Steve Burge came to open source the long way around. He was a schoolteacher in England, then in rural Georgia — the kind of rural where the starting pay for a teacher in 2004 was $27,000 a year. That math didn’t work once he had a family, so he started building websites in the evenings. A few months later, the side hustle was paying more than the classroom. He never really looked back.
What followed was years of open source training — flying to government agencies to teach Drupal in person, back when that was a real and lucrative market. When Drupal 7 broke backwards compatibility and drove a wave of sites toward WordPress, Steve followed his customers. And when the training market dried up, he looked at what WordPress was missing for publishers, and started filling in the gaps.
That’s PublishPress: a suite of ten plugins (and counting — he’s aiming for fifteen by end of 2026) built by listening obsessively to customer support tickets. No big roadmap. Just “build this thing, hear what people need next, build that.”
The conversation goes a lot of places — Drupal’s marketplace ambitions, indie newsrooms replacing shuttered legacy papers, the block editor’s silent majority of happy users, and why Steve considers classic editor diehards the COBOL programmers of WordPress.
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