greece, called Larissa. I love blogging, travelling and people, as well as customer care.

I also enjoy photography, arts, crafting and I am a WordPress Community enthousiast, caring about accessibility and encouraging women participate in tech fields. Currently, I am a member of the WPMU DEV Accounts & Billing team.

Q. How did you come into your current field? Share a bit of the background?

Ans: I’ve studied Computer Science and Telecommunications and mostly I worked at a more technical field as IT technician, IT Manager and later Technical Customer Support Representative for Asus.

Volunteering as a member of the WordPress Community for years, I’ve met my current team.

Q. What’s the most interesting project you have done to date in WordPress?

Ans: When I started being involved in WordPress Greek Community , I started also building my 2 blogs, which are my favorite projects so far.

My first one, mindrops.gr is an e-magazine with literature and poetry articles in Greek, while my personal blog is my way to share my insights, stories and travels with my Greek WP Community family and not only.

Q. Have you ever been to any WordPress meetups or WordCamps? If yes did you learn anything useful?

Ans: I have first met the WordPress Greek Community at a coffee shop with 10 people deciding to organize the first WordPress Larissa meetup back in 2015.

Since then I have attended and later organized with Evangelos Athanasiadis WordPress Larissa meetup till now and also attended multiple meetups in WordPress Thessaloniki meetup and helped organizing the WordPress Greek Community online meetups edition due to the COVID-19 situation.

I’ve been also a co-organizer of WordCamp Athens 2016, WordCamp Athens 2017 (Publicity, Childcare, Sign Language Interpretation, Swag/Printing, Speaker recruitment/Selection, Fundraising/Sponsors), WordCamp Thessaloniki 2018 (Sponsor Wrangler, Publicity, Communications and PR, Childcare and Accessibility).

And WordCamp Athens 2019 and WordCamp Thessaloniki 2019 and volunteereed as Speaker Wrangler Manager and Registrations Manager at WordCamp Europe 2018. Been also a co-organiser at PR Team at WordCamp Europe 2019 and co-organiser as PR Team leader at WordCamp Europe 2020.

Every event looks like a door you open to knowledge, skills and networking. You not only learn a lot of interesting things relevant to your work or interest by watching a presentation but also you can meet amazing people networking and share your passion about WordPress, your struggles and possible solutions to issues you may encounter.

Plus, either attending a workshop or volunteering you can evolve as a person building relationships with other members of the community or as a professional by developing your existent or new skills.

Get involved. It’s never too late and everyone is welcomed.

Q. What does your workstation look like?

Ans: My workstation usually looks clean and tidy and a bit girly. Just my notebook connected to a bigger monitor, an external keyboard and mouse, a headset and a very comfortable chair.

Depending on the season you might see also decorations. For example something bringing Xmas on your mind.

Q. What kind of tools/software do you currently use for your creations?

Ans: Since I am managing two blogs, I am interested in keeping them safe from hackers, and in performance optimization.

At the moment Defender Pro plugin and also Hummingbird Pro, Smush Pro and Uptime monitor plugins from WPMU DEV are my allies. I use also Forminator Pro for my forms and SmartCrawl Pro for SEO.

Q. What interesting feature do you think you would like to see in WordPress and is currently missing?

Ans: I am at the moment really satisfied by the platform as a blogger, however, I’d love to see more things about accessibility for everyone.

Q. Out of the current plugins and themes which one do you like the most and why?

A My favourite plugin at the moment is SmartCrawl Pro. For a blogger like me being able to write content SEO-wise is really important.

Q. Which WordPress hosting do you use and would you recommend for your clients and others?

Ans: Selecting a hosting company requires research. Needs to be able to answer some questions first. Hosting companies offer a variety of services and the customers needs also vary. What suits my needs might not be fit for someone else.

Can you try answering these questions first?

What is your budget?
Are you interested for a company that can provide you also other products with your hosting like domain names, plugins etc.?
Would you like shared or dedicated hosting?
Are you a company or a single customer?
What are your needs regarding resources?
Do you have a multisite or single WordPress installation? etc.

Q. Do you like/love what you currently do in WordPress?

Ans: I really enjoy my current job and I owe this mostly to my colleagues. I always believed in teamwork and these people as well as my employers or managers make it happen, so I am really proud and happy for that.
And I always loved the customers’ happiness and relief when you’re able to help them resolve any issue.

“It’s all about the people.”

Q. What would you like to do in the future in the current field or somewhere else?

Ans: I like evolving as most of the people I know, therefore I’d like to try different things in the future in order to implement new knowledge and skills at my current job.
And I want to get involved also in different parts of the WordPress Community.

Q. Can you give us some reference for whom we should conduct an interview next and why?

Ans: I always struggle with such a question as the members of the Community are giving their best and it makes it difficult to distinguish one or more.

If I had to chose someone that does not often talk and I’d love to hear their voice it would be Konstantinos Xenos and Takis Bouyouris as very active WordPress Greek Community members.

In addition, since I want to encourage women talk a bit more I’d love to refer the girls of the amazing podcast series WomenInWP (Amy Masson, Tracy Apps, and Angela Bowman) and the organizers of WomenWhoWP meetup like Jen Miller.