Community Interview: Kolakube from Kolakube Software, XFtoWP, MD, CryptoWP
Q: Hello! Thank you for accepting my interview request. Can you tell me and the community more about yourself?
My name is Alex, I am a 29 year old developer and food trucker from Austin, TX. Founder of Kolakube software.
Q: How long have you been on forums in general? What's the history behind you?
I first learned about creating websites and in particular forums around 2004 while I was in elementary school. The first forum I joined was for an old online multiplayer game called Dinky Bomb, where you would play against random people from around the world. The forum was called WePlayHere and it was for fans of the game to discuss strategy and also hosted private forums for the game's established clans.
I loved participating in the forums almost as much as playing the actual game itself, and concepts like "Moderators", "User promotions", and "private forums" captured my imagination and the thousands of forum posts I would go on to make there.
The weird text at the bottom of the site, "Powered by vBulletin", didn't make much sense to me until the day Atari bought Dinky Bomb and WePlayHere and proceeded to shut the entire game and forums down. Another member had created a sanctuary site to try to salvage the community and enlisted me as a moderator, but without the core game intact and most user's not even knowing about the new forum, it was a pretty short-lived website.
However, the idea of running a forum was not lost on me after that experience and in place of playing Dinky Bomb, I set out to start creating my very own forum. From there I went on to try just about every free forum software under the sun and became very interested in creating forum skins and styles.
After about a year of creating and releasing free forum styles I became relatively well-known at an old forum hosting service called Forumer, which offered hosted versions of phpBB and IPB at the time, and I became a moderator on their official support forum. This was a paid gig, and to be only 13 years old at the time, it was a pretty big deal!
From this money I was able to purchase my first license of vBulletin and did what everybody does—created an admin community! It was called "Admin Utopia" and had a good run for a little over a year, but ultimately fizzed out. This was my most successful community endeavor to date, and through the seemingly endless amount of hours spent inside the vBulletin templating system, I had learned a good deal about web design and CSS and even released a few styles back on vB.org.
After getting bored of forums and not finding satisfaction creating vB styles anymore, I explored my curiosity for blogging around 2006 and created a blog called Blogussion to document my journey and the things I was learning as a blogger.
Learning WordPress was so much easier than vBulletin and I was able to use my web design and CSS skills to design a nice theme for my blog. With such a simpler website setup and my taste for design satisfied, my mind was freed up to focus on writing content and I became a writing machine!
In a little over a year, Blogussion had taken off more than any of my past forum projects combined and I had a loyal readership. Despite my web design experience, I considered myself a writer first and foremost, but that changed after my readership inspired me to create my first paid product.
The design of the blog had become so popular that in 2009 I launched my very first paid product, which was an inspired theme of the same skin I had created for Blogussion. This style was an instant hit, and I made my first four-figures online by the time I was 16 years old.
After this, my passion for web design was reignited and I spent the next year leveling up my knowledge of web design languages and learning how to develop with PHP. All of this made me spend less time writing for Blogussion, and right before graduating High School in 2011, I sold Blogussion for a five-figure sum and launched a small WordPress theme shop called Kolakube.
With my loyal readership from Blogussion, and some notoriety in the community of the WordPress theme framework I built my designs on, Kolakube was a success right out of the gate. After a couple years of releasing new designs and the ups and downs of running a popular theme business, sales ultimately started to decline and I felt I had built myself into a box by relying on another theme framework to make my design's possible.
I took my best seller entitled Marketers Delight and re-launched it as a standalone WordPress theme in 2015, which forced me to take on even more responsibility as a theme developer while also making the least amount of money in sales I had in years. My passion for developing MD was too strong to care very much, and through even worse ups and downs, MD has been the core of my entire online presence and is burning strong even to this day.
Today my web development career is spent working on MD and my relatively new plugin, XFtoWP, while balancing a few client projects, all under the name of Kolakube. I intend to release a few more plugins under the Kolakube brand, but in 2023 I hope to spend more time writing articles and blogging than coding alone; to come full circle in the industry where I consider to be doing my life's work.
Q: What is your greatest strength as a developer?
Sometimes I look at the software I create and think "man, this is really boring!"
