Philip John is a seasoned Full Stack WordPress developer with over a decade of experience building and maintaining high-profile publishing platforms, from WordPress.com VIP sites like Time.com and TechCrunch to the Newspack stack for newsrooms. He combines deep backend expertise—evidenced by contributions to notable open-source projects such as Automattic’s Co-Authors Plus and the AMP for WP plugin—with hands-on product and operations experience from founding agencies and civic tech ventures. Phil brings a rare blend of journalism domain knowledge, online marketing acumen (having managed over £1m in Google ad spend early in his career), and community leadership through local media and nonprofit roles. He’s equally comfortable refactoring plugin internals as he is advising local authorities on open data or helping launch social-good products like OurHousing. Based in the UK, he balances technical stewardship with a persistent focus on local journalism and civic impact.
Contributions:4 releases, 38 commits, 40 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Philip primarily focused on maintaining and updating the Co-Authors Plus WordPress plugin. Their contributions included updating version numbers, merging release branches, and refactoring code related to author archive handling. The user also addressed a bug related to the test suite and optimized existing code, demonstrating an understanding of the plugin's core functionality and testing procedures. Additionally, the user made changes to the template tags and meta functions.
Enable AMP on your WordPress site, the WordPress way.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:12 commits, 3 PRs, 5 pushes in 10 months
Contributions summary:Philip primarily focused on improving the quality and maintainability of the AMP plugin for WordPress. Their contributions involved refactoring code, including removing extraneous conditional statements, improving code escaping, and removing debugging code. They also addressed performance concerns by setting limits on queries and controlling when rewrite rules are flushed. The user also made changes to the author attribution.
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