Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 22 of the WP mainline podcast for Friday, December 17th, 2021. I am your host, Jeff Chandler and joined, uh, by, uh, Malcolm Peralta. Hello, sir. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello indeed. How has your week been?
Speaker 2 00:00:36 It’s been okay. Uh, it’s, it’s hard to get things done with everyone already kind of on holiday brain, but other than that, it’s going well.
Speaker 1 00:00:43 Yeah, well, I, I tell you, one thing I’m getting pretty concerned with is all my, all my crime, uh, variant it’s going around. Cause cause now it’s like, you know, I was fine with wearing a mask everywhere, but now it seems like this variant is to the point where I have to actually, uh, purchase some and 95 mask or kn 95 mask and start wearing those out in public. If I want to really protect myself from this new variant, the good news is I’m back double bank’s needed. We’re trying to schedule our boosters as soon as possible. And from what I’ve been able to tell the vaccines are doing, from what we can tell, we’ve been doing a great job of battling these, these variants and mostly all the bad news I’m seeing. And, uh, 95% of all hospitalizations here in my state are from people who are not vaccinated. It’s it’s a damn shame.
Speaker 2 00:01:34 It certainly is. And I, I mean, I think, uh,
Speaker 1 00:01:38 From what I’ve heard, you’re actually going to have spot right now. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:01:41 Actually we’re probably the worst in the, in Ontario. I think there were some fair and we’re one of the worst in all of Canada right now. Um, it’s, it’s actually really sad. A lot of it is 18 to 29 year olds. Um, and, uh, yeah, you would just think that they would be vaccinated, but I think they still think they’re invincible. So that’s just the way it is sometimes
Speaker 1 00:02:02 With, with youth comes a feeling of vulnerability and you have to learn the hard way sometimes. Okay. So I’m sorry for starting to show off and abandon. I mean it’s important. And uh, and in fact with all my crime, I hope I’m saying that right. Cause there’s a whole work about that. I had all my crown, all my crime crime, uh, so an event took place this week where people from the WordPress community, highly esteemed special folks, uh, in fact, five for the five contributors, uh, they were invited to attend these state of the word 2021, which took place in New York city at the, uh, know-hows, uh, office kind of automatic satellite office. In fact, we learned that, um, the venue that it was, uh, the event was in was actually, uh, a headquarters building for tumbler and a lot of the tumbler workers, uh, we’re working from that space, but not too many people from Tumblr are in that space and making use of it in a, I think mass says they have it until 20, 23 maybe, but they had the space for another year or two.
Speaker 1 00:03:13 So he said he opened it up and said, if anybody would like to do, you know, uh, meetings or meetups or conferences or anything rubbing around open-source and whatnot there, that he’d be open to, to allow in that venue to open it up for the community to, to use, which I thought was really cool. Cause it’s venue spaces. I mean, it’s New York city, everything costs an arm and a leg and your right toe. Uh, so being able to have, if you’re local to that area, being able to have a venue like that, to do a meetup in, um, as a pretty cool deal, pretty good thing. But then, you know, you’ve got the variants going around, who knows if you want to meet up at this point, anyways, the event took place. There was about, it looked like 30 to 40 people attended the state of the word where Matt mulloway pretty much gave a roundabout, uh, summary of what’s been taking place.
Speaker 2 00:04:01 It was just that number, even just that number is kind of interesting. Like originally it was to be 50 people and actually during the introductory kind of, um, like the start of the presentation Matt actually had to ask, and then that created a cascade where everyone wanted to move up closer. And I dunno, it was just really funny that little like awkward moment of know everyone’s shuffling seats, but there was, there was, uh, more than like half a dozen seats that were available, um, for people that either couldn’t attend or didn’t attend or I’m not sure, but I thought that was kind of interesting.
Speaker 1 00:04:35 Yeah. And I should note that everybody who was there in attendance had to be vaccinated, had to have the vaccination card, had to present proof of vaccination, be able to participate in that event. So there were some safeguards in place now, hopefully all those people that were there when they get home, they take some rapid tests, you know, to see if maybe they possibly have the new Varian and whatnot, you know, that’s up to them. Uh, but anyways, yes, so some that kind of started off with, uh, contributions and what’s been going on in the, uh, in, in the state of WordPress. And, uh, the first thing I’ll say is that I was watching live via YouTube YouTube stream. And the first 10 or 15 minutes of the YouTube stream was terrible. I constantly got errors, uh, streaming areas. And it got to the point where I was getting, quite frankly, I was getting pissed off because you know, this was important information. And every time I log in, it’s like, Nope, can’t Nope, stream air, stream, air. And I kept having to refresh and a lot of people were experiencing, experiencing the same problem. Uh, unbeknownst to me, this event was also streaming on Facebook and Twitter, and those really didn’t have any issues. So I don’t know what happened between the two, but what now,
Speaker 2 00:05:46 The problem with those other locations, those they don’t have that live chat. So like one of the cool things about coming to that YouTube thing, a whole bunch of names and faces that I haven’t seen in ages, like kind of chiming in and saying hello to everyone. And that was a really cool feeling. So I ended up having the Facebook stream open and the YouTube stream, like pause so that I could still see the chat on YouTube while I was watching it on Facebook. It was really
Speaker 1 00:06:09 Ridiculous. Yeah. It was cool to, to hang out and see people watching from India and Nigeria, Africa, all over the world, all, all sitting together, watching this presentation and all United through WordPress in that, in that chat room, uh, which was, which was pretty cool. But once the, uh, once the stream got going and it worked, it was fine. It was okay. It was just a little frustrating there at the beginning. So Matt started off by talking about, uh, there’s eight new core committers now for 2020 and 2021, uh, which is fantastic. These are the people who had the keys to the castle, so to speak. They had the ability to make commits to WordPress core and change the code at runs on 40, 43% of websites that are out there. So it’s, it’s a highly esteemed, uh, position that, uh, requires a lot of responsibility. So congrats to those eight individuals, if you have not, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 2 00:07:05 Can we just pause and like also highlight how great it is if there’s a little bit more diversity in this group than previous groups? I mean, um,
Speaker 1 00:07:11 Yeah, I mean, it’s not, it’s not the early days. It was like eight people in a click, you know, it’s not like that anymore.
Speaker 2 00:07:17 Yeah. It’s not just eight old men, old white guys or whatever anymore. Like there’s some, some women who are now able to be core contributors, able to be who have risen through the ranks to become who have fought their way to be able to do this. Um, people from like east Asia and other ethnicities. I mean, like, this is really great to see that it’s not just, you know, a group of eight old white dudes that were just added. I think that’s worth kind of pointing out.
Speaker 1 00:07:41 Um, I’m right there with you. Thank you for highlighting that. Uh, if you have not taken a look at the, uh, wordpress.org/new site lately, you probably should because it’s going to be going through a redesign. I’m taking a look at it right now and it’s not live as of yet, but at some point in 2022, it’s going to be redesigned with some jazz aesthetics. It’s going to be a based theme, of course. And it’s going to take advantage of what we’re priests 5.9 has to offer with full site editing. Of course, step foresight editing means nothing to us because we’re just going to be viewing the content, but it’s supposed to look pretty nice and pretty good in this part of a larger revamp of wordpress.org in general, uh, which is probably long overdue. I think, I think Matt was saying the last time they redesigned were preset org. The news portion of the site was like, we’re press 3.0, so it’s been awhile.
Speaker 1 00:08:37 Uh, one of the other things he talked about, and this was, this is pretty important. This is one of the actual, like one of the most important things. One of the highlights for me during this whole state of the word, he talks about open verse and he talks about how it was brought into WordPress from creative common search. And it’s going to a large focus on audio photos and additional media assets, which are going to be made available in the coming months, uh, for those who don’t know, uh, creative commons, which has been around for at least 20 years, uh, they’ve been involved with creating licenses around content. That’s kind of like, it’s not exactly, you know, GPO is a, is a license for freedom and that’s for software. But when it comes to content media that we have creative commons and, uh, what you’re able to do is, uh, they weren’t able to financially keep it afloat anymore.
Speaker 1 00:09:28 So may I, and maybe I think it was through automatic or whatnot, uh, kind of acquire them, brought it over. And I was going to be housed under the wordpress.org umbrella, which I think is a really cool thing, uh, that to keep it going. And right now you can, it’s going to be renamed open verse. And if you go to wordpress.org/open verse, right now, you can search from millions of different photos and stuff. Uh, Matt said that they’re bringing over the audio portion, uh, in January. So that’s something really cool. And on the side, um, we’re of that org, it was kind of soft launched or in the state of the word, but it’s wordpress.org/photos. And Matt Malo is they’re creating a photo directory of CC zero licensed images, which is, which is really cool because the CCO license is like, it’s pretty much people putting their photography in the public domain.
Speaker 1 00:10:24 So when you use a CCO licensed image, you don’t have to worry about so much like attribution or whether you want to use it in a commercial setting or what have you. It’s basically look, here’s my image. I’m contributing it, use it however you want. It’s kind of like what the licenses. So I think it’s really cool that we’re going to have this photo director and I’ve already submitted a photo today to it. And, uh, it’s, it’s in soft launch right now. And, uh, there’s some questions that were brought, I think, um, Adam Warner actually, uh, during the Q and a session brought up a good question on how is this going to handle XF data and some of the other maybe personally identifiable information. And right now that hasn’t been really thought of or addressed just yet, but it is a point of contention that they’re going to figure out and work on. Um, and these guidelines, if you look at the guidelines for the photo directory, it it’s pretty, uh, some of them are pretty substantial. And the one that actually bums me out is you have to pretty much own your artwork, own the photograph. And there’s a guideline in here that says, photo photos must not consist solely of the artwork of others, such as paintings, drawings, and graffiti. You know what that means? I don’t think I’m going to be able to submit photographs of trains with graffiti on them. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:11:36 So I, I, I saw you tweet this and I, and maybe post it somewhere else as well. I’m not sure I think, um, but as soon as I saw it, my first thought was there’s, there’s a specific word there that I think lets you kind of get away with submitting train cars with graffiti on them solely. No, if it has like multiple train cars, molded pieces of graffiti on it, it’s not necessarily like you’re not ripping off someone else’s artwork just to promote their artwork. Um, and again, it’s a little bit more public or open for those kinds of things because you have a train out in the world kind of thing. It’s not like, um,
Speaker 1 00:12:12 Like a mural on a wall.
Speaker 2 00:12:13 Exactly, exactly. So I think you’re going to be able to get through it and post your train pictures there. I think it’s going to be completely fine and, and I hope they accept them and enjoy them. Um, one of the funniest things to me though during that part of the presentation was Matt, uh, with a little chagrin on his face going, you know, we swear we named this before Facebook and their whole thing. Um, you know, the, they call it the meta search on the open verse. Uh, and then it was kind of like tongue in cheek. Like he, so hopefully, hopefully they won’t have to change the name or anything cause you know, Facebook is not small, but I just thought, I thought that was kind of a funny job at the whole crazy verse thing that’s happening in the world right now,
Speaker 1 00:12:52 Taking a look at the photo directory, my, uh, photo has been approved. So it’s just a picture of fall colors along the Cuyahoga river that I took a few years ago. And who knows how somebody is going to use this image. It’d be cool to kind of track if somehow some way I was able to see wine or how somebody uses my image. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:13:12 Just reverse image search on Google when it gets like when it starts getting used a little bit about the submission process. Talk a little bit about, um, the moderation process. I think those two things were interesting as well.
Speaker 1 00:13:23 Uh, the moderation process. I actually, I have no idea who is part of the team who was doing it, who’s doing what, um, I do know that when you submit a photo, uh, you print it, you had to give it, you can only submit one at a time maximum of 250 characters for your description. And there’s all these, these lists of things that you have to confirm such as, uh, you have the copyright or the legal right to upload the image you’re going to make it available under CC zero. Uh, photo is an actual photograph, not a screenshot or digital art photos, high quality doesn’t contain overlays like watermarks or copyright notices. It’s not, over-processed, it’s not a collage composite of multiple photographs. Doesn’t have to pick violence or hate or sexual content. That’s a gimme photo must not consists mostly of text photo. As we just mentioned, uh, must not consist solely of the artwork of others.
Speaker 1 00:14:15 Photo must not contain identifiable faces. And photo must not be a minor variation of something you have submitted to this site before. So there’s a whole list of contingencies that you have to make sure that your photograph abides by before uploading them. And most of those make sense to me, um, in order to have this directory there. And, and the reason why I think this directory is cool, one of the reasons is when we look towards the future, and this is something Matt brought up a couple of times when he talks about the idea of open verse and contributing back to the, to the commons, is these things, these directories that are CC zero for content, and eventually just going to this is going to expend, um, extend to audio, uh, fonts, uh, maybe various other assets that, you know, theme developers can use. So, and I think this will be exciting if you’re a theme developer, uh, creating a theme and creating the starter content, looking for fonts that have licenses you can use at a competitive with the GPL, uh, the images, the photography that you use in your theme.
Speaker 1 00:15:23 I know a lot of theme authors probably still use Unsplash and, uh, but Unsplash, as we’ve seen before can sometimes, and they’ve done this in the past. They can just pull the rug out from under you and change the licensing terms, uh, without any say, say, say so from you and or anybody else and Matt kind of joked about that. Uh, he didn’t highlight, he didn’t say Unsplash specifically, but I, I, he had to have been referencing them when he joked about that. Uh, it’s going to be CC zero on wordpress.org and that is going to be indefinite, uh, that the license will not change and mean they, he said unlike some other companies and the first thing I thought it was Unsplash cause he made a big deal about that. So in terms of having a website or, uh, under the wordpress.org umbrella, that you can go to defined media images, audio fonts, other things that you can use in your website, um, or, you know, especially for when it comes to creating themes, I think it’s going to be awesome. And it’s not just for WordPress people. This is a resource as Matt says for, I mean he says humanity, but I mean for the general web overall.
Speaker 2 00:16:29 Yeah. And that way your website doesn’t have to
Speaker 1 00:16:31 All be burned pictures, right? That’s yeah, yeah. It doesn’t have to be a bird pictures, but I mean, you know, Matt talks about the open web and we all talk about the open web and how, uh, you know, we, we would like it to be more open, but it seems to be closed down more commercial closed down behind walls. So I think if, instead of relying on someone else, if someone of the organization out there to create the CC zero directories or repositories for, for information, for items for media, Matt through open verse is just going to do it himself. And this is just going to be part of the legacy now of, of wordpress.org, where it’s not just about a code, but now it extends. It’s going to extend way beyond just code and software, which is,
Speaker 2 00:17:19 Which is what we definitely should be doing with all of this. All the people power that we have behind these projects.
Speaker 1 00:17:26 Absolutely. So Matt also mentioned that, uh, the WordPress pattern directory was launched and it’s going to be in fact, WordPress 5.9 has built in a pattern suggestion library. I think you can, uh, maybe able to browse through the pattern library through 5.9, maybe not, but the parenting library is pretty cool because if you go visit the pattern directory, you can click a button from there, paste it into the block editor and boom, whatever was there on the panning directory site you can have right there in your site. That that is pretty powerful stuff.
Speaker 2 00:17:58 Yeah, I agree. It, it will certainly make things, um, you know, easier and better over time for people that are like getting into really kind of designing content pages for their websites. Um, my kind of gotcha on this of course will always be the WordPress pattern directory only supports the core blocks. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:18:20 I was just going to, I was just going to bring that up. Yeah. So that’s a limiting factor.
Speaker 2 00:18:25 It’s cool. But I, I, I’m a little bit concerned about that. So I think that, you know, as the block editor grows and improves and maybe more core blocks are added, I think that this will become more and more useful, but even just with the few patterns that they already have, I’m looking at this and going, man, that’d be a real pain in the butt for me to like do as it like front end development on. It’s nice that I can just like copy paste that swap some images and colors, look at how great that looks. It’s so much better than what I could typically or easily do. So I’m excited to see this move forward.
Speaker 1 00:18:56 Uh, there was some stats that were released for the various, uh, make WordPress projects in teams. He talks about, uh, polyglots had a great year. Um, there were 13,659 language packs in core with 15,900 active translators making WordPress more accessible to the entire globe. Uh, and this is all part of a project at, um, an open source project that they use for translations called Glock press in case anybody forget about that. So glad press is probably handles like most of the translations and things of that nature language packs. Um, there was also some improvement on the diversity and WordPress front. There was 135 participants in 66 cities and 16 countries that participated in the various diversity and WordPress workshops, which I think is comprised of three different programs, uh, which helps add diversity in terms of speaking. And we’re push contributions throughout the community and learn. WordPress also saw, uh, some gains with 186 social learning spaces, 73 workshops, 70 lesson plans, and two courses in 21 different languages. And there’s still a lot of work to be done. And the learn wordpress.org.
Speaker 2 00:20:13 Yeah. Matt actually highlighted that as kind of one of the key things he hopes we’ll kind of see some real power, but behind it over the next year, because there are only like there’s two courses and they’re apparently they’re fairly deep courses, but he’s like, you know, I like to see that grow and be a lot bigger and more deep and more interesting, more engaging. And it is in 21 different languages, but I mean, that’s nothing compared to, you know, 13,000 language packs. So, um, you know, if you’re interested in contributing to WordPress, I mean, this is, this is an area that does not necessarily require a technical skill to help with. So, you know, see what you can do contributors. Welcome.
Speaker 1 00:20:49 Matt also went over the numbers, the market share numbers, according to w three texts. He highlighted those, uh, never remember last week we talked about the market share analysis that Yoast DevOp did. Uh, and Matt also iterated on the point that we brought up last week and he said that, wow, the good news from the numbers is that WordPress still leads the pack by a very fair margin. The bad news is that open source, other than other than WordPress open source is losing in those markets, your numbers. And it’s not like WordPress is taking market share from Joomla or Drupal. All of those systems are taking them from what w through texts considers the none that is a CMS that’s either custom or is not really identifiable. And he also talked about the, the sharp increase in growth from like Shopify, Wix and Squarespace. Uh, so you just, you just brought up that kind of concern in that, you know, he also mentioned that he feels like, I didn’t know this, but I guess droop on Tuma do not have mobile apps. I would have, I would have thought that those, uh, content management systems that apps and Matt and mentioned that he feels like that’s a big, a big opportunity that that’s, uh, that they’re missing right now, that it would really help them maybe gain market share become more successful as if those two, uh, content management systems had robust and very good apps.
Speaker 1 00:22:15 So I don’t know. I mean, a Joomla app. I wonder what that, I wonder what that would be like. I, I, yeah, like, I don’t know why I just assumed that that, I mean, because everybody has an app, you know, every piece of software is an app, so it was just kind of surprising to hear him say that. And I actually haven’t done any research yet to go look and see if there’s actually a Drupal app or to my app on both the apple store or, uh, you know, the Google play store. But, uh, yeah, if anybody’s out there listening, you know, get, get Groupon, Juma involved, get an app going, uh, we need them to get more market share or something. I don’t know.
Speaker 2 00:22:48 Um, one of the interesting spinoffs though, I really wanted to kind of do as an aside is there’s been a conversation on Twitter, um, and Yost just posted about it, um, on the 13th that some of the market share growth can probably be attributed to elementary growth over the last little while. Um, with a growth in, um, April from 3.8% for, uh, elementary is market share up to 6.7%. And so it looks like, you know, actually a large percentage of WordPress’s growth is actually been in part thanks to elementary growth, which in my opinion, just kind of proves the fact or the reason why the block editor has become such an important part of WordPress is to try to like get people away from the Wix is, and Squarespaces and web flows of the world and continue to use WordPress and element, or kind of is a quick way to do that. So, um, I just thought that was kind of a, an interesting thing to point out that, uh, you know, maybe a lot of what we need to see even on Drupal and Joomla is more of that, uh, you know, drag and drop kind of feel, or that lower lowering the bar of entry to be able to kind of make cool things.
Speaker 1 00:23:52 Yeah. Ella mentor has huge numbers, both in growth in market share and use. And I think it’s a valid argument to make that because of Ella mentor, uh, WordPress has seen a uptick in growth, uh, then again, without element or without WordPress, there’s no ELA mentor. So yeah, and there’s also been some discussion as to whether what the future of element where, uh, whether or not they could possibly break off and turn it, turn their software into a service. So you have Elementor software as a service to, to unbreak that dependency of WordPress. So maybe that would help them increase their market, share even more to where it’s not, you can’t, you don’t have to worry about, um, you can’t just use WordPress or Elementor on WordPress, but now you can use it like in Drupal or Joomla or somewhere else. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen there with the future of LMI tour, but that is a behemoth of a page builder and a product in the WordPress space.