What I mean by that is the features and options my products ship with are built to do exactly what they say they will do, and do it well. My work honors the software and the UI its built for by blending in as opposed to trying to stand out and annoy users visually, and are built to be built upon by the plugin itself and its users.
Q: What is your greatest accomplishment?
I still hope to achieve my greatest accomplishment yet, which would be to have a team to help my work grow. But I am eternally grateful to have started in this industry at an early age and have been able to create a life from it, and I'd like to continue to do it on my own terms for as long as I live.
Q: Why have you chosen for XenForo as your forum software?
It's actually pretty funny, for as immersed as I was in forums in my early years I had no idea of the existence of XenForo until 2018, and did not become a customer until 2020. Despite how deeply I got into WordPress, I still loved forums and always had a support forum for my WordPress themes running on IPB.
Apart from IPB2.x, which still may be my favorite forum software of all time, I had never really been a fan of the aesthetic and the features seemed so limited when compared to my memory of running forums on vBulletin 3.x. The only other possibility was vBulletin, but I hated the look of vB4 and knew they had been bought out by some big corporation, so in my mind it pretty much all came down to IPB for forum software.
Once I finally realized those few "funny-looking vB forums" I browsed were actually built on a forum software called XenForo, my passion for forums was reinvigorated and I started learning everything I could about XenForo from their forums.
I discovered that XenForo had a REST API that would let me use forum data on my WordPress sites, and I vowed that if there was no product on the market that could integrate WordPress and XenForo together, that it would be my first project after moving my own forums over. Now the rest is history and neatly encapsulated into a little product entitled XFtoWP.
Q: Why is integrating WordPress and XenForo a worthy pursuit to you?
My primary businesses have always been on WordPress, and I have always used forums as the primary method of customer support. Even all the way back to 2011, I longed for a simple solution that could register and verify forum users (with simple group promotions) after a product was purchased on my WordPress site. For my entire career of selling products, I had to manually promote every user who purchased something from me so they could get proper forum access, if they ever registered to my forums to begin with!
While I think this feature is valuable enough on its own, I found many other ideas posted from users throughout the XenForo support forum and realized there was huge potential to create a valuable product in the space.
Despite the supposed complexities of such a product and others failed attempts before, I believed I was good enough at product development and had my own interest in seeing such a solution exist that I decided to pursue XFtoWP with the same ferocity I had pursued Marketers Delight with all those years ago.
Through the vast cathedral of plugins and ecosystems that exist for WordPress, and the superior discussion platform and architecture that is XenForo, combining the two together to fill out each other's weaknesses has resulted in an entirely new line of profitable and community oriented websites that would have otherwise never existed without XFtoWP, and that is what I look to further prove throghout 2023.
Q: Do you enjoy solving bugs that might occur on your add-ons?
Outside of learning new things, I'll be blunt in saying that I abhor finding bugs in my software. As both an artist and business owner, bugs halt creative aspiration and can give products a bad name. Worst of all, bugs just waste your own and your customer's time. Despite your enthusiasm for fixing a bug, your customer's did not sign up to help you find and fix bugs.
Q: How much hours do you develop daily or weekly?
It depends on what project I am working on on any given day or week. For creating new products and finishing product launches, it is not uncommon for me to work 12+ hours days for a few days straight. My goal for 2023 is to not fall into those rabbit holes so often and find a better balance in life during those periods where extreme development effort is required... but who am I kidding?
Q: What do you recommend a starting forum owner?
For any website, your users must have a reason to be there other than sharing the same enthusiasm you have for your own website.
My websites have always been about forum and blog styles, so the reason for users to sign up and participate on my forums is pretty clear.
Whether you create your own products, have devised an innovative thought framework, or you have an infectious personality that makes everybody want to be around you, your website has to offer something that can't be found anywhere else; I have never found success otherwise.
There we have it! We are very fortunate to have such developer among us. So if you have a XenForo forum and need the bridge to WordPress integration, be sure to pay Alex's website a visit. I enjoyed reading the history behind Alex, so thank you!
