At the dinner table each night, we take turns sharing our “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”—what was our singular best and worst thing from the day. Today, my thumbs up was helping a WordPress.com VIP client with a problem by showing them one of my favorite WordPress filters, ent2ncr.¹

I wasn’t sure how to explain this at the table. I’ve ended up saying “Helping someone with their website” so often that I’m tired of hearing myself say it, so it became “I taught someone a filter that helped them with their website.”

Our five-year-old, O, asked me what’s a filter.

Filters are one of those areas of WordPress that until you get it, they can seem like a crystal ball. Plenty of new-to-WordPress developers stumble over them. How do you teach it to a kiddo? Break it down to the simplest idea.

“They had some words that look like this” while holding up my hand up in a fist. “But, their website needed it to look like this” showing my hand shaped like a “C”. “A filter is something you stick in the middle to change this”—the fist—”to this”—the C.

“Oh, that makes sense.”

With the decreasing number of women in computer science degree programs, I want to encourage them to be geeks if they want to be, or at the very least, not discourage them.