Speaker 1 00:24:45 And in fact, uh, I’d be willing to bet that there are a lot of people out there who, um, somehow get ahold of WordPress and it has elemental built in, or it’s on automatically installed. And they think WordPress is Elementor. Yes. For sure. I bet you that’s a thing. Yeah. So speaking of themes, uh, black themes grew from just two themes in 2020 to 28 themes available in 2021. And that’s one of the things that Matt really wants to see grow. I mean, he says he wants to see 5,000, you know, black, black themes, uh, by the end of 2022. And I think that’s a bit ambitious of a number of some other people think that’s a bit ambitious, but at the same time with tools like, uh, Dwight to calm that David, I constantly call, uh, David Dwyer, Dwayne I’m so sorry, David. It’s like Dwight that the first thing that comes to mind, but, um, he’s come up with a theme that Jason theme generator and I think tools like his and others will be created throughout the new year, especially once 5.9, uh, hits the masses and through those tools, I think those are going to play a considerable role in getting those black base themes, uh, get that number increased on the pristine directory, you know,
Speaker 2 00:26:04 Really helped me though when it comes to the theme directory, a better flipping demo version of a theme. It’s so hard to know, right? Like even if we’ll look through the block themes, like they say, there’s 28 block names go into the
Speaker 1 00:26:18 Theme directories, Achilles heel.
Speaker 2 00:26:20 Yeah. Go, go demo all, all 28 of those. And I bet you any money you’re going to get confused over like 10 of them. Like, wait, isn’t that the same theme that I just looked at? Because the demos look so similar for a lot of these block based themes or a lot of these like more simple themes that it can be so hard to tell like what the competitive or advantages or the unique selling point of the theme is because of how bad the demo looks, man. Like you have to depend on the photo, but you have no idea how to get to that place. Right. That you look at the photo and you’re like, man, that looks really good. And then you go load the thing, but demo and you see like, oh, that doesn’t look good. How hard is it going to be for me, someone who doesn’t know technology. And I’m just speaking in generals are generalities. Um, how hard is it gonna be for me to be able to get to that photo that I saw that looked really cool from this demo, that looks really horrible. So I wish I wish they would do something about the demos on, on the theme directory.
Speaker 1 00:27:10 I mean, what, what you just said is something that’s been brought up over the years. I mean, like I said, it’s the theme directories, number one, Achilles’ heels demo page because people window shop for pressing it’s. In fact, Matt even brought this up there in the state of the world. He talks about how, when they did user testing, that he added a photograph, he took of sheep to like the theme page or part of the theme. And that’s what people drew people in and said that they wanted to use that theme because they liked sheep. They like that photo of, of, uh, of the sheep. So it’s like, I don’t know how, I don’t know what they’re going to do or how they’re going to change the thing directory. Did he get the themes actually look the way that they looking at in that demo screenshot.
Speaker 1 00:27:50 But I, I got to imagine that with block-based themes and how things are changing and deemed at Jason and what have you, that the infrastructure updates that’s going to need to take place across WordPress org? Um, I think it’s going to be easier. I have no idea that maybe it’s going to be possible this time around, but yeah, absolutely. It’d be nice to click the demo and boom, it’s right there. Exactly what it’s supposed to look like. And now you can just tinker around with it. Yeah. Window shopping for themes, man. Over the years, I remember back in the day, a long time ago, I would just browse the directory and then I browse Google and it was all like all these different themes. I clicked view demo, and I view the demo on all of them. It’s a man that looks good. That looks good. I can’t tell you how much money I wasted by him themes. And the fact that it looks good here. And I have a vision in my head. And when I try to implement that vision into the theme, I said, man, I just wasted $50.
Speaker 2 00:28:47 Yeah. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1 00:28:48 Um, man, Matt also brought up the fact that the widgets and the sidebar can now be managed by the black editor, uh, which is neat. They also mentioned the query block, which is a very powerful block. Uh, that’s now available. It’s essentially the post loop, but now you can place it anywhere you want throughout your website in a block, you don’t have to write any PHP code, which is really cool. They also showed off a demo of duo tone filters, which to me, uh, duo tone is like, it was, I kind of like mad, but when I saw it and saw the actual demo of in and get more of a description of how it works. Okay. I can see how it’s pretty cool and it can make images to make even just pop
Speaker 2 00:29:30 A lot. They spent a lot of time on this though, like for what it is. Right. I feel like they spent a lot of time on the whole like, look at what you can do with images. Look what you can do with like all of your designs, like, you know, the consistency that you can get and stuff like that. Like they, I feel like they spent a lot of time on this. It must’ve been a bit of a technical challenge for how much time they spent on the presentation on duo tone.
Speaker 1 00:29:54 Yeah. That, and I think to me, I think the demos are very important. I think it’s very important for these features, especially these, these visual ones, instead of reading, reading about it, to actually see how they work. I think the demo is playing an important role in getting, getting the average user or people who are interested in what’s going on in WordPress to go, oh, that’s what that is. No, I’ve heard about it. I’ve read about it. But if that’s how it works, that’s cool. I think that’s the demos play a major part and there’s quite a few demos actually in the state of the word. Uh, Matt then went on to talk about how word press 5.7 had 481 contributors. 24% were new, uh, WordPress 5.8 had 530 contributors with a quarter of those being new. And he mentioned that there’s still time for people to get involved and contribute to WordPress 5.9, uh, something I’ve brought up and we’ve talked about, I think we may have talked about it on the show briefly.
Speaker 1 00:30:47 There’s been a lot of conversations around, uh, open source contributors and getting paid. How did, how, how to help those folks contribute to open source. And I, and I’m, and I brought it up a few times, like WordPress relies on free labor and, and sponsored contributor is people who are paid by companies to work on WordPress for full time. I think there’s only a finite amount of resources in time before that, well of free labor dries up. And then what happens? What do you do? What, you know, then everybody ends up having to become paid or something, but looking at these contributor numbers and so many of them being new, um, maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is, or it’s not as much of a concern as maybe I’ve been making it out to be, cause we’re still getting an influx of new contributors and we’re 530 of them, 25% being new. I mean, it’s, it’s not like a WordPress is being maintained by, by three people in Missouri.
Speaker 2 00:31:44 Yeah, no, I’m, I’m pretty impressed with these numbers too. And I agree with you. It’s not as bad as a lot of people make it sound. Um, I didn’t necessarily think it was bad because I constantly seen new names in the WordPress world that I’m like, who the heck are you? I, you know, I’m like, get off my lawn. I’ve been here forever kind of thing. Right. So, but like, honestly, it’s, it’s really impressive how many people are, you know, finding their way into this project every single day. Um, and they’re coming from everywhere around the world and it’s just so inspiring to see what they do
Speaker 1 00:32:13 And the topic that a lot of people were interested in hearing Matt talk about what’s web three and what is it, how is WordPress going to get involved? What does he think of it? And I think Matt did a pretty good job of skimming the surface of his thoughts on what web three is, how we’re pressed is poisoned already in a position to take advantage of what some of the concepts of what 0.3 is, which is participating from anywhere, being able to host it from anywhere you’re limited by only your time and creativity can create your own forks or your own feeds or out for your own needs of, of WordPress. You kind of already have some of these things built into WordPress that you can do, which is part of the whole web three concept. But by and large, he didn’t, he didn’t really talk about NFTs and minting and ownership, ownership, and licensing and all that stuff, but he kind of skimmed the surface and he didn’t do a deep dive, but I think he did just enough to let people know that, Hey, I’m aware of this, um, keep tabs on it, apply some of the apply some your common sense filters to these things.
Speaker 1 00:33:17 Uh, there’s definitely some innovations that are going on in this space, but there’s also a lot of hucksters and he is not wrong about that.
Speaker 2 00:33:26 Yeah. He certainly didn’t say learn like, and
Speaker 1 00:33:30 Learn
Speaker 2 00:33:30 Web 3d. Everyone. I remember a lot of people before the event because he kind of shot it out there that he was going to bring it up as one of his main talking points. Um, and actually it wasn’t as big of a deal in the, in the overall presentation. It was kind of like not a footnote, but it was just kind of like a, yeah, we know this exists. We know people are interested in it. We, you know, we want to be, we want to participate, but we’re, you know, cautiously optimistic about this whole thing I think is the best way to put it. So, um, I don’t know. It, it definitely, it definitely didn’t strike me as like, oh, that is so cool. Or like looking to the future or being like our first mover advantage kind of thing. It was just more like we know it exists and we’re keeping our eye on it.
Speaker 1 00:34:16 Now, one of the other parts of the state of the word that I found particularly interesting now, I’m glad he brought this up and talked about, it was the acquisitions that have taken place and WordPress throughout this year. And he showed a slide with the logos of 40 to 42 different companies, uh, that were involved in some sort of merger or acquisition this year. And he talks and he talked about how, I mean, he was aware of the conversations going on, that there’s something weird going on with just WordPress or just consolidation going on with WordPress. So he like, he, um, he does what he likes to do. And he, he talks about this concept of what was going on, but he bring in a broader sense about her and, but what’s going on across the world economically. And he showed a couple of different, uh, slides with statistics. One was the mergers and acquisitions number in the, the bar went almost off the chart in terms of what’s happening in the technology sector, but especially worldwide. Uh, so it’s not just that there’s a lot of acquisitions happening in WordPress, but they’re happening across the world this year. I mean, at a record number of, of money, that’s exchanging hands,
Speaker 2 00:35:25 But didn’t it feel a little bit like a straw man argument too. Like, don’t worry about this thing. That’s happening in an area that you care about. Look at the fact that it’s so much smaller than this other graph over here. Like it, just, to me, it didn’t, it doesn’t matter that it’s happening widely or it’s happening in other niches or other places around the world or whatever. To me, I would’ve, I would’ve really liked to kind of get a little bit more deep understanding from him on why he thinks, um, like now is the time that these kinds of things are happening or, um, what this says about the community in general or, um, how maybe WordPress or Automattic are gonna help highlight, um, you know, smaller organizations that are, that are trying to like, you know, fill in the gaps left by some of these acquisitions. I don’t know. I just, I, I think he could have done more to talk about this in a way that wasn’t like downplaying how important this is to the WordPress community.
Speaker 1 00:36:25 I don’t know the way he presented it and showed those charts. It made me think, well, okay, this isn’t such a big deal. This is happening globally. And it just so happens that all these companies got acquired and were pressed. So what’s the big deal. I mean, so I don’t know, but I know
Speaker 2 00:36:41 A little man is
Speaker 1 00:36:41 Critical. Yeah. Yeah. But I’m glad he brought it up and I glad he talked about it. So
Speaker 2 00:36:45 I agree. I agree. I’m glad it was part of his presentation.
Speaker 1 00:36:48 And he also spent some time discussing the five for the future initiative. And he showed a chart of companies that contributed or sponsor time for the, through five for the future, uh, uh, for WordPress 5.6. And you know, it’s no surprise that automatic is the biggest bulb when they’re at 70 contributors, but Yost was the next, uh, company has 16, but, but Matt’s point was that the size of the company does not mean they have more, does not necessarily mean they have more influence over the say in the amount of contributions they make to WordPress core, uh, Yost was 16, uh, is a substantially less company or employee wise, uh, than like let’s say GoDaddy. Okay. But, but, but Yoast is making quite a bit of impact through their contributions and the various parts of WordPress that he contribute to and work on. So basically the five for the future, Matt says you would like the, the, the future of the graph to be more larger bubbles, more companies with more people from those companies involved with contributing to WordPress.
Speaker 1 00:37:55 And in my opinion, I think defined for the future initiative is going to, uh, take up more precedents, uh, within the next few years, especially as, you know, as Matt says, we cannot, I don’t want to misquote him, but he describes, you know, the tragedy of the commons. And, and we don’t want to end up in a situation where all these companies are selflessly thinking of their own interests and take, take, take, but not giving back to the point where now all resources are exhausted and now everybody’s screwed. So, uh, he kind of emphasized, uh, trying to get more people involved, you know, hour. He says out of your 40 hour work week, you know, you can 5% of your time it’s two hours, or was it, was it two hours out of a hundred and something hours during the week? I dunno something to the point where like two hours, but, you know, he stresses of trying to get more and more people, especially those employers who are having financially financial success by building that top of the WordPress platform and ecosystem to get those people to start paying up, to start contributing back.
Speaker 1 00:39:05 And it doesn’t take a lot of money and it does, it just takes time and resources. Well, I say that, but then time is money for a lot of people know, without them running, you don’t have time.
Speaker 2 00:39:15 Yep. Yeah. And I mean, my counterpoint to this is that, you know, these agencies are kind of giving back to WordPress. Maybe not directly through like code contribute, like contribution.
Speaker 1 00:39:27 Oh, by just by, just by just building the site, their claim site.
Speaker 2 00:39:31 Sure. Think about it, right? Like they’re, there they’re potentially developing solutions for customers they’re, um, exposing like fortune 500 companies to WordPress they’re, um, teaching a whole bunch of people how to use WordPress through like developing these projects for these different niches. So there’s, there’s a whole bunch of ways that they are kind of giving back. It’s just not as direct. It’s a little bit more subtle. Um, so I mean, these, th all of these things help keep WordPress alive, right? If no one’s buying the software to use on e-commerce websites, then that means these companies don’t have the money to invest in it anyways. So it’s kind of it, you know, it is, there are things that are happening in that respect that are maybe not five for the future. Um, but I think that this graph could be much more interesting if it included like every company that was building on WordPress, because, you know, they’re on the fringes of this graph, um, continuing to kind of expose WordPress to a greater audience,
Speaker 1 00:40:30 Looking at all these companies, taking advantage of open source software. We know, I’m sorry, am I going to get hate mail? And should I give up,
Speaker 2 00:40:39 But let’s think about this, right? So let’s say you’re a developer, Jeff, and you are working for an agency like Canberra creative, and you’ve just developed a website for a client. And you do that. You had to, um, adjust some code for woo commerce and you go, and you submit that code to WooCommerce is a bug fix or a patch for the future version of WooCommerce. You didn’t participate in five for the future, but you did just give back to WordPress, right? Those are the kinds of, those are the kinds of things that I’m thinking about.
Speaker 1 00:41:08 I’m not even a developer, but I contributed back toward press today. You want to know how I I’m running WordPress 5.9, beta three, NWP mainline. And today I finally decided, you know what, I’m going to create some reusable blocks that are for my show notes page for the podcast. That way I don’t have to create these blanks every single time. So I created a, uh, a, the blacks I use put them all in a row, kinda made a template. I selected all those blocks collect. I clicked a little button and I clicked the link that says, add two reusable blocks. The model comes up where I get to name the, this reusable block. And I was typing in some words, and I hit backspace to correct a typo, and that made the modal disappear. And all of my selected blocks disappeared. There were no, they were deleted.
Speaker 1 00:41:59 And I, and I, and I said to myself, what the hell just happened? I said, wait a minute. That’s not supposed to work. So I said, well, how do they have, so what I ended up doing? Cause I, and when I did control Z, which is undo the blocks, didn’t come back. I couldn’t restore my content from control Z. So I said, oh, well this sends a gun. So I reloaded the page, exited out reloaded. Then I did it, did it again. And I found out that it didn’t matter just hitting the backspace key with that modal up, deletes the Moto and deletes the select blocks. And they could led, it could lead to a loss of content when I was actually happening to me. If those reusable blacks had content in them, for me, it was just more like a template. But yeah, so I actually went to track, uh, uh, created the ticket, explain how to reproduce it.
Speaker 1 00:42:46 That ticket has now been filed. It’s considered a high status, and I believe it will be fixed. I mean, to me, it’s a blacker because it could lead to lost content. But right now it’s a, it’s, it’s a high status and it will probably get fixed, uh, either as part of a port, uh, beta four release, or definitely before, uh, 5.9 was released to the public. But it just so happens to be that the one time I want to try and use reusable blocks that discover a critical bug. And you know what? I got kind of excited when I found it. No doubt, no doubt. I thought you named your block, like drop tables or something. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 00:43:27 Anyways, that was cool to create a ticket. Again, it’s been so long since I created the ticket and this is actually a critical and important bug. So I’m glad, uh, I’m, I’m happy. I was able to do my small part there and at least reporting the issue. Giving back to the state of the word. Matt mentioned, he reminded us that we’re part of a we’re in the midst of the four phases of Gutenberg. Now easier editing nest started in 2018. Uh, in 2019 was the beginning of the customization phase. Uh, we’re still in that. He mentioned that in 20, 23 work will begin on the collaboration phase. And he had mentioned that he doesn’t, there’s so much work that he feels has to be done in the customization phase, that it wouldn’t be right to, to immediately go from customization to collaboration in 2022, because there’s still a lot of work that has to be done.
Speaker 1 00:44:18 And when somebody mentioned a collaboration, what does that mean? Of course he mentioned Google docs, Google dice site, one of the Primo examples of collaborating and a document where you could see who’s editing the same document at once, where they’re editing in that document. And I’m like, you know, um, maybe Malcolm and I, you know, when this comes out, I can give them access to like the podcast post type and I can assign them and say, stay in your black or not. We’re going to collaborate, but you stay in this block, right. I’m going to assign you a block and you can’t go outside of that black. And that’s how we’re going to collaborate.
Speaker 2 00:44:53 I like that. I think that’s really
Speaker 1 00:44:54 Neat.
Speaker 2 00:44:56 I think one of the more interesting parts was not that collaboration was marked as 20, 23, but the fourth phase multilingual did not get a date no year attached to that.
Speaker 1 00:45:06 Uh, I, I, I think it was safe on, on math part to do that. I mean, he’s mentioned this in a couple of state of the words now that multi-lingual, I mean, we know that multi-lingual is a thing. We know that it is in highly important. In fact, Matt mentioned during the state of the word that he gets, uh, he gets a bit chastised for it. He gets, uh, in, when he does this presentation or does the state of the word in the Europe. Uh, but he didn’t know multi-lingual is, is hugely important.
Speaker 2 00:45:31 And we should define that. We should, we should define that for the audience. What does that mean? What does multilingual mean?
Speaker 1 00:45:35 Being able to speak more than one language, right?
Speaker 2 00:45:38 Yeah. So being able to produce content and more than one language, right? Like one of the issues that we have here in WordPress right now is if you wrote a post in English and then you wrote a post in French or Spanish, um, WordPress doesn’t really handle that. Well, there’s plugins to help
Speaker 1 00:45:54 Handle that. That’s one of the big plugins that allows us.
Speaker 2 00:45:57 Yeah. And I think that it’s kind of sad that it’s not part of core because again, like, yes, I could install WordPress now and I could use a language pack to make it Spanish. And then I could write all my posts in Spanish, but if I wanted an English version of my website, now it becomes kind of a mess. And, uh, you know, I think Gutenberg and the block editor can kind of help make that more seamless and easier to be able to kind of switch back and forth between the multiple languages. Um, and so I’m looking forward to,
Speaker 1 00:46:27 I wonder how that’s all gonna work. I mean, so if I set my WordPress site to the us or north American English locale language pack, um, and I have multi-lingual capabilities within WordPress, what does that even mean? Does that mean like I should, or I can set up WordPress to use language packs of my choosing and then visitors?
Speaker 2 00:46:53 No, no, I think, I think he’ll do block-level translations, right? So let’s say you were doing the show notes. You could do like English show notes and Spanish show notes and French show notes. And then depending on which language
Speaker 1 00:47:03 Would those be options like selected option sided languages for that black to be available in those languages.
Speaker 2 00:47:10 Yeah. But you would, you’d have to either have machine translation or you’d have to write in the values yourself, but yeah, just like we lot does, but just kind of built into core.
Speaker 1 00:47:19 Uh, well, that’s, that’s going to mean an interesting stage of the black editor, just WordPress in general, the whole multi-lingual thing, but that comes after the collaboration aspect and that’s in 2023 and we’re just now getting into 20, 22. So multilingual, you know, we’re about to two to three, four years away. I don’t know.
Speaker 2 00:47:39 Yeah. I was going to say probably it’s probably what’s going to happen is we’re going to get to 22
Speaker 1 00:47:43 At that time. There’ll be a bajillion language practice on word press.
Speaker 2 00:47:46 And they’ll probably say like phase four of Gutenberg will be 20, 25 would be my guests.
Speaker 1 00:47:53 Boy, that’s a lot of work to spend that collaboration.