Alex, a great developer known for creating software such as WPtoXF, Marketers Delight, and CryptoWP, discussed his experience and expertise in the field of software development. He shared insights on the process for creating and maintaining successful software projects, as well as his thoughts on current trends and challenges in the industry. Overall, the interview highlighted @kolakube 's deep knowledge and passion for software development, and their ability to create innovative and high-quality products.Q: Hello! Thank you for accepting my interview request. Can you tell me and the community more about yourself?
My name is Alex, I am a 29 year old developer and food trucker from Austin, TX. Founder of Kolakube software.
Q: How long have you been on forums in general? What's the history behind you?
I first learned about creating websites and in particular forums around 2004 while I was in elementary school. The first forum I joined was for an old online multiplayer game called Dinky Bomb, where you would play against random people from around the world. The forum was called WePlayHere and it was for fans of the game to discuss strategy and also hosted private forums for the game's established clans.
I loved participating in the forums almost as much as playing the actual game itself, and concepts like "Moderators", "User promotions", and "private forums" captured my imagination and the thousands of forum posts I would go on to make there.
The weird text at the bottom of the site, "Powered by vBulletin", didn't make much sense to me until the day Atari bought Dinky Bomb and WePlayHere and proceeded to shut the entire game and forums down. Another member had created a sanctuary site to try to salvage the community and enlisted me as a moderator, but without the core game intact and most user's not even knowing about the new forum, it was a pretty short-lived website.
However, the idea of running a forum was not lost on me after that experience and in place of playing Dinky Bomb, I set out to start creating my very own forum. From there I went on to try just about every free forum software under the sun and became very interested in creating forum skins and styles.
After about a year of creating and releasing free forum styles I became relatively well-known at an old forum hosting service called Forumer, which offered hosted versions of phpBB and IPB at the time, and I became a moderator on their official support forum. This was a paid gig, and to be only 13 years old at the time, it was a pretty big deal!
From this money I was able to purchase my first license of vBulletin and did what everybody does—created an admin community! It was called "Admin Utopia" and had a good run for a little over a year, but ultimately fizzed out. This was my most successful community endeavor to date, and through the seemingly endless amount of hours spent inside the vBulletin templating system, I had learned a good deal about web design and CSS and even released a few styles back on vB.org.
After getting bored of forums and not finding satisfaction creating vB styles anymore, I explored my curiosity for blogging around 2006 and created a blog called Blogussion to document my journey and the things I was learning as a blogger.
Learning WordPress was so much easier than vBulletin and I was able to use my web design and CSS skills to design a nice theme for my blog. With such a simpler website setup and my taste for design satisfied, my mind was freed up to focus on writing content and I became a writing machine!
In a little over a year, Blogussion had taken off more than any of my past forum projects combined and I had a loyal readership. Despite my web design experience, I considered myself a writer first and foremost, but that changed after my readership inspired me to create my first paid product.
The design of the blog had become so popular that in 2009 I launched my very first paid product, which was an inspired theme of the same skin I had created for Blogussion. This style was an instant hit, and I made my first four-figures online by the time I was 16 years old.
After this, my passion for web design was reignited and I spent the next year leveling up my knowledge of web design languages and learning how to develop with PHP. All of this made me spend less time writing for Blogussion, and right before graduating High School in 2011, I sold Blogussion for a five-figure sum and launched a small WordPress theme shop called Kolakube.
With my loyal readership from Blogussion, and some notoriety in the community of the WordPress theme framework I built my designs on, Kolakube was a success right out of the gate. After a couple years of releasing new designs and the ups and downs of running a popular theme business, sales ultimately started to decline and I felt I had built myself into a box by relying on another theme framework to make my design's possible.
I took my best seller entitled Marketers Delight and re-launched it as a standalone WordPress theme in 2015, which forced me to take on even more responsibility as a theme developer while also making the least amount of money in sales I had in years. My passion for developing MD was too strong to care very much, and through even worse ups and downs, MD has been the core of my entire online presence and is burning strong even to this day.
Today my web development career is spent working on MD and my relatively new plugin, XFtoWP, while balancing a few client projects, all under the name of Kolakube. I intend to release a few more plugins under the Kolakube brand, but in 2023 I hope to spend more time writing articles and blogging than coding alone; to come full circle in the industry where I consider to be doing my life's work.
