Interview with WoltLab CEO Arian Glander

Hi,
Here is interview with Arian Glander who is WoltLab CEO, I believe by this interview you are going to feel more closer to WoltLab. If you don’t know yet, i am the official Turkish Support member of WoltLab.

LT : Before we start, Could you tell us something about you and your role at woltlab project?

Arian Glander : My name is Arian Glander, I am the CEO and founder of WoltLab. Back in 2001 Marcel Werk started this project together with me.

I have a lot of different tasks at WoltLab: Product development and design, Marketing, Writing Documentation, Customer Support, …

LT : Where it comes from woltlab name?

Arian Glander : WoltLab means Woltersdorf Laboratory. Woltersdorf is Marcels and my hometown with 8000 people living there.

LT : How many developers behind this project?

Arian Glander : Our core team currently consist of three people: Marcel, Harald and me. Marcel is the main programmer. I did the Community Calendar. Harald is responsible for graphic and gui design. In the past we had up to ten diffent people working on the project.

LT : There are a lots of forum softwares, how did you decide to create wbb project?

Arian Glander : When we started the project in 2001 there were not so many good and free php solutions. We couldn’t find one that suits our needs. So we created our own software basically for us only. We also gave it away for free and we saw how many people like the software. We decided to create our own business.

LT : What is the main difference between woltlab burning board and others?

Arian Glander : With Burning Board 3 we moved a big step forward to a modern and clear software architecture. I think we are one of the first very big software solutions that used object oriented PHP 5 as foundation for their software. Most of the other PHP solutions are written in old PHP 4 style. The main difference now is our Community Framework and our package system. We experienced that most customers like to have an individual system. We created a plattform that allows to customize your forum very easily. Other developers can use our framework to create own applications.

LT : Could you describe woltlab community?

Arian Glander : The WoltLab community is the place where you can discuss, contribute and download addons for the forum. Almost one million downloads have been made on the community.

LT : Do you think multilanguage support is need to be improved at community page? Users should see more country flags on community forum threads? What do you think about future of multilanguage support?

Arian Glander : Sure. We are still not finished in our approach to offer a good multilanguage support. First of all we need better tools to translate the software and to maintain the translation. We will work on that after the release of WBB 3.1. We also hope that more users from other languages will use our software.

LT : What can we expect to see from wbb team in the near future as customers and users?

Arian Glander : First of all the new version 3.1 and a completely new website. We have a lot of plans for what comes next, but I cannot talk about this right now.

LT : Besides Burning Board, what other works you are on?

Arian Glander : The new website is the other big task right now. The final version of the Community Calendar Plugin will be released very soon.

LT : Could you tell us something different from standart documents about wcf? It should be hard work to create a framework?

Arian Glander : We know that we need to offer even better documentation for the WCF, but a lot of the main aspects are already covered in the documentation.

LT : Would you like to say anything different from questions and your last words?

Arian Glander : I just wanted to say thanks to our big community for the support over the last seven years.

LT : Thank you Arian for your time, good luck with WoltLab.

Arian Glander : Thank you.

This entry was posted on Salı, Ocak 13th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Güncel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.