Speaker 2 00:47:56 I mean, it’s not an easy problem either, right? I mean, even Google docs still messes it up sometimes. So
Speaker 1 00:48:02 Exactly. So, I mean, that says where we’re kind of in those stages of, uh, of Gutenberg and you’re still a work that has to be done work to go. Um, he didn’t mention, um, at the end of the state of the word that they have found a host city for work camp, us 20, 22, good old sunny San Diego. So if you’re a member of the San Diego WordPress community, and I know there’s a lot of you out there, uh, now that they have the host city, I believe the organization team or camp U S team is going to be reaching out to those various communities to try and get organizers to volunteer, to put this event together. Now I’m excited about this. Matt’s excited about it. A lot of other people are excited about it. I’m not excited about COVID and all the various variants and how that’s going to, uh, we’ll have to see how this all plays out because it does have event could very well be canceled.
Speaker 2 00:48:59 Well, to be fair, we do have a bit of time between now
Speaker 1 00:49:01 And the event. Absolutely
Speaker 2 00:49:03 WordCamp, uh, us 20, 22 is not until September.
Speaker 1 00:49:07 Yeah. September thereabouts. You mentioned. Um, so I, I, like I said, we’ll just, we’ll have to see, but, uh, I don’t, I don’t know for those people who are, or who could potentially be buying, buying flights or Airbnb, is there anything like that? Like maybe a few months in advance, right? Don’t make sure if you do that double check the refund policy. I’ll just say that because what you don’t want to, you don’t want to get screwed. We don’t know what’s going to happen. You
Speaker 2 00:49:38 Think if you, if you got sponsored to go, would you
Speaker 1 00:49:41 Go, uh, I actually looked it up online and I can take an Amtrak train from Cleveland to San Diego.
Speaker 2 00:49:49 Of course, of course.
Speaker 1 00:49:50 That’s the way you think so, so, so if Bob can do it, why the hell can I, I just need, I just need to find the companies to pay any, to, to be able to do it and come on. It’s totally on brand. I mean, yeah. I mean, Bob’s doing the Wu on a true chew, but come on, my site is actually about trains and you know, it’s in the title, there’ll be. Yeah. But anyways, uh, Bob, I love you. And it was so cool to see Bob doing his state of the word trip and following the hashtag the we’ll train clan and Twitter, and a really great he’s safe. He’s on his way back. In fact, it’s very cold through Montana and he’s what wearing his fight for the future hat. And, uh, he actually, it was pretty cool during the Q and a session.
Speaker 1 00:50:33 He asked Matt, he says, look, I traveled all this way. Give me some move for 2022. You know, I want to know what’s going to happen with, with wound. It basically came down to more Gutenberg is what Matt said. Uh, but, and then at the end, uh, Bob says, well, that answer was worth 66,000 miles, but what would show, which get the crowd laughing and rolling and going on. Um, and then there’s a couple of questions about how youth can get involved with word press, that man answered. How can we, uh, pass on WordPress or get the next generation of developers to, um, take interest and contribute to, and then get involved with WordPress and answer those. Um, I also want to do a special shout out to Courtney Robertson? Um, I was actually going through her, uh, summary of what happened at the state of the word, which is published on the godaddy.com garage.
Speaker 1 00:51:23 Uh, there were sort of blog over there. So thank you very much for putting this together. And we covered a lot and I watched the state of the world again today. Oh, by the way, I didn’t even mention this, but, uh, because WordPress 5.9 was delayed in December and it’s now scheduled for a January release. It turns out that we could possibly have four major releases this year. And it was kind of interesting to me that, uh, not a lot of people picked up on it or share the news of it. Cause I guess it’s not surprising or it’s not important to them. And it’s like a few years ago, boy, that would have been a big deal to have four major releases during the year, but apparently not so much this year for a number of people.
Speaker 2 00:52:01 That’s interesting. Yeah, for me, when I, when I saw your tweet about that, I was kind of like, actually I consider that a negative. I don’t want there to be four major releases every time there’s like, so again, a big part of my job is like maintenance of WordPress sites and major releases or minor releases for that matter. And that meaning like taking the time to like check to make sure everything still works on staging. If we’re pushing to production on over like a hundred different sites and it’s just a real pain in my butt. So, um, I enjoy the, the slower years in terms of releases. So, um, I like bigger monolithic releases with like really cool features rather than a bunch of smaller releases that feel a little bit more rushed. So take your time word, press community three releases is plenty.
Speaker 1 00:52:45 So that’s pretty much the gist of what went down at the state of the word. Now it was tough to watch it ma is in a room in front of 30 people. And if you watch the state of the word, you kind of get the sense that maybe he’s a little bit more free flowing or he’s a bit more open or maybe he’s a bit laid back. I mean, there were a couple times during the state of the world where it just, I mean, you could, it looked like he was rusty in terms of speaking in front of an audience. There were times where there was some long pause on that. Yeah. There’s there’s some times where there’s some long pauses, there were some tangents, he would tell some funny stories, like the macroeconomics part. And when he talks about pennies and
Speaker 2 00:53:33 How did
Speaker 1 00:53:33 I get here? Uh, and then, you know, interacting with, with the audience and, and, and the crowd and whatnot, it just seemed to be a different map. But he also mentioned that this was like his favorite one. And I got to see the people who were there in attendance got to be a part of something. I feel a special something that is maybe a once in a lifetime type of event, because it’s not every day. You get to show up to a state of the word where there’s only 30 people. And then afterwards, you don’t have to wait in line to maybe get in five words with Matt before the next person gets in and wants to see him because you’re at a 1000, 2000 person conference. So those people actually get to spend time with Matt, uh, talk to him, all those people in the audience, by the way, we’re five for the future of contributors, uh, which I also thought was interesting.
Speaker 1 00:54:21 And, uh, I don’t know, it was just kind of a unique event and I hope that those people that were there made some lifelong memories, uh, because, you know, I may not ever happen again. And those people had a chance to really sit down and have one-on-ones with Matt that were very beneficial. I know, toll for Daraja. He spent some time with Matt talking about bureau press and what he’s got plans for to be able to talk it over with Matt face-to-face and to get his approval or get his take or his ideas on something is
Speaker 2 00:54:53 We can give him a, might even give him a shadow, got a presentation. Um, a couple of things though. I mean, like, I know we’ve gone over a lot, but I just want to kinda like do some quick shout outs one. We didn’t mention the fact that, um, Joseph, uh, did an introduction at the start. Um, so the executive director of WordPress open source project, um, kind of kicked it off and also weirdly enough, um, kind of blew my brain a little bit was that Matt had just returned from a trip to Antarctica of all places.
Speaker 1 00:55:24 He’s been there a few times.
Speaker 2 00:55:27 Who does that? How do you know? It’s just so weird to meet us? Yeah, I guess. I mean, how
Speaker 1 00:55:31 Do you avoid burnout? What do you go to Antarctica? Well,
Speaker 2 00:55:34 Yeah, I guess you’re so disconnected there. Um, but I, I think, you know, I, I wonder, I would love to ask him this question and know, like, I think he’s gone to every continent at this point, like for sure. So, uh, it’s not something that everyone gets to do and I hope he, uh, is reflective or self-reflective of that opportunity that he’s had
Speaker 1 00:55:53 You think anyone looks at. I mean, him, him by him going to Antarctica and taking those photos and being able to do that. Do you think anyone out there gets jealous? I was like, Hey, but I mean, at the same time, look, the man is successful. Look what he’s created, look what he’s done. If he has the ability and the wherewithal and the means to do that, why the hell who should stop him?
Speaker 2 00:56:14 That’s such an American way of thinking.
Speaker 1 00:56:18 What’s the Canadian way of, thank you.
Speaker 2 00:56:21 Uh, I guess the Canadian way of thinking is that, uh, if he’s so wealthy, he should share it with a bunch of the rest of us and bring them, bring us along to his trip to Antarctica.
Speaker 1 00:56:31 No. Okay. Trickle down economics or something on, on, on a, on a little bit. It’s a little bit more open than that. Anyways. It was pretty cool. He took some great photos. Um, but yeah, you know, Antarctica and, and whatnot, no mask masculinity, Matt where’s Matt, you never know. It could be in the us could be in Antarctica. It could be somewhere else. Uh, so, okay. And maybe the other thing I want to talk about is maybe just highlight again, that Matt’s focus, at least in this state of the word he talks a lot about not just the open web, but humanity in general and using open source software, especially WordPress and through the CC zero creative license, zeroed images in media, the try and get it. He had mentioned the fact that anyone out there, whoever ends up running a word website on WordPress, that’s a little bit left for the CA it’s a contribution to the open web by using WordPress and every little bit helps. But, you know, it’s just sort of the, his broadened concept of worldly just in the basis of humanity. It’s not just WordPress, it’s not just open source and the users within our community, but he’s got globally led ideas for making humanity better for generations to come. And that’s a lot of what I felt came out of this state of the word.
Speaker 1 00:58:03 Okay. If you say so, uh, I mean, that’s kind of my take on it, but, um, other than that, Jesus is, or is there any other,
Speaker 2 00:58:14 And you know, just one other fun little thing, um, if you’re on Twitter, go track down Cory Miller search for hashtag state of the word and look for some photos of Corey Miller. Um, it’s pretty fun. It’s pretty funny.
Speaker 1 00:58:29 Uh, I blame her. I blame Carl Hancock for all that, by the way, he actually put that together. It’s, it’s a photo of Bob Dunn and Matt Mullenweg and some other people. And then right in the background just before, uh, or, uh, you know, it’s like he didn’t have time to get out of the way. There’s Cory Miller staring with his eyes right into the camera, like photo bombing. And he didn’t mean to do it. And he, uh, in the video, in the video, you could see him moving out of the way, but, you know, yeah. He was too late. Uh, so-so Corey, very well done. Photo bomb.
Speaker 1 00:59:05 It was, it was pretty good. All right. So other than the state of the word, there’s a lot to digest there, but, uh, there you go, kind of the state of things. Um, now we get to the end of the year, January, we’re press 5.9 full site editing duo tone, you know, is coming to a WordPress near you. And, uh, it’s I guess, unless there’s other major acquisitions that’s going to take place, but before the end of this year, cause who knows, it should be relatively quiet until the end of the year. I hope so.
Speaker 1 00:59:41 Uh, yes. Um, so that’s going to do it for, oh, you know what I totally forgot. Are you looking to increase your productivity? One tool that helps thousands of what developers and designers do more every day is go to Edie pro and binding site client and project management. Good. Eddy pro is an all-in-one solution made by and for what professionals, whether you’re new to one design or looking to grow your business, you’ll find free tools, products, guidance, and support to help you deliver results for clients, manage and monitor all of your client’s WordPress sites from a single place, no matter where they’re hosted with a single click perform bulk updates, backups, security checks, and more to save time and free up your day. And for more information, check out, go to edie.com/pro, and you’ll find more information there. And of course I’ll have links to that and the everything else in the show notes page on WP mainline that calm ulcer, it was a good show.
Speaker 1 01:00:38 Uh, my birthday’s next week. So let’s see, uh, let’s see what happens with my brain. If anybody wanted to get me a birthday present, you could buy a box car design and to BP mainline, and very much appreciate it, but how, what am I going to be next week? 38, 39? I don’t even know, man. It’s not 40 though, but it’s close. Is it ever going to be 40? Uh, unfortunately I know, right? Uh, so that’s going to do it for this episode of WP mainland podcasts. Again, you can find show notes and everything else related to the show on WP mainline.com. Have you found me on Twitter at Jeff J E F F R zero in Malcolm. Uh, you can find me at find purpose on Twitter and as always, if you need any help with anything, you check out, press tightened.com or camber creative, and next week being the Christmas a week. We’ll talk to you again next Thursday evening. So long everybody

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everyone to episode 20, one of the UWP mainline podcasts for Freddy December 10th, 2021. I’m your host, Jeff Chandler joined by Malcolm. Perotti. Hello, sir. Hello? Hello from the frosty north. Absolutely. Although here, it’s kind of the warm, well, it’s not warm north. You’re more north than me. It’s the warm south. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever thought of yourself as living in this? No, no, no. I have not. Uh, well, we’re back here in another week. Another week of things to talk about, we, uh, apologize for no show. Last week, last week was a bit of a crap shoot. Uh, just things, things didn’t go well. And it was just, just a sucky week. And we were talking before the, for the, uh, before the show here, David himself, he’s having a bit of a crappy week, how it goes at, sir. Come on. What’s so crappy about it.
Speaker 1 00:01:08 I let it out. Tell us well, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re we’re few and far between was show notes. Come on, man. Let it out. And I think I’ll keep most of it, uh, close to my chest, but I will say that’s fine. I did sign up for, um, better help.com again, to start working with a counselor to kind of sort my brain out a bit. So I’m so glad that those services exist. I wish they weren’t so pricey, but I’m so glad they exist. All right, man. Well, let me surround the you’re on the right track there. Yeah. So let’s see. Where are we at? What’s been going on here. Um, well, let’s talk about, uh, how about a theme that Jason theme generator voice say that 10 times fast, uh, David Guidewire is working on a, uh, he actually released a demo video that showcases his black theme a generator.
Speaker 1 00:01:59 And I was kind of wondering, uh, if this was going to happen, this was going to be the case of people who are going to create theme generators, because essentially what you’re doing is, you know, you’ve got your theme that Jason found that controls your fonts and your colors and things of that nature. And I think you could probably create a UI where you can take care of a lot of that stuff by clicking on NABS and putting in hex values and different codes. And then you click a button that says generate and bam. He had a theme that Jason fire you can use. And I guess then you would just need to put, uh, some sort of structure around it. Or maybe we just a bare minimum, uh, to turn it into a full site editing demon. And you could take care of all the layout and stuff within WordPress.
Speaker 1 00:02:41 But, uh, so this is at the very early stages of a project that David’s working on. In fact, he says that it’s his first web app, so it’s pretty cool. So he’s learning on the fly. There’s no word on when this is going to be released, but by taking a look at the demo video, you could see he’s pretty much got a UI. Uh, you click through a couple tabs, you add some, uh, some features and some functions. And next thing you know, it just gives you a, a, uh, a valid theme that Jason filed they can use, uh, in your theme. And I got a, I got to imagine that once full site editing is released 5.9 here later in, uh, or in January of next year and a full site editing black bay scenes. That just becomes the norm. I think we’re going to see a couple of these black team generators, uh, be released or come on. Those are gonna be kind of fun to play around with.
Speaker 2 00:03:33 Yeah, it’s so funny, right? Because I come from a slightly more developer background than you. And so my first thought was like,
Speaker 1 00:03:39 Yeah, you’re one of the folks who use theme frameworks. That’s the background you come from?
Speaker 2 00:03:44 Why, why does someone need this? Like, can’t like, if you look at the actual output of the theme dot Jason file that he creates in the demo video, it’s kind of like, uh, I mean, as long as I understood what the requirements were for setting it up, I mean, I could do, I could write this out myself. Like I don’t need necessarily a tool to do it. Do I? Um,
Speaker 1 00:04:04 So I like buttons.
Speaker 2 00:04:07 I’m always curious about the use cases, like who are the users that are going to love this and what are they going to use it for? Um,
Speaker 1 00:04:13 I think it’s
Speaker 2 00:04:15 Exactly, that’s, that’s the thing. Right. And, um, what features will he add to kind of differentiate it from the others that we’ll start doing this and, and what kind of audience will it serve? And, yeah, I’m, I’m excited to see how it evolves as well and what that market looks like and, and how this improves WordPress or setting up WordPress going forward. I think that, you know, the first thing that makes me scratch my head though, is, is, you know, when you think about it from the developer side, it’s kind of like, oh, this is pretty easy. I could write it myself. And then on like the customer side, you know, you have those customers that barely know what WordPress is. The last thing that they’re going to want to do is, you know, see this output of this, this, uh, Jason file, because to them, that would be like the scariest thing ever. So there’s only like a slice in between, um, you know, kind of like in, in that skill level where they’d be comfortable to see this and try to experiment and play with it and learn it. Um, but I’m excited for it. I think it’s a really great thing that he’s doing here and I can’t wait to see it evolve.
Speaker 1 00:05:15 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s the thing. I mean, I, I wonder how this is going to transcend into other projects into other black theme generators, how it’s going to maybe inspire some new ideas or different takes on creating these, uh, the thing that Jason found me with these themes themselves. Um, so, so that’s, that’s what I’m looking forward to. I mean, I, there’s going to be these there’s always going to be generators. I have to, there’s an entire website at that thing generate WP that might still be around. Uh I’m I’m wondering if they’re going to get on top of this theme that Jason Black clean generator bandwagon, uh, this seems like it’d be right up their alley, but, uh, yeah, we’ll, we’ll have to see just another tool to the end of the tool belt and see what happens, uh, or, you know, for some others it’s a toy, not a tool like, like for me, it’s a toilet. See what I can get in trouble with the WP Tavern. You know, I, I think I know a thing or two about that website, they’re sporting a new, it’s a sporting, a new coat of paint. If you haven’t checked it out yet, visit WP Tavern that com and you will see a new design by Justin
Speaker 2 00:06:22 Tatlock
Speaker 1 00:06:23 By not just into like, influenced by Justin Taylor. Like, uh, if you read the detailed article about the Tavern sporting, any design, he talks about that. Uh, well, first of all, the Tavern is now hosted on pressable, which is a web hosting company that was acquired by automatic a number of years ago, uh, by a member. I think his name on Twitter was Zippy kid. Um, but, uh, some of, some of you folks may remember that name, but it’s, uh, uh, Justin ended up working with the team, the, uh, automatic special projects team, because I think they, they actually have a, um, a theme behind the scenes. It’s like a special project, uh, where you can create it to me, it seems like it’s the new underscores, but it’s probably more than that. It was probably not the same as that, but that’s, that’s how I think it is. But I think the theme is based on that. So it supports full site editing. It’s black based, and you can take a look@itonwptavern.com and just from the, uh, from the looks of it, it’s, it’s, it’s white, uh, black font. You can, there’s definitely it’s blocky. I mean, you’ve got,
Speaker 2 00:07:33 It’s very newspapery. And I think one of the things that when we brought this up as, as something to talk about today, I kind of wanted to transition to what does, like, what do news websites need to look like these days? And this kind of feels like, you know, it wants to be like the New York times kind of like that kind of clean Chris newsy kind of focus. And I love that they added in the little, like Beerstein with the foam on top. I think that that’s a real nice callback. I think that was really smart of them. Um, it is a very, like very elegant looking design, which is also nice. I think though that, you know, it lacks some, it still lacks some personality, like even the last design and this design, it just kind of lacks some of the fun or some of the tongue in cheek that kind of goes with the name. Um, and like, I’m gonna have people that have design skill and the time to do these things. You kind of expect them to elevate that. And, uh, I think they could have gone a bit further with this and that’s, that’s just how I feel. I mean,
Speaker 1 00:08:39 Oh, well, when I, when I read the feedback on this and the other, the previous design, some of the feedback I read from, from readers was that, you know, w what is this? This is boring. This is there’s there’s no, there’s no, there’s no wooden floor as a background image. There’s, there’s no, uh, beer stands all over the place. There’s no, uh, uh, little beer emoji is all over the place to represent now being in a Tavern it’s, there’s no, there’s no personality, but, you know, back in the day, I mean, this was 2009 when I was running the Tavern. And I, I added that wooden background image. It was a wooden floor or an image, but I cannot believe how that resonated with people over the years, how it actually, um, gave, gave the site look and feel like it, like its own thing. Like, it really was part of a terror, like a Tavern ass type website. And, uh, it just kind of took us my heart every time I read somebody say, or request to have something like that back. But here we are with the plain Jane Black and white elegant looking simpleness website and
Speaker 2 00:09:41 Happy to see the little like Stein as well. Right. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 00:09:45 Absolutely. You gotta have, you know, at least there’s one thing on here that represents a TIF. That’s the Beerstein
Speaker 2 00:09:52 I mean, and the old design doesn’t even have that I will say, like, in terms of your own site, in terms of WP main line, I mean, if you had, let’s say like a theme developer come to you and be like, you know, Jeff, we’re going to custom design WP mainline, what do you like, what do you want it to look like? Do you have some like ideas or thoughts in your head on like other things, like other elements that you wish you had the design skill to implement?