Q: What is your greatest strength as a developer?
Sometimes I look at the software I create and think "man, this is really boring!"
What I mean by that is the features and options my products ship with are built to do exactly what they say they will do, and do it well. My work honors the software and the UI its built for by blending in as opposed to trying to stand out and annoy users visually, and are built to be built upon by the plugin itself and its users.
Q: What is your greatest accomplishment?
I still hope to achieve my greatest accomplishment yet, which would be to have a team to help my work grow. But I am eternally grateful to have started in this industry at an early age and have been able to create a life from it, and I'd like to continue to do it on my own terms for as long as I live.
Q: Why have you chosen for XenForo as your forum software?
It's actually pretty funny, for as immersed as I was in forums in my early years I had no idea of the existence of XenForo until 2018, and did not become a customer until 2020. Despite how deeply I got into WordPress, I still loved forums and always had a support forum for my WordPress themes running on IPB.
Apart from IPB2.x, which still may be my favorite forum software of all time, I had never really been a fan of the aesthetic and the features seemed so limited when compared to my memory of running forums on vBulletin 3.x. The only other possibility was vBulletin, but I hated the look of vB4 and knew they had been bought out by some big corporation, so in my mind it pretty much all came down to IPB for forum software.
Once I finally realized those few "funny-looking vB forums" I browsed were actually built on a forum software called XenForo, my passion for forums was reinvigorated and I started learning everything I could about XenForo from their forums.
I discovered that XenForo had a REST API that would let me use forum data on my WordPress sites, and I vowed that if there was no product on the market that could integrate WordPress and XenForo together, that it would be my first project after moving my own forums over. Now the rest is history and neatly encapsulated into a little product entitled XFtoWP.
Q: Why is integrating WordPress and XenForo a worthy pursuit to you?
My primary businesses have always been on WordPress, and I have always used forums as the primary method of customer support. Even all the way back to 2011, I longed for a simple solution that could register and verify forum users (with simple group promotions) after a product was purchased on my WordPress site. For my entire career of selling products, I had to manually promote every user who purchased something from me so they could get proper forum access, if they ever registered to my forums to begin with!
While I think this feature is valuable enough on its own, I found many other ideas posted from users throughout the XenForo support forum and realized there was huge potential to create a valuable product in the space.
Despite the supposed complexities of such a product and others failed attempts before, I believed I was good enough at product development and had my own interest in seeing such a solution exist that I decided to pursue XFtoWP with the same ferocity I had pursued Marketers Delight with all those years ago.
Through the vast cathedral of plugins and ecosystems that exist for WordPress, and the superior discussion platform and architecture that is XenForo, combining the two together to fill out each other's weaknesses has resulted in an entirely new line of profitable and community oriented websites that would have otherwise never existed without XFtoWP, and that is what I look to further prove throghout 2023.
Q: Do you enjoy solving bugs that might occur on your add-ons?
Outside of learning new things, I'll be blunt in saying that I abhor finding bugs in my software. As both an artist and business owner, bugs halt creative aspiration and can give products a bad name. Worst of all, bugs just waste your own and your customer's time. Despite your enthusiasm for fixing a bug, your customer's did not sign up to help you find and fix bugs.
Q: How much hours do you develop daily or weekly?
It depends on what project I am working on on any given day or week. For creating new products and finishing product launches, it is not uncommon for me to work 12+ hours days for a few days straight. My goal for 2023 is to not fall into those rabbit holes so often and find a better balance in life during those periods where extreme development effort is required... but who am I kidding?
Q: What do you recommend a starting forum owner?
For any website, your users must have a reason to be there other than sharing the same enthusiasm you have for your own website.
My websites have always been about forum and blog styles, so the reason for users to sign up and participate on my forums is pretty clear.
Whether you create your own products, have devised an innovative thought framework, or you have an infectious personality that makes everybody want to be around you, your website has to offer something that can't be found anywhere else; I have never found success otherwise.
There we have it! We are very fortunate to have such developer among us. So if you have a XenForo forum and need the bridge to WordPress integration, be sure to pay Alex's website a visit. I enjoyed reading the history behind Alex, so thank you!
