Interview: Andrea Barghigiani on Jetpack

Andrea is a long-time WordPress user and runs the popular WordPress blog wpAndMore aimed at Italian WP users and developers. We got in touch with him recently to find out what he thinks about our Jetpack plugin. Andrea lives in Italy and can be found on Twitter @Andrea_AndMore.

Who is Andrea?

What do you do for a living?

For the last five years I’ve been developing WordPress themes and plugins. Recently I began to teach other people how to develop with this platform via articles and video tutorials on wpAndMore.info.

What’s the best thing about your job?

In a nutshell, that I can use WordPress to satisfy the requests of my clients 🙂

How did you first start using WordPress?

I’ve been using WordPress since version 2.7. At the time I was looking for a framework/platform able to help me speed up my develop process and give more power to my clients – WordPress was the best fit.

Thoughts on Jetpack

How’d you first find out about Jetpack?

I always keep myself always updated about WordPress news and I think I read about it on the WPTavern blog (even if I can’t be so sure!). Since then I’ve installed it on more than ten WordPress sites.

What’s the one Jetpack feature you couldn’t do without? Why?

My favourite is the Related Posts feature. I like it because it decreases my bounce rate (I can show more articles to my hungry readers when they finish reading one post) and because it does not stress my server in doing so.

What do you think of the the Jetpack setup process: Easy, hard?

The setup process is very simple, all you need is a WordPress.com account and you’re ready to go!

What do you value about Jetpack?

Based on the kind of site, Jetpack helps me in many ways. First and foremost it helps me keep my installations more organized and streamlined, since I have to install less plugins. Jetpack also helps me run the sites even faster with the CDN options (Photon) that it provides.

Working with Clients

Do you generally recommend Jetpack?

Well, looking at the latest improvements, in my opinion Jetpack is a must-have plugin. The various features improve our WordPress installations in many ways, starting from the social aspect (like the social buttons or the amazing Publicize feature) to the more text based ones (like LaTeX and the After the Deadline integration).

Does Jetpack help you with client work?

Sure! Unsurprisingly, my clients are usually happy to install something for free that will give them loads of features. Photon, Carousel and Tiled Galleries are always welcomed by them and the social feature integrations I mentioned previously are very useful in helping them with promoting their sites and content.

Jetpack Frustrations

What frustrates you about Jetpack? Why?

If I have to be honest, the only thing it frustrates me is right after install. By default Jetpack activates several modules that I do not need and I have to disable them one by one each time I install it. But I mean, it’s not a big deal 😉

What would you like to improve?

Apart from the above (ie: letting me activate only the modules I need) I’d love it if you could implement a bit of AJAX technology, so I do not have to refresh the page each time I activate or deactivate a module.

Get involved!

Try it out

If you’ve not used Jetpack before, read our step-by-step installation guide here to try it out for yourself.

Contribute

If you are a Jetpack user already please tell us what you think in the comments and, if you’d like to get involved yourself by writing a guest post about Jetpack or being interviewed yourself, get in touch!

Richard

Designer.