Speaker 1 00:10:17 Uh, let’s see. Yeah. If you visit WVU mainline, I mean, you’ve got to, I’ve got a boring one site too. If you look at it with other than the logo and stuff, it’s, it’s blue, blue font. I mean, other than the logo, there’s not really much there to indicate this is a ,
Speaker 1 00:10:36 But I mean, I’m thinking of like the railroad crossing signs. It’d be cool to find a way to implement those. Um, uh, definitely not the Blinky red lights at a crossing. That’s probably not very accessible, friendly. It probably drives people nuts. Uh, maybe maybe up here, uh, where the navigation is since I’ve got those two lines, you know, maybe make it look like a railroad track or something, you know, that, that that’d be kind of cool. I don’t know. I think stuff like that, uh, to, to, to bring originality, to bring uniqueness to the site.
Speaker 2 00:11:06 That’s, that’s what I’m trying to go for. And that’s what I’m trying to say, right? Like that is, that should be the goal of a good website. I know that news websites don’t need to have the most elaborate designs or the most detailed designs or the most fun designs, but it doesn’t hurt to inject a little bit of life and levity into these websites. And I think it helps strengthen the brand and helps define the community a little bit. And, you know, I think that if you’re going to do a major redesign like this for any site you got to have, you have to think about those kinds of things a little bit and not be so like, I don’t know, overly professional in a way, because again, I think if you were to like blur this, like the WP Tavern website homepage, if you were to blur the logo and blur the texts, you couldn’t quite read what it was. I don’t think you would ever know which site this is. Cause I could probably find, you know, a hundred sites that look fairly similar to this. Um, and that’s kind of a disappointment and I think, I think they could go a little bit harder and a little bit further with us and especially with the resources that they kind of have. Right. So
Speaker 1 00:12:13 I know, I know some people have said that this just looks like a website or the Tavern looks like a site where it’s just a template with a font and then that’s it, you know, I mean, I, you know, there are in, in page builders and some of the templates that are out there, there’s a lot of them that kind of has this look and feel that, that, that the Tavern sporting. So yeah, I mean, I mean, what could be, what could they do to, it could be maybe, uh, some, some colors, uh, a background image. That’s no performance that actually, you know, adds to the look and feel of the entire site. And maybe in the comment section, a custom design comments, section that’s Tavern ask, however,
Speaker 2 00:12:50 And there was some little elements, right. So maybe, um, where you have like the recent comments, um, on the sidebar of the homepage or, um, is it on a single articles too? No, so they don’t have it on
Speaker 1 00:13:02 We’re like the list item that, you know, turn it into a beer Stein
Speaker 2 00:13:06 We’re even, or even with the headers. Right. You could have it. So like there’s two beer steins that are far apart, and as you scroll down, they like clink together in terms of like, so like, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 00:13:17 I would wear up my mouse wheel doing something like that.
Speaker 2 00:13:20 Exactly. And, but it’s, it’s memorable. Right. It’s interesting. It’s engaging, it’s visually appealing. And I think we have to ask these questions about how much further can we push these designs because we want our web, like it’s so competitive these days, how do we kind of stand out from the crowd? Um, and I think they kind of missed the Mark A. Little bit here on that. And I think a lot of sites are missing the mark on that lately.
Speaker 1 00:13:43 What about the feedback of the people who own these sites? And they say, what the hell does it matter? What it looks like just as long as the content is good niche. I think that only goes so far.
Speaker 2 00:13:52 I agree. I mean, do you like, do you want to go back to a site every day like this? I mean, I might as well just read it in and our,
Speaker 1 00:14:00 Uh, yeah, that’s, that’s what I was getting at, you know, without the, without the uniqueness to design, to make a beautiful, do a nice cover around that content. I mean like, why not just read it through a feed reader you’re getting almost the same experience.
Speaker 2 00:14:15 Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:14:16 Yeah, yeah. So I don’t know tamarind sport and new design. We’ll have to see if they, uh, if it adds, uh, any more features I want now I will say it’s fast. It is fast. Uh, one of the sites that recently did a redesign and the whole brand thing was do the Wu by Bob Dunn and his, his site is he did a really good job. And I know he had direct feedback as to what he wanted the site to look like. And he worked with dev studios and maintain to put it together. And he’s got a very nice, uh, looking website, uh, with the, with the, the logos, the colors, he’s got this unique looking kind of background image for some of this news bits and stuff. Uh, so there’s a redesign I like,
Speaker 2 00:15:00 Right? Yep. I get what you’re saying.
Speaker 1 00:15:02 So there you go. I mean, so what am I going to w how am I, you know, I use a generate press and WP main line, and I use a theme, one of the themes or templates that, that came with it, and I’m kind of wondering, what am I going to do after WordPress 5.9? Am I going to, uh, uh, how am I going to redesign this? Am I going to just go out there and look for FSC, full site editing theme, uh, supports black base, whatever, and then just try and redo that. Am I going to stick with January press and maybe see if they, if there’s any way I can finagle things, or is there even a reason to change? I don’t know. You know, I’m pretty happy with what I have so far, so, and it’s not that technical or, uh, that, uh, demanding of a website. So I don’t know. Um, I mean, I’m going to move on from generate press here in the future,
Speaker 2 00:15:51 Out there in the WordPress world. If you’re a front end designer and developer, I honestly, though there might be someone who is interested in kind of helping you, maybe not necessarily redesign the whole thing, but who could kind of give you some more graphic design elements to place on this team that you’re already using. That kind of gets you a little closer to,
Speaker 1 00:16:10 And I know what to do. I know I’m going to go get some clip art. I’m going to ask you apply. That’s what I’ll do. No open source clipper. Come on, man. I
Speaker 2 00:16:19 Feel it
Speaker 1 00:16:19 Hurts. Don’t worry about it. It’d be nice. It’d be railroad theme. They’ll blank field will move. It’ll be jaggy perfect
Speaker 2 00:16:27 At some like MP3s AutoFair,
Speaker 1 00:16:30 Some dot WAV files. So they’re huge. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Dot wave or O M pay the little, the little MPEG files or middies remember middies
Speaker 2 00:16:39 Yes, I remember middies oh my goodness. That’d be amazing. Actually. I wonder what trains going by. Sounds like admitting form because a lot of them can’t get the detail that you need to really replicate the true honest sound. So it’d be interesting. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 00:16:53 I’m getting them to implement the Konami code on WP mainline, where you do it. And it’s like some insane look on the website with a middy plane of a train room by giving me you’re giving me terrible ideas. That actually sound not that terrible.
Speaker 2 00:17:09 Maybe we should move on from this before we dig any deeper.
Speaker 1 00:17:13 Absolutely. Uh, so there’s a bit of an issue involving a Gravatar. It turns out that, uh, Gravatar made the headlines again, due to an unintended use of its API now Gravatar, which was created by Tom Preston Werner way back when and acquired by automatic in 2007 enables users to upload an image for an avatar and use it across any site that has built in support for the service, you know, and at the time when Gravatar was created, I thought it was a great idea. I supported it. I headed that WP Tavern. I said, man, it sure would be nice if all the forums I frequent and all the sites supporting Gravatar, cause then I’m going to have to upload my image to each one of those sites. And if something changes, I want to have to go to each one of those sites and change it.
Speaker 1 00:17:57 But I don’t know the more, the more I think about it in the more sites I’m not actually frequenting these days, the more I’m like I’m kinda mad with the whole, with the whole Gravatar thing, but the website security service have I been poned recently contacted its users to notify them that their email address may have been part of data that was scraped from Gravatar. The service actually references an article that was published on bleeping computer from 2020, that details how security researcher carload Dato use the Gravatar API to easily enumerate MD five hashes that are associated with a user’s email address. Now, in addition to these email addresses, uh, data was able to scrape any information that the user placed in your Gravatar profile using this, uh, API endpoint, which they were not supposed to do as a unintended use of that API. So automatic has since, or the Gravatar service has since closed down that portion of the API to prevent this from happening.
Speaker 1 00:18:53 But, uh, dado had already scraped the information of w I think it was 1.2 somewhere around one point. Uh, I can actually look at it right now. Oh, about 120 113 million Gravatar accounts. Now, when you sign up for Gravatar, they make it plain and simple in your face saying, look, our job is to create a public profile that’s easily maintainable, and you can maintain it from one place instead of all these myriad of different sites. And what you put in this profile is public information. So, you know, there’s, there’s no biggie there, but the reason why this in the enumerating of email addresses, uh, that’s been an issue for years. It’s been brought up in 2009, 2013, 2016, where if you look at the source code of a website in the comment section, you’ll see an MD five hash of, uh, which would be the email address of that Gravatar user. And by using something like, uh, uh, hash cat or one of these other programs out there, you can actually turn that empty. You can, uh, can I reverse engineered MD five hash to figure out the email address? So it’s, it’s almost like the MD five hash is kind of like a courtesy of, of, uh, well,
Speaker 2 00:20:14 So it’s an over some it’s, it was an oversimplified kind of thing. It was never really intended for real deep security. It was just a layer of obfuscation to simplify something. So instead of saying like, you know, malcolm@gmail.com, let’s just change that to a series of letters and numbers. And then we know that we don’t have to deal with an at symbol in a URL and stuff like that. So, I mean, it, it simplified a lot of things in kind of early and mid web, but every MD five hash at this point has been like reversed. So like there’s not a single MD five hash that exists at this point that can’t be reversed back into the values that it’s like semi obfuscating.
Speaker 1 00:20:51 I mean, finding, figuring out an email address through Gravatar is no big deal. The problem here is that this person was able to scrape all of that pro easily scrape all of that data, put it together in one data set. And now people are able to use that in, in phishing attempts, uh, social engineering, those types of attacks, um, and some of those profiles included information like Bitcoin wallets or cryptocurrency, wallet addresses, and some of that other stuff. So, yeah, I don’t know. I, I think email addresses are, is information that a user typically reserves the right to make public or not. And I’m willing to bet that most people who, who use Gravatar probably didn’t sign up thinking that their email addresses become public knowledge outside of the sites that utilize the service. Well, that’s, there it is. Now your email address is out there. Now I’m part of a data dump
Speaker 2 00:21:46 What’s amusing to me is that I probably change email addresses every, like I dunno, three to five years. So I, I don’t even remember which email address I would have with Gravatar anymore. Like, I’d have to figure that out and do that whole like reset password probably too. And it’s just a nightmare, but, um, yeah, I dunno. I, I never really kind of got all the way into Gravatar either. I, I was hopeful for it like you, that it was going to be like a central service for like profile and identity online and actually maybe even make it easy to log in or register for other services. I think that was a long hope that I had, I don’t know if they ever said that they were going to go in that direction, but, um, you know, how you can log into websites using like your Facebook login. I always thought Gravatar login was something that would eventually come to exist. Um, but yeah, I, I, I don’t know. I never really got all the way in and then
Speaker 1 00:22:36 I think, I think get hub supports Gravatar there’s I know, I think vBulletin and some of the other forums, software projects probably support Gravatar, but I don’t know if you, uh, it continues to remain as a core feature in WordPress. In fact, you can even upload in a fresh install of WordPress. You can’t manage avatars locally, user avatars it’s either Gravatar or nothing. So if you want an alternative to Gravatar or you want to manage or have your users to be able to manage their avatars themselves, I recommend a plugin called WP user advertisers, uh, by John James Jacoby. And he does a good job of keeping it updated. And basically what it allows you to do is, uh, it allows users to upload and select their own advertisers. And by the way, I wrote an article back in 2016 for the Tavern where I describe that it’s, it’s a pretty crappy user experience I’m managing and changing your avatar from within WordPress. And this article got me to check in and see if there’s any been, been any changes on that. No, it’s still a pretty crappy managing and changing your avatar from within the backend of WordPress, which I don’t understand, but you know, nowadays from now on until eternity, I don’t bother with Gravatar anymore. If I can help it, if I do any new WordPress sites that I manage, I use the WP user advertised.
Speaker 2 00:24:02 I just turned it off. It’s more data to pull in on a page load that’s probably not needed, but I don’t, I don’t do any community sites. So for me, those faces aren’t as important.
Speaker 1 00:24:10 Yeah. Yeah. You know where some of those websites are just, it’s a web ATAR is a webinar.
Speaker 2 00:24:16 There’s a couple of them. There’s like a robot one and a weird shape one.
Speaker 1 00:24:21 Yeah. So there you have it. So Gravatar is just going to keep on going and doing what they do. And, uh, if, uh, basically whatever information you have and your Gravatar profile is now part of the data dump. So if you want, you can go into Gravatar, you could delete it or not. I don’t think it really matters at this point, but Hey, at least, uh, at least passwords are not considered public profile information. You all have that going for us.
Speaker 2 00:24:48 I would recommend though, that if you did have your email address in that Gravatar data dump, it doesn’t hurt to update your password and make sure you have good password security or to FFA or something like that. Um, because they could bot attack those email addresses potentially, and try to gain access to your email, which would be really bad. So just be safe out there.
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Speaker 1 00:25:57 Um, I just, uh, I’m glad I have a good sense of humor, but I’m professional about it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Uh, so long time, WordPress lead developer, core developer, Helen, who Sandy, she announced that she is moving on from 10 up, which she’s been there for about 10 years. And she’s also kind of moving on from WordPress. She kind of says in her announcement posts that no, she doesn’t want to work. She doesn’t think that she wants to work on WordPress itself. Full-time again, which she feels should be okay. She has ideas and wants, but she has no real drive to manifest them herself anymore. She feels very good about the current direction of the project, especially the adder out of there. And she knows that there’s wonderfully smart and kind people who work on it. And she’s thankful to have been part of such a great community and project for a long time.
Speaker 1 00:26:53 And she says that you will definitely have not seen the last of her. And she’s, uh, you know, at the point where she was willing to spend time and meet people at, uh, work camps again, and she has joined a another company, but she’s leaving that reveal, uh, for a later day. So I just wanted to say, thank you, Helen, for all of your work and your contributions to WordPress and, and what you’ve done over the years and, uh, looking forward to, uh, seeing how you influence the tech world in the future and, uh, enjoy your new adventure.
Speaker 2 00:27:30 Yeah, I think it’s really great that, uh, it sounds like she’s got an engineering manager position that she’s really happy with. I, uh, I, I can’t help, but feel a little gutted for the tennis team. Um, she, when I worked there, she was a staple of that company and I’m sure that has not changed at all. Um, she was the director of open-source initiatives at 10 up. She was a WordPress lead developer. Um, she, you know, was just amazing to like listen to, and, and I just, I, I can’t imagine after so long with that company, she’s like a fixture there for her to leave. I was just, when you posted that before the show, I was just like, how does that even happen? Like, I dunno if I was, if I was a, the executive team at tenet, man, I’d be like driving by with, uh, dump trucks of money saying, please don’t leave. But I get that sometimes you get to the point where 10 years, And especially in the tech world, right? I mean, you think of the turnover in most agencies is typically around that, you know, eight to 16 months and she’s lasted 10 years at the same agency. That’s huge. So, um, kudos to her for that, but, uh, wow. It’s just, that’s going to be an interesting change.
Speaker 1 00:28:50 So in other news, uh, what’s going on here with the 1.5, 1.6 million WordPress sites hit with, uh, some attacks.
Speaker 2 00:29:01 Yeah, so it, it seems like, um, there were some plugins that, uh, have this options, update vulnerability in them,
Speaker 1 00:29:12 Pelvis press capabilities. You know, I know the, I know the folks over at published press, they have great products and they do have the, this is a plugin where you can manage the various roles and capabilities of users. And apparently they had an oopsy.
Speaker 2 00:29:27 Yeah, it’s, what’s really interesting is not just that there’s a bunch of sites being attacked. It’s that they’re being attacked from 16,000 different IP addresses over the last 36 hours for a total of over 13 million, um, tracked or, or like noted attacks on websites. Um, it’s funny in that, in the word fence posts, they give you like, you’re the top 10 offending IP addresses that you might want to block on your firewall, whether or not you have these plugins, you’re probably getting traffic sent to your WordPress site by these IP addresses. And it’s just, it’s not useful traffic. So grab that list, blocked them. Um, it does go on to kind of say like, Hey, if you’re using like published press capabilities, can you be social plugin, Pinterest, automatic WordPress automatic,
Speaker 1 00:30:12 A number of themes too. Yeah. The Epsilon frameworks can version. So there’s a number of themes that a part of the Absalon framework that are affected by this as well.
Speaker 2 00:30:22 Yeah. And some of them are bigger than others. Um, I didn’t see any in here that I’m like, okay, I know that theme, or I’ve installed that one in myself before, but like a news mag has over 10,000 active installations in it. Um,
Speaker 1 00:30:35 Oh yeah. A lot of these themes are free and available on a theme repo. That’s right. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:30:39 Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re not running the latest version of these, you might just kind of want to double-check that because otherwise, um, you’re not in a good place and actually one of the themes, which was kind of interesting to me, uh, nature, Maglite, there’s actually no patch for that theme currently for this issue. So if you’re running that it’s recommended that you actually uninstalled that from your site and switch teams like now, or
Speaker 1 00:31:01 Yeah. If that, if that theme is available on the, uh, theme directory, I would, I’d be very surprised if you can access it right now. It’s probably already been taken down based on, Wordfence probably getting in touch with them, the theme review team, and probably haven’t had taken down or at least suspended.
Speaker 2 00:31:18 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:31:20 But what was going on in here was that, uh, attackers were updating, the users can register option two enabled and setting the default role option two administrator in most cases using the publish press capabilities plugin. So that’s a yikes so
Speaker 2 00:31:38 Little issue. That’s a big issue.
Speaker 1 00:31:40 Now anyone can register in the new user role is, is admin meds. That’s it, man. Yeah. That’s not good.
Speaker 2 00:31:46 Can you still a castle so to speak?
Speaker 1 00:31:48 Absolutely. So if you were using published press capabilities, and again, some of these other plugins will have links to these in the show notes that you want to make sure that you’re updated to the latest versions because they’re patched, then you won’t have to worry about it. However you should, if you were using these plugins, you should, double-check your go to settings general and look at the membership area, make sure that, uh, the, the anyone can register is as is not checked or if it is make sure that the new user default role is not set to administrators, set it back to subscriber.
Speaker 2 00:32:21 I will say too, that if your site has already been compromised, they might be able to hide that information from you. So if you’re running these plugins, it might be worth reaching out to your web host and saying, Hey, is there anything we can do to just make sure that everything is a okay.
Speaker 1 00:32:36 Um, and also I should backup time or utilize backup time.
Speaker 2 00:32:40 Yeah. And check your user list as well. If you, if you go there and you click on administrator, so you go to your WordPress admin panel users, um, and then you click on administrator, it’ll list your administrators again, unfortunately through code, some people can hide different accounts, but, um, if they haven’t done that and you see someone on there that shouldn’t have administrative roles, bump them down to subscriber, remove them, do whatever you need to do, but just kind of be cautious everyone. This is, this is not good
Speaker 1 00:33:07 Throughout the years of using WordPress has a site that you have or own that maybe you forgot about. Have you ever been, uh, exploited as have any of your sites been succumbed to a malware or a vulnerabilities security issue where you just had to wipe it or restore from a backup? Yes.
Speaker 2 00:33:26 More than once. Yep. Wow. Yeah. I’ve, I’ve been, I mean, again, part of that is just the sheer number of like clients sites that I’ve run, but even on my own personal sites, I’ve like, you know, been lax on security sometimes or updates. And next thing, you know, it’s, it’s a bad situation. Um, I would say honestly, most of the issues that I’ve had in general with WordPress security has been due to, um, someone with administrative permissions, having a weak password and mean not having a system in place to like restrict the number of attempts that people can have to attempt to log in with different usernames. I think that that combination has probably been like my biggest hole, um, in terms of security over time, which I’m much more cognizant of these days, uh, and much more like, um, actively aware of and dealing with to make sure that it doesn’t ever happen to me again. Um, but I haven’t had too many issues where it’s been like a plugin that has caused the issue or a theme that’s caused the issue. It’s it’s usually been like that brute force.
Speaker 1 00:34:29 Yeah. I think, I think it’s still a thing too. If you visit WP admin and visit a lot or just a login page, I think by default, it’s an unlimited amount of tries that you could do. I mean, that’s the whole reason why I remember back in the day brute protect, that was a whole service dedicated to protecting a WP admin. And it was kind of like the Akismet, but for your login form or your registration form on WordPress and automatically up acquiring them a number of years ago. And now I think grouper tack it’s part of, it’s probably a service as part of jet pack or Geopack protect, but some kind of security solution that they have. But, um, men, the stats that blue protect was showing me when I was running the Tavern, I was looking at it. Oh my goodness. It was still a scary to know that that’s how many attempts was going on or how many attempts that were blocked of people accessing WPN men. And just, it just guessing. And most of all this stuff was automated.
