About Monowar Hossain


Monowar Hossain, WordPress developer from Dhaka, Bangladesh

WordPress Developer from Dhaka, Bangladesh, working on custom themes, plugins, Elementor, ACF, and website performance. Open Source Contributor. I am also known online as devmonowar — that is the name you will find on GitHub, Stack Overflow and most other places.

Who I am

My name is Monowar Hossain. I build things for WordPress, and almost all of it is free and open source — anyone can download it, read the code, and change it.

Right now I maintain a set of plugins published on WordPress.org, with another one waiting in the review queue. I also build a WordPress theme called PortoLite, and I run a shared demo library so people can try every widget before installing anything.

How I started

I finished a Diploma in Engineering at Magura Polytechnic Institute in 2016. I did not begin with WordPress. I started with plain HTML and CSS, then moved to PHP because I wanted to understand what was actually happening behind the pages I was putting together.

WordPress kept me for one simple reason: when something did not work the way I wanted, I could open the code and fix it. That is exactly how my first plugin began. I needed a slider that did not slow a site down, I could not find one I was happy with, so I wrote my own. Later I cleaned it up and published it on WordPress.org so other people could use it too.

How I work

Every plugin I have released follows the same three rules, and they came from problems I hit myself.

What I build and why

None of these started as a product idea. Each one started as something that annoyed me on a real site.

Open source

I keep my work free because that is how I learned. When I was starting out I read other people's plugin code to figure out how WordPress really worked. That code was free for me, so mine is free too.

Free does not mean unfinished. Every plugin goes through the WordPress.org review before release, ships with documentation and a changelog, and I answer the support topics on the forum myself. If something is broken, I would much rather hear about it and fix it.

What I am learning now

Two things have most of my attention. The first is performance — how to keep a plugin small enough that adding it to a site is not a trade-off. The second is accessibility, which I did not take seriously enough early on: making sure what I build works with a keyboard and a screen reader, not only with a mouse.

I also answer questions on Stack Overflow. Explaining something to another developer is the fastest way to find out whether I actually understand it.

Quick facts

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