Throughout the last few posts, I’ve been talking a little bit about WordPress Developer Salaries, but have also done so by taking a look at exactly what it means to be a WordPress developer.

If you’re just catching up, the previous posts are:

1. A WordPress Developer Salary Should Be…?
2. WordPress Developer Salary: Manage That Content
3. Of Salaries and Software Development with WordPress
4. The Roles of WordPress Development

There have been a lot of awesome comments and I’ve enjoyed hearing the different perspectives and opinions that everyone has brought to each post. There’s one more aspect of WordPress development that I want to look at before ending the series.

I’ve already mentioned this throughout several of the previous articles (and it’s been bought up in the comments, as well), but I thought it’d be worth outlining it here not only to share my concrete opinions on the matter but hopefully as an attempt to provide a reference or even maybe some food for thought for those who are looking for WordPress-related jobs, and those who are looking to staff WordPress-related jobs.

Specifically, it’s about looking at the term “WordPress Developers” and trying to give an explanation as what that really means.

After all, we’ve already said that the term developer is overused to the point of having no meaning, right?

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In the last three posts, I’ve spoken a bit about the salaries of WordPress developers, why they may be lower than traditional software developers, and some of the expectations that come with what a WordPress developer may be (depending on their role).

I’ve shared:

1. A WordPress Developer Salary Should Be…?
2. WordPress Developer Salary: Manage That Content
3. Of Salaries and Software Development with WordPress

In the last post, I talked a bit about the responsibilities and expectations of a traditional software developer and how that may relate to WordPress. And earlier, I briefly talked about the terms a “developer” and an “implementer” both of which I think are applicable in the WordPress space.

But first, it’s worth noting that many WordPress developers are people who are building themes and/or plugins. At this point in WordPress’ history, people still aren’t seeing it as something that can be used to build web applications (let alone mobile applications) so it’s seen more as something that bloggers, frontend developers, and maybe some middle-ware developers are used to doing.

And all of that is correct – but there is more to it than what’s listed above.

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Over the last couple of posts, I’ve been talking about the various things that contribute to WordPress developers having lower salaries than other traditional software developers. Specifically, I’ve talked about:

• Three reasons I think salaries are lower,
• And how the industry, applicant pool, and skill set play a role

To be clear (and as pointed out in the comments), this isn’t the case everywhere, but it’s apparently a common enough trend such that peers in the industry are noticing it, and it’s struck a chord with others to, ahem, write about it, and to continue a talking about it a little more in-depth.

Anyway, one of the things that’s undeniable is that WordPress can’t be compared directly to frameworks like Rails and .NET, libraries like jQuery, or straight up languages because it’s none of those things. In and of itself, WordPress is an application that can be installed on a web server and can be used for digital publishing.

It just so happens that it has a powerful API that allows it not only to be extended, but for other applications to be built upon it.

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In the previous post, I shared a few thoughts on the challenges of setting a WordPress developer salary. When I began writing out my opinion, I ended up writing a lot more than I had intended, so in order to keep posts at a shorter length (thus saving all of us time :) and sounding less monotonous, I’ve broken everything up into a handful of posts that I’m basically running as a series.

Yesterday, I laid it all out in that I shared three reasons as to why I think WordPress developer salaries are lower than that of the average software developer. There were some really good, thoughtful comments on the post, too.

And the whole point of doing that was to lay out a high-level view of my opinions before looking at the topic in more detail.

As much as I want to talk about more technical matters of WordPress, I think it’s worth noting that one reason that a WordPress developer salary is hard to set is that many still see WordPress as a content management system, if not just another blogging platform.

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