Speaker 2 00:35:24 Yep. It is. It’s amazing. The, uh, engineering
Speaker 1 00:35:29 Going to record our show right now, who knows how many attempts are being made to log into WordPress? I don’t want to know. No. I mean either, but you know, that’s in here hearing lies by the way. Speaking of security, um, do you, can you recommend or know of, and maybe somebody in our audience knows you can contact me on Twitter at Jeff email me, but I’m, I’m, I’m kind of in the market for a two factor authentication plugin. Um, I use strong passwords on WP mainline and every other website that, uh, that I maintain or have admin privileges on. But I, I’m kinda thinking that I want to do some, maybe implement two factor authentication
Speaker 2 00:36:13 And I’m using only enough. The Wordfence plugin allows you to do two.
Speaker 1 00:36:17 Okay. Wordfence I know they have a, they have a free option. So I want to, as part
Speaker 2 00:36:20 Of the free option, it is, it is. Yep.
Speaker 1 00:36:23 Okay. So I might look in the word fence, uh, other than, oh, let’s talk about this. This is interesting CMS market share, uh, Yoast of all key does a, um, a biannual analysis. So I think it’s two year. Is that what bi-annual means? Yep. Thank you. Thank you. So I’m going to call you right brain and, uh, to help out the left side of my brain, but he does a bi-annual analysis of the CMS market share numbers provided by W3C texts and w three taxes, the company that everybody calls and everybody looks towards when they’re bringing up or talking about market share numbers for S for your content management systems. And he says that, wow, in the previous two analysis analysis is of the ecosystem. There’s a lot that has changed with some interesting new trends in the last six months. Uh, we can cover some of these things, um, in the numbers. Um, but I’ll just ask it out of the gate, uh, going over this report and his analysis, anything that strikes that strikes you as, as ad or worrisome, or maybe a bit surprising, because I, I have one thing that he mentioned that I’ll, I’ll bring it up after you answered.
Speaker 2 00:37:35 Um, for me, I think the, the thing that made me go wow, the most was, um, the, the continual arise of Shopify was one of the big things. And then secondarily, I was like, Ooh, the slow death of Joomla
Speaker 1 00:37:50 Drupal. And it was interesting.
Speaker 2 00:37:53 Yeah. So like, if you look at those two lines, um, going in their opposite directions, it’s, it’s super interesting to me. I mean, I have numerous times thought about like, you know, surely Shopify is basically as big as it’s going to get and not just keeps growing and I’m just blown away. I, I, I don’t know if you’ve ever used Shopify before. I’ve, I’ve developed a couple of projects on Shopify. Um, my thought on that is I felt like I was being bled to death, like death from a thousand paper cuts, because everything you want to do, every feature that you want to add is another monthly subscription of like $3, $5, $2, $8.
Speaker 1 00:38:31 And that’s probably because it’s a, it’s a software as a service. Right?
Speaker 2 00:38:34 Exactly. And so by the time you get your monthly bill, you’re going, wait, I’m spending like $180 a month on my like, shop that I set up, like, okay, as long as I’m getting good conversions, that’s fine. But for like, as you’re starting out, you’re going, this is dumb. Like I could set up a woo commerce shop for way cheaper than this. So like, I don’t in my brain, I kind of get to this wall where I’m like, why is Shopify? So like, you know, growing so much or so potent, what, what was your kind of takeaway from this?
Speaker 1 00:39:03 So we’ll just really quickly here. Uh, the tap 10 CMS is we’ll cover, I guess I’ll just go down the line. You’ve got WordPress at 43%, then you’ve got Shopify. Yeah. 4.3% Wix at 1.9 Squarespace, 1.8 Juma and number five at 1.8% drip, a 1.3 blogger at 1% bit tricks at 0.9 Magento, uh, was 0.6% in OpenCart at 0.6%. And one of the notes about the numbers by Yoast evoke, uh, is this, and I’ll just quote him. He says new contenders, all software as a service. He says, what Flo and Weebly have both shown nice growth over the past 12 months, web flow, especially can be expected to be knocking on the door of the top 10, by this time, next year as an open source enthusiast. It pains me to see that all of the software as a service tools are winning and open source in general is losing everywhere. And boy, that, that statement kind of struck out at me cause he’s right. And the numbers show it.
Speaker 2 00:40:08 Yeah. And I have to admit, so I have tried web flow as well, and it feels really good. Like Jeff, if you haven’t had a chance yet go sign up for a free web flow account and play with it for like two or three hours. And I think you’re going to agree with me that there’s an empowerment that web flow provides, um, that I haven’t even in like Squarespace or some of those other like tools I’ve never, I’ve never felt as empowered with those as I do with web flow, I feel like web flow is the answer to like, what if wordpress.com and Squarespace like truly had a child and they still allowed you to do like custom post types and custom content types. Um, it, it, it is super empowering and I can totally see why web flow is growing like crazy right now. Um, because honestly, if I was to start in like the CMS news world today, or if I was to starting like the CMS or building sites for clients world today, I would probably be doing a hundred percent web flow. Wow.
Speaker 1 00:41:07 Uh that’s uh, I guess I’m gonna have to check it out. Um, he also mentioned in his analysis that overall the market is consolidating the, the entire CMS market is consolidating. He does mention that he’s kind of sad as well about the truthful and Juma decline. The numbers of decline and Shopify wins wakes is winning those a square page. Squarespace is winning. Um, and all of those software as a service providers are generating more revenue. They’re getting a hold of, of more money. So we’ll have to see how, or, you know, if any way possible WordPress can continue to battle against these behemoths with, uh, as they continue to generate more money, get access to more, uh, revenue that they can spend. But now looking at WordPress at 43% market share, and we can go back, let’s go back 10 years when even, even then 10 years ago, the numbers were still huge for her presence for market share. Could you have ever predicted, or could you even have predicted a scenario let’s even go back to 2007? Let’s go way back now, let’s go back to that too. Near the beginning. Could, could, could any of us have seen WordPress becoming this dominant on the web?
Speaker 2 00:42:22 No, I don’t think so. I think, I think that we all assume that it was going to kind of hang around with some of the more mature, um, options that were available on.
Speaker 1 00:42:31 I thought it was good. The question I have is why is WordPress at 43%? Why is it,
Speaker 2 00:42:36 Why is it not like right there right next to
Speaker 1 00:42:38 It? I mean, it, Drupal was not that bad Drupal has been maintained. The dev developers love it. It’s a, it’s a pretty good solid content management system. Well, how come its market share is not up? What’s the problem.
Speaker 2 00:42:53 I, I wish I had an answer for you. And I think that’s a great question. That’s the community. I mean, Hey everyone, if you’re a Drupal fan or, you know why Drupal’s only at 1.3% messaged Jeff on Twitter or wherever you can find them. I I’d be interested in that answer too, because I, you know, I, I’m not a fan of Drupal by any stretch, but I mean that, that gap between Drupal and WordPress is just, it’s shocking to me. Um, the gap between Squarespace and WordPress is shocking to me, the growth in Shopify is shocking to me. I mean, maybe I’m just out of touch and I’m like, you know, getting old and get off my lawn. But, uh, yeah, I, I don’t understand it. I just, I don’t, I love WordPress don’t get me wrong, but I don’t understand why the gap is as big as it is.
Speaker 1 00:43:34 And, uh, yo Stan says that e-commerce continues its rise, uh, as a result of COVID-19 where people have been buying and selling things online, he says, as a result, e-commerce is becoming more important and e-commerce sites take up a bigger portion of the top 10 million sites online. Those are the ones that attract by w through texts. And he says that he honestly doesn’t know where all these e-commerce sites are coming from. Uh, but he also mentions that, uh, just like WordPress WooCommerce was growth seems to be slowing a bit over the last six months who commerce added 0.4% market share while Shopify added 0.6%. He says, it’s a bit too early to draw conclusions over this. So let’s see where these figures are six months from now.
Speaker 2 00:44:17 Yeah, I agree. And I kind of wished that he had more data from more e-commerce providers. Like, you know, what our big commerce installs looking like, or what are other like, um, uh, what’s another e-commerce solution. I’m sure you have a bunch of them in your
Speaker 1 00:44:32 Head when I think of will commerce or e-commerce it’s like WP e-commerce is a classic, the shop plugin shop with two PS that’s, as far as I know that still around and kicking. Um, but yeah, in all this mess, I keep forgetting about big commerce, B commerce made, uh, some large inroads into the WordPress space and community about a year or two ago. In fact, I remember, I think tofa DeRosa had a bit of influence into that. He was kind of like there were press liaison and, and, uh, that’s how, that’s how I came across big commerce, but, but they’re right up there as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:45:06 And I’d be interested to see what that market share looks like. They’re probably not Shopify numbers, but I think they’re worthy of being on these kinds of graphs.
Speaker 1 00:45:13 Wow. You know, but, but again, I like to go back to that, to that quote, where he says it pains me to see this software as a service tools are winning and open source in general is losing everywhere. That’s I don’t know. I guess, keep that in the back of your head folks, because man, that’s kind of, that’s, that’s depressing, but I think, I think it’s also not surprising because as a software, as a service, what do you have, do you get a tailored solution that is tightly controlled by the provider? And you know, when you create that sort of very strict, uh, area for providing the service and you don’t have the wild west of plugins, you don’t have the wild west of themes. And, uh, you know, you have at the very least a robust API that third parties can build on top of no, I, I don’t know.
Speaker 1 00:46:02 It’s like there’s many benefits to, to be in part of a software as a service solution, instead of as opposed to like WordPress and WooCommerce, where, Hey, I found this plugin on Etsy, you know, install it on your WordPress site and who knows what happened. It’s, you know, just the wa we’re pressed it’s the wild west and SAS is just, I don’t know, the county jail. I dunno, maybe that that’s a terrible comparison, but I don’t know. Hopefully, hopefully, uh, open source in general, not just WordPress, but open source in general can continue. It’s continuing to strengthen that, lose to software as a service, because it’s all about breaking down the walled gardens, right? 3d centralization, all that crap.
Speaker 2 00:46:48 Yeah. I mean, and, and speaking of decentralization, I mean, you know, decentralized WordPress news, um, if you want to support WP main line, go check out for $49 per year. You can be a real fan and, uh, you can continue to kind of make sure that, uh, Jeff and I can bring you this podcast and the news, and there’s no corporate overlord
Speaker 1 00:47:08 Software as a service you’re minting required. There you go. You do not have to hook up minimum ask or any other crypto wallet to WP mainline to support this show.
Speaker 2 00:47:19 Amazing.
Speaker 1 00:47:20 Let’s see. So next week’s going to be an interesting week next week show because we have the state of the word on Tuesday, December, and that’s where we’re going to kind of get a measure. The pulse on what’s been happening with WordPress of element of the, this year, previous years, and what’s going to be happening in the future. And a lot of people were stoked to hear what may ask to say on web three and, and the blockchain, and maybe get his thoughts on it. What, what, how it relates to WordPress and whatever else. I know there’s a lot of people looking forward to that. And I’m kind of, I’m interested just to see a general direction of where Matt sees WordPress heading in the next year or two and what his plans are and sort of the direction that WordPress is going to take.
Speaker 2 00:48:08 I think you should, uh, host a watch party or listen party or whatever.
Speaker 1 00:48:11 Yeah, man, there’s so many people doing those. I’ve already made some of them like, Ooh, Ooh, uh,
Speaker 2 00:48:17 Who’s running one. It’s your fans go and listen to,
Speaker 1 00:48:22 Uh, there’s some out there. Oh, I know, I know a number of people were actually hosting Twitter spaces. A couple of different writers spaces are going to be happening. Um, either during or after. I don’t know what post status is having an after for our state of the word space. Um, in fact, there’s actually going to be, I think Cory Miller is representing post-data. So we’ll be there in person and Matt mulloway, uh, sent an invitation to post status and said, Hey, is there anybody, is there anybody from post status? It’s going to be here. Maybe we can do a little interview. And David Bisset, couldn’t make it because of prior obligations, but Corey Miller is going to be there. So Corey is going to follow Matt Mullenweg into a conference room and do a little interview. That’ll be interesting to see. And I’ve got a couple of places that are interested in my take on the state of the word. So I’m supposed to record a little shindig and send that out to a couple of people, but, uh, yeah. Yeah. So we’ll all be, uh, sitting on the edges of our seats on Tuesday for the state of the word.
Speaker 2 00:49:24 Do me a favor. If you, if you do find, uh, any kind of cool people that are going to run Twitter spaces or websites, they’re going to do like viewing parties or whatever, make sure you tweet about them so that I can maybe pick one or the other people can pick one as well.
Speaker 1 00:49:37 Okie dokie. And what that, and that’s going to wrap it up for today’s episode, find show notes for this show. And every other episode on WP, mainline.com, just click the podcast link. It’s all right there. And you can follow me on Twitter at Jeff road, J E F F R zero, where I tweet pictures of a pizza Crescent rolls and some other things. And, uh, David, how about you, sir?
Speaker 2 00:50:01 Uh, you can find me at find purpose on Twitter and I’m always available@presstightened.com and for, uh, you know, whatever your website building needs at Cambra creative.
Speaker 1 00:50:13 Um, so we’re getting towards the end of the year here. In fact, uh, in about two weeks, I celebrate another revolution around the sun with my birthday. So that’d be cool. Um, yeah. So there, the end of the year crunch, and then, uh, do you think things are gonna slow down for you? You can take a breath on it. Come January. Are you going to be, is it just grinding all year long? There’s no, there’s no stopping. Oh, I’m hoping to go a little slower in January. I think really though my slow period will be after my wife graduates from her undergrad. And uh, we’ll, we’ll probably we’ll hopefully find a little bit of time to just kind of be it’s just about four months away. That’s nothing in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Um, time flies by. Yes, it does. All right. So everybody enjoy the rest of your weekend. I’m glad we got the hanging out with you today and we’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon or evening so long everybody

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 20 of the WP mainline podcast for Wednesday, November 24th, 2021. I’m your host, Jeff Chandler and joined by Malcolm porosity. Malcolm served gobble gobble
Speaker 2 00:00:33 Only for you, American.
Speaker 1 00:00:34 Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. You already had your Thanksgiving. That’s right. It’s like a full month ago. Yep. Well, it’s our turn now, buddy. Very much enjoying looking for this is my favorite time of the year. Uh, we’ve got, uh, some stuffing homemade stuffing. We’ve got broccoli and cheese casserole, which is basically just broccoli and cheese brownies. So to speak to very good. I got deviled eggs in the fridge. We’ve got homemade pumpkin pie roll. We’ve got, uh, uh, smoked roasted Turkey from the honeybee Tam company. And what else do we get? Oh, she’s gonna, she’s gonna make some candy yams. We’ve got pumpernickel bread. And uh, the only people who’s going to be here tomorrow is me and my wife and smokey. So, you know,
Speaker 2 00:01:14 That is quite the
Speaker 1 00:01:15 Fees were covered for the weekend. I think
Speaker 2 00:01:18 I was, I was actually talking to a, uh, my coworker and one of the things that I brought up was just how big of a deal Thanksgiving is in the states. And, uh, he said, you know, Christmas is kind of more for the kids and Thanksgiving is kind of more for the adults. So that’s why it’s kind of treated as this, you know, bigger event. Um, how do you feel about that? Do you agree? Like is Thanksgiving bigger than Christmas and, and a lot of,
Speaker 1 00:01:40 Well, let’s put it this way. I think Thanksgiving is the holiday that generates the most sales of alcohol during the year. So I don’t know, take debt for what you will. Uh, but, um, yeah, I don’t know. I suppose I, I think, uh, I don’t know, man, I just love Thanksgiving because you’re almost guaranteed to have a good meal somewhere. You know, if it’s not a relatives, a friend’s house somewhere it’s, it’s always, it’s always this time of year where you just, hopefully you take a step back and you give thanks and you’re thankful and you think about the good in your life and in the good of others and helping out others and kind of all of that stuff. And, and Christmas for me, it’s just, my birthday is on December 21st, which by the way, is the darkest day of the year. Um, you know, my apologies for that, but, uh, you know, I couldn’t help it.
Speaker 1 00:02:30 Uh, um, but, uh, you know, when I was growing up for Christmas, I can never read my birthday present. It was, it was mostly like a leftover or extra Christmas present. And I never really got to do you being a Christmas baby sucks or somewhere around Christmas, but, but in terms of family, I don’t know. I think they’re both Thanksgiving is a big deal and, uh, I don’t know, I just, I’m looking forward to it and, uh, by the way, folks, and there are, you know, I got to figure out a different three words to say, I keep saying, by the way, like I’m forgetful or something. But, uh, uh, my apologies again to, I was supposed to be on the state of WordPress news panel last Friday. Uh, it was hosted by David Bisset and the post status team. I think Dan also was a part of it.
Speaker 1 00:03:17 There was a lot of people who were a part of it and I know showed and, you know, I woke up and it was about three or four o’clock in the afternoon and people were texting us and me saying, are you okay? Are you okay? I actually suffered a pretty, I wouldn’t say severe, but it was very uncomfortable and very unwanted, a anxiety attack and Friday morning, which kind of took me out for the rest of the day. Uh, and I only had that severe. Okay, well, there was, it was severe and, uh, I only have one pill left and I didn’t want to use the pill. And, uh, I was talking to you about this on Twitter, you know, getting anxiety meds. The United States now is becoming a giant pain in my ass. I have to now go through a behavioral therapist. And then after I talked to them, I then have to schedule an appointment and actually go physically see my doctor.
Speaker 1 00:04:05 And then after that, I might get the prescription of meds that I need. And I don’t know, it’s starting to seem to me like the, the, the pills I need. I’m not selling them. I need them. I only use them for, if I feel like an attacks coming on that I can’t control what they do is it’s it’s 0.5 milligrams lorazepam into slows my heart rate down. And it allows me to get control of myself. And, uh, it, it seems like they’re starting to treat them as like opioids or something in the federal regulations. I never get nuts. Yeah. I mean, it shouldn’t be over the counter and all that, but I mean, it should be, uh, should be that I should message my doctor and say, I’m running out. Can you renew my prescription? She says, okay, here you go. And it should be that simple, but it’s not the fax that to the pharmacy and you’re good to go kind of thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:04:54 So I’m working on, I’m working on getting some pills, but it’s been such a pain, the acid, I haven’t even, I haven’t even scheduled an appointment with the behavioral therapist yet, so maybe I should work on that now. I’m not as lucky as Malcolm here being married to a behavioral therapist, she she’s an undergrad in psychology. I want you to go, wow, you got there right there. And your son, right by your side, you got some therapy. I mean, I’m sure your, your wife could give you some therapy too, if you wanted, uh, I’m telling you everything wrong with you.
Speaker 1 00:05:31 All right. So there, it was a, a big week in, uh, in the news department, as far as WordPress and con is concerned. Let’s start off with the big story and that is GoDaddy breached. Uh, now this was an article published by Wordfence. Uh, they were the ones who sort of were first on the scene with this, but, uh, according to her report filed by GoDaddy with the sec, uh, an attacker initially gained access via a compromise password on September 6th, 2021. And it was discovered on November 17th, 2021, at which point their access was revoked. So while the company took immediate action to mitigate the damage, the attacker had more than two months to establish persistence. So anyone currently using GoDaddy’s managed WordPress product should assume to be compromised until they confirm that it’s not the case. So we’re talking about upwards of 1.2 million, uh, customers, and that doesn’t even begin to account for the customers of those customers that could potentially be affected by this issue.
Speaker 1 00:06:35 Uh, and now it appears that GoDaddy was storing SFTP credentials, either as plain text or in a format that could be reversed into plain text. Uh, I learned today, uh, from, from some folks on the insight that they definitely were not storing the passwords in plain type. So, uh, I can confirm that, uh, but they were storing them in a way that made it essentially the same thing. Uh, so what they did is instead of, um, uh, instead of using best practices, uh, like using a salted hash or a public key, both of which are considered industry best practices for SFTP, uh, the plain text passwords, a lot of an attack attacker direct access to password credentials without the need to crack them. So this is bad news. This is just bad news all the way around, especially on the week of black Friday, this affects managed WordPress hosting company, uh, customers on GoDaddy, uh, let’s, let’s see media temple, uh, Tieso hosts 1, 2, 3 reg domain, factory Hart, internet, and host Europe.
