About Us

Simple Forum – as it was once named – was conceived towards the end of 2006 – just 3 years after the birth of WordPress itself. I had created a handful of small plugins and needed a decent support mechanism that wasn’t email. Nor – after investigating the options – was it an existing WordPress forum plugin. So, without giving any thought to the consequences, I sat down and started to write a new plugin just for myself and started to use it on my website that December.It was named ‘Simple Forum’ because I wanted it to be functionally more capable than other options but at the same time simple to use. And, I thought, as I was going to be the only user, I could do things the way I wanted them.

Users of my other plugins started to use the forum for their questions and requests and now and then people would ask if they could have a copy for use on their own website and slowly but relentlessly it snowballed.

The very second user to register on my support forum was Steve Klasen AKA Mr Papa. He asked for a copy and became a nuisance regularly asking for new features and changes. And then he would write half of them himself and send me the code. And slowly – as the months went by – no longer a nuisance but a genuine collaborator, the project became more and more dependent on both of us and a partnership was formed.

At some point we were surprised to discover that a standalone application named ‘Simple Forum’ had long existed so we changed the name to ‘Simple:Press’ maintaining the ‘simple’ misnomer and at the same time honouring our WordPress foundation.

November 2008 saw us launch this dedicated website alongside version 4 with the next major milestone taking up virtually all of 2011. During that year we re-designed and re-wrote the entire project to create version 5 utilising our plugin and theme api and slimming down the core code. Launched in February 2012 this remains the foundation of Simple:Press today.

We do not know for sure how many users we have out there in the globe. But every now and then it is a great pleasure to visit a website only to be surprised by a Simple:Press forum. Sort of makes it all worthwhile.

We Are…

Yellow Swordfish aka Andy Staines. Based in the UK county of Cambridgeshire and used to blog with WordPress but stopped a long, long time ago.

Mr Papa ake Steve Klasen. Based in the US state of California and retains a very active interest in cruising at Cruise Talk Central.

Ken aka Ken Wilson. Based in the US state of Texas, Ken has got his teeth into our Codex documentation and is keeping us on our toes and up to date.