Photo: Mary hits a backhand volley. She has been playing tennis for more than 50 years.

Mary Baum is a sponsored contributor to the Core team of the WordPress open-source software project.

WordPress powers 43 percent of the global internet and 63 percent of sites that run a content-management system.

From WordPress 5.2.2 through 6.5, and counting…

Release coordinator

Releases have one lead (generally the founder) and two to three coordinators.

Major release: WordPress 6.5

Minor release: WordPress 5.2.2

Release-coordination cohort

Official preparation for coordinating a major release. WordPress 6.4

Marketing-communications lead or co-lead

WordPress 5.4, 5.5, 5.9, 6.2

Marketing-communications mentor

WordPress 5.6

Noteworthy contributor

(Pictured on the credits page)
WordPress 5.3, 5.7, 5.8, 6.0, 6.1

Ongoing work around the project.

WordPress Developer Blog

Founding member of the editorial board and occasional author.

Core team representative, 2022

People of WordPress

Occasional copy and photo editor

WordCamp speaker and organizer.

From 2011 through 2019, Mary spoke at WordCamps across the United States on design and development.

She was on the organizing team of every WordCamp held in St. Louis, from the very first WordCamp St. Louis in 2011 to WordCamp US in 2019.

Photo: Mary speaks at WordCamp Miami, 2018
Click on the picture to see Mary’s talks on WordPress TV.

Life before WordPress

A veteran creative trained in design and copy, Mary has roots across a variety of marketing disciplines. Her design degree predates WordPress, the internet …

Oy vey. Enough of the official sound.

She’s been around, okay? By the time the internet was born, she’d been a working creative for more than a decade

Most of this site is about photography—events, landscapes and flora, with some portraits and, of course, cats. She messes around with pattern design and has some products for sale around the print-on-demand world.

But if you want a snapshot of the last 40 years, here goes.

1980s: moving the needle

This sweepstakes for a Midwestern pasta brand ran in 22 markets and got 225,000 entries. On average, that was more than the population of some of those cities.

This print campaign for high-end athletic equipment sold enough after just the first media placement to earn back what the client had paid for the space.

1990s: setting a standard

Mary quips that in the 1990s she got an MBA—from the Maritz school of business administration.

Moving off the Maritz campus to go independent, her client at Maritz Marketing Research said her creative set an industry standard for quality. The products also brought in about half of the automotive research group’s annual revenue between 1996 and 2001.

2000s: branding a flagship

By 2002 it was clear that the centerpiece of any brand would be its website.

At that point, Mary had built one site and built it wrong. She built the site for this niche financial firm wrong, too.

But the identity work and brand standards, including a name for the product and some simple ideas to describe it, got it ready to become the flagship product for a seller of corporate 401(k) accounts across the US.

2010 and beyond: Pressing the racquets

In 2010 Mary saw the writing on her own walls.

She needed to find her own niche. And she needed to offer more than just static sites. In 2011 she standardized on the Genesis theme framework.

In 2015 she focused her client work on tennis. The result was RacquetPress.

And the rest is history.