Speaker 1 00:07:45 So it’s not just GoDaddy, but it’s a whole collection of resellers and other folks under the GoDaddy umbrella. So what you should do, and I think, uh, Godi has already, GoDaddy’s already been doing this is reset your passwords, reset your for, for your WordPress database for your user account. Um, if you have customers, you should probably be set their passwords as well. Uh, because a attacker with that amount of time, they could have installed, you know, maybe a road plugin, they can install malware, they could have installed, or, uh, just log the information down in case they needed it, uh, for a later date. So this is just bad all the way around. And it, it doesn’t, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s it dawns on me, you know, when I was thinking about the show today, I’m like, oh, this is, this is, this is bad news. This is big news, but it’s bad news. And yet go to Eddie sponsors of the show. So how weird is it going to be talking about this new story? And then a few minutes later I’m telling people, Hey, go over there and be a customer, uh, this, you know, so today I’ve decided that it’s just too uncomfortable. I’m not going to do that. I go, daddy’s going to get what they paid for in terms of sponsoring the show, but not today.
Speaker 2 00:09:02 Yeah. I mean, as I said to you before the show, this happens in the biggest companies all the time or not all the time, but often enough, right? Like this is not
Speaker 1 00:09:10 Security incidents happen, but in this way, in, when it involves being able to retrieve passwords or logging credentials in plain text, this is really bad. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:09:21 I agree. I, you know, I will say though, that, um, these kinds of issues are always more complicated than they appear on the surface. Like you mentioned, they likely weren’t stored as plain text, which means that they were like hashed in a way that you could figure out what the hash values were or like, you know, reverse any kind of basic encryption that was being used or what have you. Um, I think the more interesting part about this and the thing that makes me kind of scratch my head is why like, even with press Titan, we don’t store, like our servers are all separate. Like the access and controls are all separate. Everything is separated. Like even if you gained access to my email, let’s say, um, you would still only be able to gain access to like the press site and.com website and maybe like one or two other projects. Um, there’s no single log in or a single place where we have all of this data. So, you know, it makes me scratch my head. Why a company, as big as GoDaddy would store all of this stuff in a consolidated place where you could get like 1.2 million sites affected, right. Like that’s where I kind of get confused. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:10:33 Well, I don’t know if it was all consolidated into an area. I think
Speaker 2 00:10:38 That’s a provisioning system. Right. Um, and, and again, I would just say like, okay, you know, maybe that’s an easy point of failure to fix going forward, right? So like don’t have a single central provisioning system to do all of the managed WordPress sites
Speaker 1 00:10:52 Or a store, these credentials in a secure way, which, which there are already a standard or industry best practices to do that with my question is this, there is a lot of questions like this was from, I think from the sec filing that said this was based on legacy code or legacy systems that they had in place. So the question I have is there had to have been people on the inside employees who have known about these security issues or known about this risk. And they’ve just been, how, how, how has this been able to go on for this long, without it being addressed? And now this ends up happening? No, I’m, I’m very interested to read in the post-mortem about this. If they even publish one as the, how this all came about, there had to been people known on the inside had known that this was, this is an issue and it was going to, it was going to be, uh, something like this is going to happen at some point, if it wasn’t addressed.
Speaker 2 00:11:50 I mean, I would like to assume that that is not the case. I mean, let’s, let’s, let’s look at
Speaker 1 00:11:55 You invest best intentions.
Speaker 2 00:11:56 Listen, again, it kind of comes down to, for me, like there’s some simple, very, very simple things that they could have done to mitigate this risk. And I’d like to think that if someone with decision-making authority knew about it, someone would have made that choice. Like for, for instance, I, I don’t know about you, but a lot of the sites that I use require to FFA to log in with their provisioning system, likely to that, I mean, even logging in the most GoDaddy stuff these days, I need to FFA like to manage the domain names or manage hosting accounts. So I dunno, I just, there’s a lot of like, yeah,
Speaker 1 00:12:32 I don’t even think a to F is required. I think that’s something that the user has to have the customer.
Speaker 2 00:12:38 Right. But I mean, I’m talking about like their provisioning system, how does that not have to have a controls in place? Right. So even if you did store this data in a way that could be exported easily in plain text, let’s say, um, like, you know, make sure that it’s difficult to get access to that system set up access control system. So only certain people have log-ins, um, flag things. If there’s logins outside of standard times that a person would log in, like there’s a lot of very simple security things that they could have done to really kind of reduce this risk. And the length of access is also kind of concerning to me. Um, you know, being able to have access to a system like that for over two months, like that is a lot of time to be able to walk around and export data and see what’s going on and how do they not trip some kind of security thing. And just in general, right? How do they not trip some kind of security thing over the course of two months of being able to log into this system?
Speaker 1 00:13:32 So do you have any, uh, sites or clients hosted on GoDaddy?
Speaker 2 00:13:37 Um, cause,
Speaker 1 00:13:39 Uh, you should probably change your past
Speaker 2 00:13:41 Actually. No, we do not have any sites currently using managed WordPress hosting on GoDaddy, take a deep
Speaker 1 00:13:47 Breath, take a sigh of relief.
Speaker 2 00:13:49 Yeah. I mean, but again, like, even if we did, none of the clients that I’m typically working with are a big deal in that respect, it can be very easy to change that. I think anyone that’s running an e-commerce site or any kind of like that’s where it gets tricky, PII personally, identifiable or identification information or whatever, like your personal information. Um, if you’re running like a, uh, you know, like a health center or even a gym or any kind of e-commerce site, like you might actually be legally required depending on where you live to notify all of your customers, not just ones that may have been like transacting during the time of access, all of them. And that, that like that business burden is going to be very interesting. And I highly doubt a lot of the, the sites that have kind of have this issue will do that. So again, we don’t know what the follow-up actions are going to be. We don’t know what’s going to happen with this whole thing. I feel like this is going to make waves for quite some time as this all gets sorted out. And, uh, you know, again, maybe it’s one of those things
Speaker 1 00:14:51 Where, you know, go daddy for their managed WordPress sites, push heavier on, on to a Fe. Yeah. Maybe, maybe to fan I’ll actually be like a requirement, which probably wouldn’t be a bad thing. Um, I’ve got two FFA turned on practically for everything that I deem important. Uh, let me tell ya, uh, to a phase of pain in the ass, if you lose your phone or switch phones, I can confirm that, but I know, I guess there’s different apps or different things you can use to make it less of a pain, but I don’t know, every time I do it, it’s still a pain. Yeah. I like that for, for I’m in the Google ecosystem. So I’m using the Google authenticator app and moving that from phone to phone has been, I usually, usually I got us set up to do like just a text message.
Speaker 1 00:15:33 So as long as my phone number is in there, it doesn’t matter what my device is. I can still get the code in. I use both email and text message for, uh, for that instead of using authenticator app. Cause I got one time I had to go through such a long process to get the authentic app to on the new device. And it was just like, I can’t do this. This is not good. I’m like, it works so well. I’m locked out of my own accounts. I can’t get access to them. Uh, you know, I feel for the, uh, GoDaddy employees and I, I know a lot of them, uh, you know, it’s, it’s gotta be rough. You know, they, they did just had the page, they had a big announcement, you know, they got acquired by GoDaddy. Everything was looking great. And then this week comes around and bam, you know, you get this bombshell dropped and it’s like, ah, you know that feeling, oh, and then during a week of black Friday, you got all your eCommerce customers or you manage.
Speaker 1 00:16:26 It’s just, you, you know, you know, it’s not, not a good situation for, for anyone. No, I agree. It’s going to be, time will pass. Things will get better. The sun will pop out and we’ll move on and they’ll learn and we’ll, we’ll move on. And you know, at some point in the future, there will be a headlines of a different web host that has a major security incident. No, it’s just a, it’s just a matter of when not if, uh, so speaking of WordPress, uh, there is a, oh, the WordPress, uh, 2021 survey is available to take, if you visit wordpress.org, there’s a banner up at the top. And, uh, I’ve actually in the link I clicked. It actually says it’s in English. So I think it’s available in different languages, which is pretty cool. And if you go through the survey, you can answer various questions about how you use WordPress and other information.
Speaker 1 00:17:19 And that will be shared on the wordpress.org news blog. Uh, so it’s, it’s always quarter to get that kind of information. And the more responses to that survey, the better, the better look we have at the, uh, sort of WordPress ecosystem in general. And I haven’t taken the survey yet, but I plan on doing that because I don’t mind being a statistic. Uh, speaking of WordPress, 5.9, there was a video that was published the other day. Um, I noticed this sometimes, and this hasn’t been the first time it’s happened, but the WordPress Facebook account sometimes publishes videos of a new version of WordPress, like a preview video. And I can not, it’s not published anywhere else. And I was like, when I saw this and I, and I said, introduce and WordPress 5.9, I said, wait a minute, we’re 5.9. Is it going to be released for at least another month?
Speaker 1 00:18:08 Is this a mistake? Is this the intro video? Is this what is going on here? So I watched it and it’s essentially a preview video of what you can expect in WordPress 5.9. It’s actually a well done video that shows off full se adamine being able to edit the nav area, the nav block of your website, uh, through the editor. Uh, but what the highlight for me was the style. So being able to select different styles, every theme, and being able to change your topography and your colors, which I thought was really nice because now you can have a theme, you can create a couple of different styles and depending on how you feel during that time of the year, you can just give your site a little bit of that new look and feel without overly changing everything like the layout and whatnot. And I was talking about this before the show with, uh, w with somebody about, do you remember back in the days of Zen garden and Sam garden was all this check out what we can do with just CSS.
Speaker 1 00:19:03 And I, and I remember there were conversations in the WordPress community with default theme scene, with the idea of trying to do the Zen coding approach, but with the default theme. So you could easily switch themes in and out. It’s just CSS. And then you can have a new look and feel without really changing everything. And then there were child themes, but child themes to me was made it almost as many changes. You know, it could change the layout, it could change the look and feel. It was almost like a full theme, even though it was a child thing. So it’s kind of funny that it just seems like it’s taken us all this time to get to the point where if you just wanted to do simple typography changes and colors, just to kind of spice things up in your site. Uh, now you don’t have to install a child theme or whatnot. You can, hopefully your main theme will come with styles and you can just select the style from within the full site editor and it’s applied and it looks good and everything’s golden,
Speaker 2 00:20:01 You know, what it made me think of though. Um, remember when people used to do like different, uh, you know, add snow to their designs for winter or Christmas
Speaker 2 00:20:12 Yeah. So like, I wonder if I’ll be able to like set up styles per programmatically, like using like the functions that PHB file and like have like, you know, different designs or looks based on maybe the time of day or the time of year or, or those kinds of things. So, you know, and just again, not changing the layout, just changing kind of which styles like which CSS set or color set or type sets that I use for my,
Speaker 1 00:20:38 No, it would be cool is if I had a light theme and a dark mode theme, and based on the time as you say, programming programmatically, uh, the, the style could be applied based on the time of day. You want users wouldn’t need to switch and then wouldn’t need to be a setting stored as a cookie or whatnot on the site. You got the, you got the brain going, sir, that would be cool. I bet you, I bet you, this can be something that could be,
Speaker 2 00:21:05 Um, what do you think of like, I mean, you’ve watched this video, what do you think about five dot nine? Do you feel like it’s an exciting release? It seems like it’s a pretty big release.
Speaker 1 00:21:14 Well, it’s, it’s so big. It’s been delayed and we’ll get to that, but I think, yeah, I think 5.9 because of full site editing and what that entails and because 20, 22 realize and full site editing and we got the nav block and in other things, this is like one of those milestone moments, as I’ve said before, we’re, it’s, it’s like a cutoff point of before full site editing black themes and after full site editing and black themes. No. So it’s going to be, you know, we have WordPress 5.0 yeah. Pre Gutenberg and after Gutenberg, well, this is going to be, you know, one of those big things, but for themes, you know, before FSC and after FSC and from what I’ve seen in the, in the video, and I’ve not actually used or experimented with a full site editing black thing. And yet, uh, there are a few available, but I’m kind of waiting for 5.9 to, to come out and then actually start playing with themes. But from what I’ve seen, I’m kind of anxious to get in there and click around and see what I see what I’m capable of, see how I can break things with this, a new way of, of managing the theme. And something else that I’ve been thinking about too, is, you know, the theme customizer. Yup. What’s going to happen to the customizer in the era of full site editing. Does it disappear? Does it simply become a toggle of turning full site editing mode on or off, or here’s the, what happens with the customized?
Speaker 2 00:22:37 A lot of developers use the customizer to add and store values. So I don’t necessarily see that going away anytime soon, but it definitely feels like the expectation is, uh, a transition away from the customizer to this. I think, you know, when we talk about WordPress five dot nine, to me, I’m a little bit nervous because I feel like it’s a, do you remember what WordPress was like when Gutenberg first came out and everyone was saying goodbye was kind of garbage, but that was like Gutenberg version 0.1. Right. And we have come a long way since then. Is this going to be full site editing version 0.1? Or is this full site editing 1.0, so I, you know, that question to me still, hasn’t been answered. And I’m curious about how good, how easy, how fun basically that this will feel when it actually comes out
Speaker 1 00:23:28 At least early iterate often. That’s what they always say. 1.0 is the loneliest number.
Speaker 2 00:23:34 We have one chance to make a good first impression. Right. I mean, look at the ratings on Gutenberg.
Speaker 1 00:23:41 Yeah. You had to bring that up, huh? Yeah. But you’re right. You’re right. Um, it, yeah, it did. It didn’t go so well, did it? That’s what you get. That’s what you consider a, not warm reception as to what happened with, with the introduction of Gutenberg into WordPress. But, uh, you know, speaking of speaking of saving theme values, I think people will be able to do that now. And the theme that J sound file. I think the theme that Jason file is going to take the place of what you were able to do in the theme customizer. I can’t confirm that, but it seems to me like that’s how it’s going to work.
Speaker 1 00:24:20 So speaking of, uh, you know, I mentioned that WordPress 5.9 is so big that it’s been delayed. Well, there’s going to be a revised or there is a revised release schedule for, it was 5.9. The final release is now planned for January 25th. Uh, during the end of the original alpha release cycle, there were issues that arose that were related to multiple major features planned for the 5.9 release, including full site editing. Uh, the navigation block, the 2022 theme, which depends on full site editing and the 6.0 release isn’t due out until April, uh, which is too long. They, the, the, the team felt was too long for the community to wait for them. So after going through the list of issues, the core editor team saw that the features could ship in 5.9, what the revised schedule and what they did is they had many discussions in terms of when and how, and they decided that the best course of action would be to delay WordPress 5.9 to include the various fixes and shipped them to the community, uh, by the end of January, taking into account the fact that there are less people around, within the last two weeks in the first week, or last two weeks of December and the first week of January, and they’ve actually built in time so that they can actually do a, for the beta if they determined that to be necessary.
Speaker 1 00:25:42 Uh, so I, I don’t think anyone’s going to complain to be honest that, uh, the release has been delayed from December into January. I’ve brought this up before, you know, they say that deadline or deadlines are not arbitrary, I believe is what the saying is. Uh, and I’ve always wondered why not just have a release in January to begin with, you know, at, at January’s bullying month, uh, there’s nothing really going on. Uh, you’re, you’re trying to start a new start, a fresh, and by having a release of WordPress, a major version, you know, the end of January, Hey, you know, it’s something to look forward to in the new year. So in December is just a very, very busy time of year for everybody around the world. So I, I don’t know. I, like I said, I don’t think anybody’s complaining, uh, and nobody, I mean, the full site editing and the other features of 5.9, they’re exciting. And I think people can’t wait to check them out, but now what’s one more month going to do
Speaker 2 00:26:43 Well. I mean, one of the big issues that I’m experiencing, um, at Canberra is getting engaged resources over the holiday season to make movement on things. Yeah. The
Speaker 1 00:26:55 Big question. Oh
Speaker 2 00:26:57 Man. Oh man. I think the big question mark for WordPress then is, you know, let’s assume no, one’s going to do anything meaningful in December for WordPress five dot nine. Is those, are those twenty-five days in January enough to make that meaningful progress to put the release together, they assume. Yes. But I would still be interested to see kind of what the volunteer, or even the like corporate sponsored hours in terms of development for WordPress 5 99 looks like over the course of like, you know, right now, basically through the end of the year.
Speaker 1 00:27:31 Yeah. They do say that the, uh, the blockers that have been identified in the list have already been merged, uh, last week and they’re no longer blockers. So that’s good to know. So now they can just work on bug fixes, hammering some things out, and hopefully having enough time to, to take care of everything before the release in January. And now’s a good time to, uh, the test I’ve actually installed the WordPress beta testing plugin. And I have it set up to be, uh, I think it’s unlikely. So I dunno if something breaks, I’ll let you all know.
Speaker 1 00:28:08 The state of the word is happening. It’s happening December 14th, 2021, between five and 7:00 PM Eastern standard time. At first, I thought it was going to be live-streamed only, but it turns out that automatic has a satellite office in New York city that I didn’t know about. I haven’t kept up on the various satellite offices that automatic has, but it makes sense for them to have one in New York city. That’s also where, uh, Matt has a, uh, a place to stay. He’s, he’s got a home there in New York city and you can actually request a seat to, to go there and participate in seam, deliver the state of the word in person. Uh, so seats are limited to 50 attendees. You need to fill out the request a seat by Sunday, November 28th, not all requests will receive, uh, due to venue capacity, uh, but everyone will receive confirmation or some community, some form of communication on Tuesday, November 30th.
Speaker 1 00:29:10 And if you’re planning on attending this event in person, you’re going to be asked to show your COVID vaccination card at the venue entrance. So, uh, be sure you have that on your person if you, uh, if you go there, but, uh, you can still send in a question if you want. There’s a, there’s a form. You can submit a question during the Q and a portion of the, of the events. I don’t know. That’s pretty cool. At least we’ll be able to see or, or actually hear people clapping maybe during a state of the word. Oh, that’s nice. And then to be able to open that up, and I imagine we’ll have a little after party or get together at the, at the auto medical office in New York city after the event.
Speaker 2 00:29:49 So, you know, who is going one of the people or two of the people that got, uh, some of those seats include Tofor. Oh, really? Yeah. I think tofa and his wife were going,
Speaker 1 00:29:59 Oh, how about that? Nice. Um, I am not going, actually, I wasn’t even invited. I heard that some people get invited to go. They actually, uh, uh, again, invited to go in person and, uh, you know, I wasn’t one of them, I’m sorry, I’m just washed up, man. Uh, but, uh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t go anyways. I’m I’m not, uh, I’m not a one to fly or drive to New York city. That’s absolutely something I don’t want to do. So I’ll just sit here in my nice comfy little home drink, a bottle of water pet smokey, and what to say to the word on my, on my laptop, which I think is what a lot of people would do.
Speaker 2 00:30:42 I hope so. I mean, 50 seats is not a lot, so it’s a pretty exclusive group of people that’ll be there. Um, but I do think that it does bring some kind of energy to the whole presentation to have.
Speaker 1 00:30:52 I just have people there it’s always a much different, did you, uh, I don’t know if you did this, but during last year during COVID, did you ever watch any of the episodes of the prices right
Speaker 2 00:31:03 Now? I didn’t.
Speaker 1 00:31:05 I watched episodes of the prices, right? And I’ve, I’ve determined. You’ve got to have an audience. You’ve got to have people screaming numbers at you, screaming dollar amounts, openness, this show suck without the audience. I mean, drew carries a fantastic host and they all did a great job, but not having that audience interaction. And just having that, hearing the, uh, the recording of people applauding and whatnot, it sought. So having an audience is a huge difference maker, especially sports venues, same thing. No, and they haven’t an audience there. It kind of sucked, but, but actually, but, but now that we have all the people there and now you hear all the cheering and now there’s fights, you know, there’s fights back in the states. Yeah. All right. So we’ll end this show on a bit of a, uh, kind of making me grumpy, but I’ve, I’ve seen conversations within the past week or so.
Speaker 1 00:31:54 And, you know, Carl Hancock brought this up actually, as we’ve just been talking about this on Twitter, you know, Carl, and I’m just talking about pricing and FOMO deals. And if you go to a certain website, they, they hit you with these, uh, sale prices. And sometimes they’re not even a, the sale price, there’s just a lot of, uh, bad mojo going around with the WordPress companies and how they present prices in their sales. And the question that was brought up was that these black Friday deals that so many WordPress businesses are participating in, are they actually deals? So, um, uh, gentlemen, uh, man, I, uh, I, his, uh, I forget his name off the top of my head, but he does WP raccoon.com. And, uh, he’s actually part of a visual composer team and cloud ways, but he actually maintains, uh, a WordPress. He’s got a plugin pricing document that he’s been maintaining now for the past few months.
Speaker 1 00:32:58 And he’s been sharing updates about it on the WordPress for business Facebook group. So he was actually in a prime position to be able to look at the prices he has in his document and compare them to the black Friday deals. And it turns out that a lot of companies are, uh, giving you special offers when it doesn’t really appear that they’re actually that special when you compare the before and after, uh, discount prices when black Friday is concerned. And he also discovered that there were companies that increased their prices earlier on in the month of November and then provided a black Friday deal. But at the end, it really wasn’t a deal. So this is just something that’s going on. I wanted to bring this up because I know we talk about, if you run into business, we talked about user trust, right? You want users is trust you in this to me, if you raising prices, that’s not a problem.
Speaker 1 00:33:52 I don’t think anybody will complain or anybody will say raising prices. That’s your prerogative. As a business, you raise prices when you see fit and that’s what you do. But if you’re going to raise prices, let’s say at the beginning of November and in knowingly participate in black Friday with a deal that doesn’t even seem like a deal or it’s, you’re not even saving as much money as you would, if you would have bought it without the black Friday or early in the month, it just appears shady. It, it appears knownly on trustworthy. Uh, and I think timing is a big deal here when it comes to raising prices in November and in participating in black Friday, it’s just, it rubs me the wrong way. I don’t, I, you know, people were bringing up that in some countries, this kind of crap is illegal. Like if a company has to stick with a certain price for like 28 days before they could do anything with it and whatnot, I think that’s a thing in some of these other countries.
Speaker 2 00:34:46 So, I mean, just to play devil’s advocate because you know, I like doing that.
Speaker 1 00:34:51 Um, you have cute horns.
Speaker 2 00:34:55 I mean, what I like, why does anyone feel like they like, so if you don’t like the pricing, or if you don’t like the deal, why do you get to it? Like, you can comment on it, but like, why do you get to tell them what they can and can’t do what their pricing don’t you live in America, the land of freedom.
Speaker 1 00:35:09 I, I can’t tell, I can’t force them to do whatever, but I, I think, uh,
Speaker 2 00:35:16 Does it feel shady to you? Like what, what are, what are they specifically doing to you that makes it shady? Are they like opening their cloak and the back alley going, Hey, man, I got this deal for you
Speaker 1 00:35:27 Black Friday to me. Well, w what has, why has it become in, uh, in the commercialization of, of, of, of America, uh, it’s a day for customers to feel like they’re getting the best deal of the year. And it’s an opportunity for, for companies before the end of the year to go into the black, instead of the red, that’s what the whole black Friday thing is all about. But to do that in a way to actually look into it and see that, well, this ain’t a deal. What the hell is this? You know, this isn’t, I waited all year for this,
Speaker 2 00:36:00 But here’s the funny part about that, right? So you said like black Fridays about companies getting into the black, and then you, you counter like, compare that to companies, giving deals to customers. It’s really about corporate greed, right? It’s it’s not about making sure that you, the customer happy it’s about making sure the company makes as much money as possible so that they can keep in business and do cool things for another year. So like, you’re, you’re assuming that you deserve the best prices or that like consumers deserve the best prices. When the actual, like focus of the day is about making sure the company makes as much money as possible.
Speaker 1 00:36:38 Um, I’m not, I’m not assuming I’m expecting, it’s my expectation that today’s that the deal I get this black Friday deal is the best deal and the best price I’m going to get on this product for the entire
Speaker 2 00:36:50 A year. But it might be the best one that you’re going to get until the next black Friday next year, right? Like if they’ve raised their prices and now they’ve lowered, lowered them arbitrarily for this single day back to what they did before. If they keep those higher prices for the rest of the year, then they didn’t really do anything shady. They just raise their prices and then reduce them back to what they were temporarily. So that you had one last crack at getting the old price before they raise it permanently.
Speaker 1 00:37:18 I was looking at some of these sites that are mentioned in this list, and I was checking out their pricing pages. I can’t tell you heads or tails. What the hell the original price is on these things anymore. They’ve got, they’ve got crossed out prices. They’ve got sale prices. They’ve got black Friday FOMO. You’re going to miss out. If you don’t act now prices. I have no idea what the hell the original price is on the sink.
Speaker 2 00:37:40 And then, and then the funny part is, you know, is that
Speaker 1 00:37:42 Intended?
Speaker 2 00:37:43 Yes, it is price. Confusion has completely intended, um, because what they want you to do is
Speaker 1 00:37:50 They want to psychologically get me to give them money. And they want me to fear of missing out that they want me to think that this is the best it’s going to be, that now is the time. And you better don’t add biggest plan.
Speaker 2 00:38:02 Yeah. Better. You better pick the biggest thing. Cause otherwise you’re not getting the best deal.
Speaker 1 00:38:09 Yeah. But, and by the way, speaking of that, of the, of the price and pages, I did see the cheapest, the cheapest plan that they had exact same price, no sale, no nothing, but for all the other tiers, you can see what you apparently you could save a little bit of money
Speaker 2 00:38:23 And the joke of this whole
Speaker 1 00:38:24 Thing I want to give away for free.
Speaker 2 00:38:26 Th the joke of this whole thing for me is, so what happens on Monday
Speaker 1 00:38:34 Cyber Monday let’s raise prices.
Speaker 2 00:38:38 So the joke is cyber Monday, right? And this whole idea that, oh, okay, you buy all your digital stuff on Monday about your physical stuff on Friday.
Speaker 1 00:38:44 That’s the way it was supposed to be, but what
Speaker 2 00:38:47 Ended up happening? So now now what we receive is just twice as many bloody emails about sales. Yeah. It’s just,
Speaker 1 00:38:53 Oh, annoying. And on top of that, black Friday has turned into black November. I know.
Speaker 2 00:38:57 I know. And it just keeps getting longer. Doesn’t it? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:39:01 And I just, I don’t know. I’m, like I said, on Twitter, I’m thankful that I’m in a position to where black Friday means nothing to me. I, I’m not, uh, I’m not out there looking for a black Friday deal on a TV, on a WordPress plugin on hosting or anything of that nature. It just another day for me. And I just get to sit back and drink a drink of coffee and not have to worry about traffic. I know I have a few times in my life I’ve gone out just to do it just for fun, not really to go shopping, but just to experience it. And it is an experience to go out on black Friday shopping. It’s, uh, most of the time it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad being in a home Depot at 5:00 AM and people are just crashing into you, a card skeet and other goods. That’s something I’m glad I actually got to witness that one time going inside the mall at 3:00 AM. That was fun. But other than that, you know, I just, black Friday is a thing I hope that I don’t have to mess with. But, uh, yeah, I don’t know. It’s just, um, I think it’s a note ticket is that, you know, maybe we just in the back of your head just wonder, are you really getting the best deal? I mean, best deal at that time, maybe.
Speaker 2 00:40:10 So I’m curious, have you at, at no point you thought, Hm, should I run a WVU mainline black Friday deal for subscriptions or advertising or anything?
Speaker 1 00:40:22 Well, I, it, my smart ass self was going to run a black Friday, uh, special this week where, uh, people save no money. It was just the same price.
Speaker 2 00:40:33 Well, at least you didn’t raise prices, right? Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:40:35 Exactly. Now I got that going for me. I don’t know. I thought about it. I thought maybe doing a black Friday, but no, Nope. Not going to do it
Speaker 2 00:40:44 Just interesting. Ah,
Speaker 1 00:40:46 Any, any, any black Friday deals going on over there at press tightened?
Speaker 2 00:40:50 No, I mean, we’re so bad at that kind of stuff. Uh, we don’t do like marketing or special promos or anything like that. I mean, at one point for like a couple of years back, like three years back, I thought, I think that we were going to like, try to do like a low value offer to try to like build trust and confidence by like, and it was going to be like, not just, it, wasn’t going to be like a specific day around that, that I was going to be just a, long-term like, here’s our low price offer. So you can kind of get to know us and see if we’re we’re half decent. Um, and we ended up like canceling it after like three months because all the people that it was attracting were not really the people that would be interested in.
Speaker 1 00:41:28 Yes. Well, let me ask you this. If, if a company has a product of service, it’s on sale, but it’s on sale for the entire year is, seems isn’t really a sale or is that the price?
Speaker 2 00:41:39 Well, so it becomes, it’s a marketing thing, right? So they’re hoping that you haven’t seen their sale price before, and they’d probably put like a cookie on your computer. So like, you know, you see those repeating countdowns, right? If you clear out your cache and cookies and you go back to a website and the countdown’s now like 10 days until the sale is over and you clear your cookies like two days later, and it’s like 10 days until the sale is over. I mean, they do that on purpose to try to get that scarcity mindset going so that you’re willing to like pull the trigger without actually kind of thinking through your purchasing decisions. I mean, all this stuff is like marketing 1 0 1. And so when I say,
Speaker 1 00:42:10 I know it must, I must, it must work because all of these websites are doing the damn thing. Like I went to, uh, just before the show, I went to two websites, uh, to view the pricing pages. And they were hitting me with FOMO. I’ve got two days and so many hours to take advantage of this offered. And when I clicked on the X or was getting near the exit on the tab, it gave me a big banner saying, no, don’t go. And then in the bottom left hand corner, it was telling me people’s names and locations of people who bought this and that, uh, in the right hand corner, I’ve got, um, some chat support reps saying, Hey, uh, you interested arrested now? Well, how can we help you spend your money here? I mean, that was, I was bombarded, man. I was in a psychological nightmare on that website.
Speaker 2 00:42:53 And you have to ask yourself, right? Like, is it really like for certain things, is it really valuable for them to do this? Like, are they truly making enough money to like warrant this kind of hard sell or this kind of like emotional manipulation? Like if they’re making like 30 bucks off of me, like, is that really enough to be doing this and potentially like annoying however many other people that they could have potentially sold to like, just the whole thing is strange to me. I don’t, I don’t understand marketing the same way as, as I think a lot of other companies do.
Speaker 1 00:43:26 And, you know, and I’ll ask you, and this is something Carl Hancock was talking about that the FOMO that I was mentioning, the, the, the, you visit a website and boom, it shows if you don’t purchase within a certain amount of time, you know, you can’t get access to this price or that deal. Like, what do you think about that? That’s, that’s totally tapping into the, the, the mindset of consumers and it’s art of most of the time it’s artificial FOMO.
Speaker 2 00:43:49 Yeah, for sure. But I mean, it’s, it’s using the exact same, like it’s
Speaker 1 00:43:55 Kind of crappy illegal
Speaker 2 00:43:56 And well, probably Carl, Carl points this out, but the funny part is like, if you go to gravity forms right now, and you look at their black Friday page, they have a countdown on their website as well. Now, you know, it’s not going to reset magically and it’s not going to be this permit price discount and this like trickery or, or like kind of, you know, gray hat marketing, emotional
Speaker 1 00:44:16 Manipulation,
Speaker 2 00:44:18 Uh, six days, 16 hours, 11 minutes,
Speaker 1 00:44:21 The first black Friday week or something.
Speaker 2 00:44:25 Yeah, exactly. So like the sales are getting longer and longer. These opportunities are there. Everyone’s using these countdown timers, whether or not they’re real countdown timers, like everyone’s doing this and they
Speaker 1 00:44:36 Just a consumer at the end of the day with all this going on, does the consumer actually, when are they getting the better end of the stick on all this?
Speaker 2 00:44:44 I mean, sometimes, sometimes they are actually kind of shoots themselves in the, in the foot a little bit, because if I’m, if I see this sale, right, the elite version of gravity forms is $129 American right now, normally it’s $259 when this sale is done. If I didn’t pull the trigger for whatever reason, maybe I didn’t have money in my bank account until January 1st kind of thing right now come January 1st. I’m going to go, well, I’m going to wait until they run another sale, right? Like they’ve now devalued their product in my mind to the point where I’m going to wait until it’s like around that same price again, before I purchased. And I may might forget about it in the interim and never purchase the elite version of gravity forms because I’m waiting for this magical sale to happen again. And it might never happen again.
Speaker 1 00:45:26 And guess what, you, you, you didn’t read the post that they published back in November saying at the beginning of the new year, we’re going to raise price,
Speaker 2 00:45:33 Right. And so then, and then it’s even worse right now. I’m now I’m really kicking myself and I’m also going, well, I’m not going to pay 2 89 or whatever the heck the new price is. I’m definitely going to wait for a sale now. So these, these kinds of games, especially in terms of software, you have to be very careful of, um, when I used to sell advertising on, um, uh, splash press media’s websites, way back in the day is a blogging. That’s a name I know. Right. Um, you know, it was, it was one of those funny things where depending on the client, like I, I went out and I sent all these emails to these different businesses that I knew advertised on blogs in like the WordPress space or in the technology space. And they wouldn’t even talk to me until I added another zero on the end of the price.
Speaker 2 00:46:14 Right. Because it was all about the value that I was presenting and not about the true value of what I was offering. Um, because value is a perception, right? It’s what, what is the most amount of money that someone’s willing to pay? So when you put something in front of someone for 200 bucks, or you put something in front of someone for $2,000, it’s a very different value proposition that they assume it’s not, it’s not necessarily a tangible, like, understandable thing. Is gravity forms worth $300? Is it worth $600? Is it worth a thousand dollars? I think it probably is. Is it worth $129? Heck yeah, man, you guys should be like clicking buy an hour on that all day long. But like, they, they, they, like, I don’t even know that they know what their maximum price actually is or what that turn is.
Speaker 1 00:46:57 Yeah. I mean, how many of us, even as individuals actually know what our value is?
Speaker 2 00:47:02 Oh, no, I, yeah, I agree. But we don’t necessarily have the same sales data. Right. Like you and I are not selling ourselves every day where we can kind of start to build an understanding of our value in that, in, in the wider marketplace. So
Speaker 1 00:47:14 Yeah, I mean, when I was, when I was coming up with like prices on member, subscription memberships and stuff like that, advertising for WP mainline, I was talking to my good buddy, Bob WP, Bob done do the woo. Uh, yes, I got one in there. I was talking to have any sent man just experiment. He said, just put, put the prices of what you need, what you feel you need, you can get by, you can make a living not, and just base it on that and then experiment. And he says, you know, the, the worst thing that can happen is, you know, you just have to change your prices. So I I’ve been kind of sticking with that. And it’s, it’s worked so far and, uh, to wrap up the show, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re so hyped on Crowdy forums. You know why it is because back in 2009 at work camp Chicago, they bought you, they should, they gave you a preview of what it was and hook line and sinker, baby.
Speaker 1 00:47:59 They got you. And I only, and I, and I choke, I can’t, I bring that up because last night and Twitter, uh, some folks, we started talking about a word camp, Dallas, the first word camp Dallas, which was in preschool, Texas, where Matt Malawi showed up on a Saturday as he just, he just had his wisdom teeth pulled, but that was my first ever work camp. And then we’re somehow we got up to work camp Chicago in 2009 and we’re Chicago 2009 was a big deal because that’s when Matt Mullenweg announced commercial, uh, commercial themes would be added to the WordPress team directory if they were a hundred percent GPL, which then led into all of the discussions with Brian Garner and Jason Schuler and Corey Miller of I themes and a bunch of other theme shops with Matt, mulloway saying, well, what does that mean?
Speaker 1 00:48:44 What does it mean to be a hundred percent GPO? Can we do this? Can we do that? And, uh, so that was a big deal, but it was also a big deal. And there are pictures of this in the racket genius flicker account. And, uh, I have a few on my account, I believe where you can actually see Carl Hancock and the rocket genius team showcasing gravity forms to Matt Mullenweg, mark gauche, uh, and some other folks, including, uh, Malcolm Peralta, who at the time was a big boy with curly hair know. And, uh, you know, he got to see it firsthand. And that was a really cool cause I remember those days and I said, man, I looked at it and I looked at the interface. I said, you guys nailed it. This is going to be a big deal. This is going to be a popular product. And, um, you know, I’d take no credit and being right, but, but, but Hey, it has served them well over the years and it continues to be one of the top form solutions and WordPress. And uh, at one point you actually got to work for refugees.
Speaker 2 00:49:41 I did, yeah. For like two years.
Speaker 1 00:49:43 It was great. But do you remember, do you remember that event where camp Chicago, any, any fond memories of that event? Um, I mean that was bounce back in the beef five media days.
Speaker 2 00:49:53 Geez. Yeah. I, uh, you know, I didn’t really get to attend many word camps in my career. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve, I’ve been very much kind of, uh, uh, heads down doing my work kind of WordPress user or WordPress, whatever. Um, but that was, that was certainly an event for the times. And, uh, you know, I’m so glad I was there because I think that really did end up kind of putting me as a front runner for being, you know, part of their, uh, customer support team and helping out with some early marketing and stuff like that. And I just, uh, I feel so grateful that, you know, I attended that event and, uh, yeah, I remember there was, there was so many, like I look back at the pictures and I’m like, I wonder what happened to this person in that person? Cause like the, you know, the, the big names in WordPress at the time who have gone off and done other things. And so it’s, it’s always interesting to kind of go back and look at it
Speaker 1 00:50:47 Like Mika Baldwin, I got a picture of him. He was there. He was, he was a, he was a big deal at the time. And, uh, you know, I was looking at pictures of Corey Miller and bred Williams and we looked like kids 2009. And me, I looked like, uh, me of today looked like I ate 2000 meat 2009. I mean, I don’t know what happened, man. The years of not kind to me. Yeah. It’s all Cove it’s fought, but man we’re camps 2009, 2010, big time, I still got a picture of the, of the screenshot on the projector. It said commercial, GPO themes on a directory or whatnot. Like did the announcement, man, that was, that was a big deal. And then that launched to all the GPO debates and arguments and things of 2010, 2011, those were good times, easy page views, GPL.
Speaker 1 00:51:42 That’s what it turned out to be. Anyways. It was kind of cool looking back on that I’m like the WordPress historian for some of those times and medians and things I’ve been able to take advantage of. So it’s always, always fun for me to, to bring all that stuff up and reminisce. Um, so there you go. And before we go, um, it’s Thanksgiving for me. So let me say, let’s see, what am I thankful for? I’m thankful for my wife, I’m thankful for smoky and thankful for medication that works for anxiety attacks. I’m thankful for all of the people out there who check up on me on a regular basis on Twitter. And, uh, so on the various social media, I’m thankful for Malcolm for being able to put up with me and my jokes and co-hosting the show with me on a weekly basis. And, uh, what else am I am thankful for WordPress and its community and everyone who is, uh, been able to financially support me or just support me in general. Thank you very much. And I’m thankful for what else am I thankful for? Oh, heated car seats. Those things are awesome.
Speaker 1 00:52:47 Do you ever have a heated car seat? Oh my God dude. It’s so nice. I live in Canada.
Speaker 2 00:52:51 You kind of have to,
Speaker 1 00:52:54 And I know your Thanksgiving was in is, uh, was a month ago, but, uh, I don’t think I ever asked you what you were thankful for. Well, off the top of your head for my wife. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:53:10 We have a wonderful house with a wonderful dog. My mom lives with us and uh, she takes the lion’s share of cooking dinners for us that are just absolutely amazing. I mean, otherwise we’d really be just kind eating a lot of like frozen. Um,
Speaker 1 00:53:23 They spent so much time to work and everything else have work, food cooking. I mean, you gotta, you gotta have, you gotta have time.
Speaker 2 00:53:29 So the, the support that we get is amazing, um, where we live right now, my, my, my jobs like, uh, press Titan and Cambra creative, and the people there have been so supportive. Um, you know, the, the societal change, my, you know, the biggest thing I’m thankful for actually this year is the societal change that we’re seeing in terms of being able to talk about mental health. Um, you know, I never thought as a teenager, that the world that we lived in would get to the point where we could talk about this stuff without being shamed for it, or just told to like, you know, just think positive. And so I’m, I’m most thankful for that change, um, because it’s meant a lot to me and I hope it has meant a lot to you as well.
Speaker 1 00:54:10 Yeah. It was kind of weird when I made the announcement on Twitter and I apologized and I said, this is what happened. You know, I had quite a few people liking that tweet and telling me, Hey, that was really, um, uh, strong or it was really, um, what’s the word I’m looking for a brief. It was really brave of you for, to come on and to say that. And I said, it doesn’t even feel brave to me. I’m just telling you what happened. No, but I don’t know for a lot of other people, I guess they didn’t, they, I guess they don’t expect people to just come out and say, this is what happened and, and attack and no show this, uh, I don’t know. You know, that’s just, I mean, that’s just what happened. So, but if it helps others, if it inspires others or if it makes others feel as though they can say these things and, you know, I guess that’s a positive thing. Yep. So with that, that’s going to do it for this Turkey edition of, uh, the WP and mainline podcast. You can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes on WP mainline.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at Jeffrey, J E F F R zero and Malcolm, sir.
Speaker 2 00:55:21 Uh, you can find me at find purpose on Twitter and if you need anything, you can always find me through press titan.com or Canberra creative.
Speaker 1 00:55:29 So everybody have a safe, enjoyable holidays, uh, sucks from Malcolm. He already had his, so it’s our turn. But think of it this way, Malcolm you’ll have at least three or four, maybe five days of quietness from the us side of things, which, you know, maybe you’ll appreciate. We’ll all be well, we’ll all be quiet for the next few days, maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:55:53 Uh that’s. I mean, it is what it is. I’ll make it work.
Speaker 1 00:55:58 All right, everybody, we’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long everybody

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 19 of the WP mainline podcast for Friday, November 12th, 2021. I’m your host, Jeff Chandler joined by my favorite Canadian Malcolm Perotti and we have a third special guest, I mean, extra special, like do the woo type of special. We’ve got Bob Dunn on the show, Bob, thank you very much for joining us all the way from the west coast. Thank you, Jeff. I knew you just invited me for, you could say that again and again. Well, what can I say, man? I’m addicted to the woo. Yeah, every time I get he’s going to make you sick of your own brand. I’ve I’ve done a fairly good job of, uh, I’ve been trying. I mean, I, by the way, drinking game this episode, every time I say, do the Lou take a drink and we’re about three minutes in and people are already buzzing. So pretty good. We’re making progress.
Speaker 1 00:01:10 Well, anyways, Bob’s joined us here. He’s got a little bit of a news that he’s going to talk about. That’s specifically related to him and his brand. We’ll get to that in a while, but I want to start off the show with the bombshell that was dropped yesterday, and that is GoDaddy has acquired Pagely and, uh, um, no, this is not clickbait. Uh, a lot of people were wondering if, uh, gesture Abel, the co-founder Pagely will was trolling people. This is something he would do. This is up his alley, but it turns out he was naturally people and, uh, people were just blown away. I was blown away. This is shocking on nobody. Nobody saw this coming, unless you were part of the deal. This is a, we’ve had a lot of WordPress acquisitions this year. This one to me is the biggest and most surprising of them all.
Speaker 1 00:01:57 And mostly because of the way Jess started the company, what it’s all about? He’s been touting independence. He’s taken no VC money. It hasn’t been back. There’s no, uh, investor influence. He built it from the ground up, putting the employees and customers first. And he built something that has, uh, turned into, um, something that GoDaddy wants to go to Eddie has seen Paisley’s place in the market space and they want to, they wanted to bring Paisley. Actually. Why don’t I just read the quote? Cause that’s bull, uh, explains this, um, better than I could obviously, but he says, quote, we did things our way in at work. In fact, it works so well that one of the largest internet brands in the world GoDaddy wants us to help them to be more like us. They’ve put their cars and cash on the table and are serious about serving a wider segment of the market with better quality products and top class service to ultimately help more people succeed.
Speaker 1 00:02:57 Uh, so that’s, that’s great news all the way around. I mean, um, go, daddy has changed massively as a company. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that on the show. You know, they’re long gone from the days of Bob Parsons and bronchi, Superbowl ads and things of that nature they’ve completely changed their image and what they’re about and what they stand for in the company. That’s also, you can also, it’s evident in the GoDaddy pro and they’re in the, uh, the services that they offer and the investment they’ve made 11 investments, not only in the WordPress space, through conferences and whatnot, but also the people that are working on WordPress have made a lot of personal investments in the people. And so overall, this is just, it looks like a great deal. And because, uh, Paisley didn’t have any investors. It was, uh, Josh and Sally stable, his wife, uh, they both own a hundred percent of the stock.
Speaker 1 00:03:50 And so when they sold that stock to go daddy, they actually took those funds and distributed them back to all their employees within the company. Uh, even those who had tenure within just a few years, ended up getting, uh, some amount of funds from this. And, uh, what I, what I like most about this is as Josh in his interview, there’s a one hour long interview that Corey Miller did with, uh, Josh dribble right after it was like 15 minutes after he made the announcement. And, and it just says that he was very proud of the fact that not a single investor, not a single one of them got rich. It was all the people who showed up to do the work. And I thought that was fantastic. So great deal all the way around. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to be working closely.
Speaker 1 00:04:33 They’re going to remain, maintain, uh, be a separate entity within GoDaddy. And they’re going to work closely with these skivers team, which is focused on WooCommerce. And they were actually acquired by goatee GoDaddy back in 2020. And what Paisley is going to do is work with sky verge and try and create the best hosted WooCommerce solution in the world. And that’s what they’re going to be doing, uh, for the next few years. So w we’ll have to see how this turns out, but, uh, you know, congrats to the Josh and Sally wonderful people. And it’s, uh, it’s a pretty cool story all around node, the way they built it from the ground up, bootstrapped, it got all of these employees, long-term employees. And that’s just a, it’s a good story all the way around.
Speaker 2 00:05:17 Yeah. My first thought was I thought they were joking, um, at first as well. And then when I dug into it, I was like, holy smokes. This is actually happening. This is pretty crazy. Um, one interesting thing from, uh, Tofor who I work with at Canberra. Uh, he said like, what the heck is automatic doing? Letting go daddy kind of own the WooCommerce hosting space, um, because that’s basically what this deal is going to potentially allow them to do. I mean, GoDaddy probably spent a fair bit of money to make this happen. And like automatic is right now hiring a product marketing manager for commerce solutions for WordPress, VIP. Um, so like, you know, that’s a little more like a drop in the bucket versus this, uh, you know, fire hose that, that GoDaddy just basically purchased out. Right? So, um,
Speaker 1 00:06:04 I mean, automatic doesn’t need to own Paisley or whatever they own who commerce,
Speaker 2 00:06:10 But in terms of like your first choice for hosting for your e-commerce solution, I think, I think this is going to give GoDaddy a huge edge over, uh, automatic slash WordPress, VIP. Um, it’s bringing in a lot of great talent. It’s a deep understanding of how to host it. Um, so they might not necessarily be the company that is developing the software, but I don’t think you’re going to find a, uh, you know, a better, better slash bigger team of experts on that platform.
Speaker 1 00:06:37 And I, I gotta tell you if I’m thinking about hosted WooCommerce, I’m thinking about like the, uh, liquid web, they have a managed WooCommerce, uh, solution. Um, in fact, geez, you know, you know, who has one media temple, I was just looking at them today. You remember media temple GoDaddy acquired media temple like eight years ago or something like that back in 2013. And if you go there that you wouldn’t even know that they’re under the GoDaddy umbrella, but they have managed who commerce hosting. I found that out and actually it’s tied in a GoDaddy pro they’ve got a manageable commerce, but, but I’m not thinking initially WordPress, VIP, that’s not my go-to, I’m not even that doesn’t even cross my mind that that’s where I would go. But I, but I think, you know, that also I’m just an everyday average user. I’m not a maybe fortune 100 fortune 500, 1000 type of company looking for that type of that level of service.
Speaker 2 00:07:34 Yeah. I mean, Bob, what did you think when you saw this?
Speaker 3 00:07:37 You know, initially, and I actually didn’t take it as a joke from Josh because,
Speaker 1 00:07:43 Well, you’re the only one.
Speaker 3 00:07:45 It was, it was too much to be a joke, you know, it was like, okay, this is, I mean, I know Josh. I mean, we all know Josh and this was like pushing the envelope. I thought, oh, I don’t know if he quite come out and say it this way. So initially it was like most, whenever there’s an acquisition, I have two reactions. One is like, oh, I get it right away. This one I had to pause for a minute because yeah. I mean, it’s always that I’m thinking hosting, hosting, you know, I’m thinking of the bigger picture, but then I’ve been in communication a lot with GoDaddy and especially around GoDaddy Pearl. And I know that they have a lot planned for the next year in e-commerce and no specifics, just a generalized statement from them, um, in our different talks. And I, so there was this tickle in my throat, I thought, okay, is this something to do with that?
Speaker 3 00:08:40 Because I just thought of what Paisley’s bringing in as far as hosting. So when I read it that, you know, sky verge, I saw the word sky verge in there. It was like, it clicked for me right away. Okay. I see there’s something going on there because I’ve also talked to the sky verge team. And I know they, you know, obviously they, weren’t going to tell me any details about this, but there was some really big plans for the next year or so that didn’t surprise me in the sense that I’m a little bit different than most people in the WordPress space, because I kind of take acquisitions with a, um, you know, I can take them or leave them because I don’t know. I, I just come in from outside of WordPress and I used to see them all the time in the, you know, other business world outside of the bubble.
Speaker 3 00:09:31 So it’s never a real, nothing ever really surprises me. But I do agree that the conversation I did listen to that this morning with Corey and Josh and boy, a lot of it resonated. I w I was like, this is, this is incredible. I mean, it was really, really good. And yeah, it’s, it, it makes so much sense and I’ve known sky verge team for years and what they, I thought they got to be something bubbling in the back because, you know, you bring in an older extension to GoDaddy, but, you know, and they offer those through the, I think there will commerce manage hosting plan already, but there was so much more, and I knew it wouldn’t just be okay, we’re just going to keep adding extensions here and there. So there’s, there’s a lot bubbling in the background that this all made sense and became very cohesive when I saw it happen.
Speaker 1 00:10:30 And I was listening to that interview and I was listening earlier today. There is a Twitter spaces conversation with members of the other WordPress community that anybody could join. And, uh, uh, David showed up who was a, the marketing director, marketing manager for Pagely. And, uh, one of the reasons, you know, as a company, Pagely reached this point where they wanted to scale, they wanted to do these awesome things, but in order to do them, they needed to really right. They wanted, they needed to hire all these engineers and hire all these people and scale upwards. And they just, they were successful as a company. You know, they, they were profitable, but they just didn’t have the kind of the kind of reach and the ability to, uh, uh, to do what they wanted to do. And also because they were bootstrapped and didn’t have any investor money, uh, they, they didn’t really have a parachute.
Speaker 1 00:11:23 And so they couldn’t really make a decision. And I think Chris Lama, might’ve mentioned this, where if you’re bootstrapped, you, you can’t take on a risk where if it doesn’t pan out, the company fails, it just goes away a disappeared sheet. You can’t, you can’t do that. So by having sort of an entrance plan now, by being part of GoDaddy, now they’re able to make these rapid changes and be able to scale as much as they need to hire as much as they need to and do the things that they, that they really want to do now in the WooCommerce space.
Speaker 2 00:11:55 That all sounds fair to me,
Speaker 1 00:11:57 For sure. And I’ve, I’ve always seen, uh, you know, congrats to Paisley. You know, that he’s always, uh, Josh always had this, the stick of, you know, we’re independent. We’re over here by ourselves. Look, look what I’ve created, investors, you can’t give me any of your money. Cause I don’t want it. I don’t need it. We’re independent. We’re going to stay independent. And, uh, you know, um, now that Paisley has gone to part of their subsidiary of GoDaddy, I can’t think, can you guys think of any other independent WordPress specific kind of hosts that’s out there? I can’t think of any,
Speaker 2 00:12:33 Uh, of a reasonable size. Probably not. I mean, they’re all getting gobbled up by bigger entities. I think, um, all the midsize players. So then you’re left with like the boutique smaller players and then the giants and that’s it, but eventually something else will fill that mid-market but
Speaker 1 00:12:48 So, so, so something like this happens and obviously what’s the next question. When these acquisitions and consolidation, you know, what’s going on in the WordPress world is now, are we turning? Is everything going corporate? What are we supposed to do about this?
Speaker 2 00:13:01 I’m not too concerned about it. There’s always going to be other people out there to try new things. My, my actual next question was how long until he goes and starts another company like how, you know, those things are pretty common too, right? And entrepreneur entrepreneurs and entrepreneur for life. They can’t stop being an entrepreneur just because they go work for a company and the bigger the company, sometimes the faster they feel it. So I think that’ll be an interesting process.
Speaker 1 00:13:26 Um, deed indeed. And, uh, his wife, Sally who co-founded the company, but they, you know, they were talking about this, they got married and three months after they got married, boom, they incorporated the company and they worked on it for 18 years. So Sally is actually stepping back from the company and she’s going to take a long, much needed dessert, a break while Josh is just cranking it. And as he says, going in hot with the Paisley team at GoDaddy, and he’s going to be cranking away and doing things. But, uh, um, and the other thing too, is he mentioned that, you know, there are a million, you know, they’re millionaires and there’s other people in a Paisley company who are well to do now, uh, thanks to the acquisition. But he also mentioned the importance of his, his community, his local community, and the, in the philanthropic opportunities that are not available to him.
Speaker 1 00:14:13 And if you don’t know, Sally’s stable, she’s, she’s very much into giving and, and being part of the community, in fact, PressNomics, which is their, uh, flight ship conference, which is going to be coming back by the way, um, go to GoDaddy actually saw PressNomics as a part of the Paisley brand and who they are and what they stand for suppress Pressonomics will be coming back in some form or fashion. Sally says that she’s already got like a theme for it, but I remember a portion of the ticket sales used to go to like St Jude’s children’s hospital or a charity of her choosing, which was just, uh, which was just awesome, you know? So it’ll be interesting to see, um, if they create like a foundation or what they do philanthropically with the, with the funds that are now available to them. I’m also looking at that, uh, see what happens there.
Speaker 3 00:15:01 Yeah. I think that’d be pretty cool because I could tell just from Josh talking about it, how that could, you know, and who knows, even with Josh, how big of a part tech had played for them down the road and, uh, yeah, it’s, I, I mean, I’ve, you know, in my previous business that I had, we worked with nonprofits for a years and years and I have a deep down love for them. And I, I, I can, that was one part I really could relate to when they said that, that they’re at this position in place now where maybe they can put some of their energies towards that. And I thought that was really cool.
Speaker 1 00:15:39 Yeah. Maybe that’ll scratch the itch for them too, so that they don’t feel the need to kind of run away from the GoDaddy mothership, so to speak. So let’s see, in other news, if you can believe there’s other news after that a WordPress 5.8 0.2 was released earlier this week, this is just a, uh, uh, a bug fix has two bug fixes and one security fix. And that has to do with the, uh, there was an expired certificate that was involved with the code. So they fixed that. Uh, so that’s no longer an issue. My site automatically updated. I’m sure a lot of others out there as well. So if you haven’t updated to 5.8 0.2 yet, definitely put that on your to-do list. And speaking of, uh, families, husband, wife, teams, family, run businesses, there is a new CEO over at Yoast Yoast brother. Uh, boy, you know, should I, should I, should I try to do that
Speaker 3 00:16:39 And how to say his name? Because I know you said it really well, you said I’m not going to screw it up because I haven’t said it verbally forever. So I’m going to let you do it again.
Speaker 1 00:16:52 I got to say the J writers adjacent, they, but I don’t think, I
Speaker 3 00:16:56 Think it’s silent, man. I wish I could remember
Speaker 1 00:16:59 That this dice DevOp boy, this is, um, I’m sorry, man. If I’m butchering, it
Speaker 3 00:17:04 Might be ties
Speaker 1 00:17:05 To just tie ties to fall. Maybe ties, ties to balk. We’ll go with that. He’s going to be Yoast new CEO. And he actually turns out he’s actually Yost to Vaux brother. He was actually employee number four of the company. Um, he stepped away from the company at some point, uh, uh, back in 2012, worked at various other companies for a while. Then he came back and, uh, uh, Yost, a wife who was the, who he’s taken over for her. She’s stepping down and going to be more in a creative role and write about content marketing and SEO and the creative side of things. She’s going to be stepping back working, I think about three days a week and, uh, congrats to her. Cause it, cause this is more of a scaling back thing for her after the, of the company that Goulston her and others have sold to new, full digital. So new CEO over there, uh, congrats to Yoast, uh, things are changing. And, uh, also it’s nice to see someone of, uh, of the family thinking of, I don’t know of any other, not off the top of my head, uh, an announcement like this, where the CEO, uh, position changes amongst relatives, you know, the same family. Usually it’s different people.
Speaker 2 00:18:17 It’s funny, we’ve talked about this before, right? Like if FI’s had been, um, you know, son, then we’d be talking about that like dynastic approach that we were thinking about in previous episodes where we wondered if this kind of thing would happen. And now here it is, except it’s a brother instead of a son. And so I think that’s super cool.
Speaker 3 00:18:36 Yeah. And he’s been really, you know, pretty heavily involved in the background. He’s like one of those people you don’t hear about, but he’s doing a lot. I met him first time I met him was at a WordCamp us and I’m not, I can’t even say which word camp us it was, but I just gotten into the hotel and I’d come down. And I was looking for some familiar faces in the lobby was pretty much MP. And he was sitting over by the bar when these tables and can smile at me. And so we walked over and I could, you know, I didn’t know who he was. And he was a pure joy to get to know this guy. I mean, we were laughing within minutes. People started gal, you know, other people are coming by joining the conversation and I’m real excited to see what he does because he’s, he’s a really smart guy. I’ve, I’ve talked to him many times over the past few, few years and yeah, he’s just, he’s got incredible personality and I think he’s gonna, um, be awesome at it.
Speaker 1 00:19:36 So you know what time it is? Oh, go ahead.
Speaker 2 00:19:39 Oh, I was just going to say one other thing about thighs is, uh, you know, he basically has a background in psychology and I think that’s a really good set of skills for a CEO to have.
Speaker 1 00:19:53 So do you know what time it is? It’s time to pay the bills and you know how we’re going to pay the bills. We’re going to tell this audience just how awesome GoDaddy pro is. Should I do I, should Bob, do I think Bob is experiencing this, but it’s my show. He’s here as a guest, sit back five, relax. Let me handle this. Are you looking to increase your productivity, Bob? One of the tools that helps thousands of what developers and designers do more every day is go to any pro combining site client and project management. GoDaddy pro is an all-in-one solution made by and for web professionals, whether you’re new to web design or looking to grow your business, you’ll find three tools, products, guidance, and support to help you deliver results for your clients. Pay attention, Bob, manage and monitor all your client’s WordPress sites from a single place, no matter where they’re hosted with a single click perform bulk updates, backups, security checks, and more to save time and free up your day by if you’re a busy man, you do a lot. This can help you free up some in your day for more information, visit godaddy.com forward slash pro. Of course we’ll have links to that in the show notes and the GoDaddy pro, and they’re doing all kinds of cool stuff. In fact, I just learned that, um, their manage work, uh, well, commerce hosting, if you get it, you get access to $6,000 worth of WooCommerce extensions available.
Speaker 3 00:21:08 Yeah. SkyBridge SkyBridge has a lot of extensions. I mean, they have a lot that they’ve had out in the marketplace and very popular ones and yeah, you get, you get access to all of their extensions and um, yeah, I, I should have actually brought my ad roll daddy pro too, because they’re, they’re a sponsor my S my site as well. We could have, you know, I could have read mine at the same time and gave them double Levine.
Speaker 1 00:21:34 Uh, man, it would’ve been awesome. No, no. Yeah. That would’ve been awesome. Both of us paying the bills mutual respect go, daddy would have liked it. I’m sure we put this past go to, they would have loved it. Also, speaking of partnerships, not so much acquisitions, a user heavy partnership with post status. And instead of me talking about it, geez, why don’t I have Mr. Do the woo take your drink? Why don’t you explain to us, uh, what’s going on here? Well,
Speaker 3 00:22:06 It was interesting. Cause when I announced it, of course everybody had questions cause it was pretty generalized because it’s kind of just starting out. So it is generalized. It’s not a, you know,
Speaker 1 00:22:17 Did anyone have a status something? Well, you
Speaker 3 00:22:20 Know, I had a couple of questions that people said, well, does this mean they, you own a part of them? They own a part of you. Is this? I said, Nope, this is purely just a support partnership of each other and a, uh, a natural, you know, um, partnership that is obvious. And the reason how it kind of came about is I’ve been referring post status for quite some time through do the whoop because I talked to a lot of people that are either in this space and looking to grow and connect with people or they’re coming from outside of this space and they want to get into the WordPress ecosystem and ultimately we’ll commerce. So I send them a lot of times I say, Hey, you know, go check out post status. You got to listen to the conversation going on there. You get to hear kind of behind the scenes, what businesses are talking about.
Speaker 3 00:23:12 Sometimes it’s a crazy step, but you know, sometimes it’s very insightful stuff too. So it, it seemed to be a natural for us to pull together some kind of resources and Corey and Jonathan, both there said, you know, why should we reinvent the wheel? Why should we cover a WooCommerce and try to cover it? Because it is a Beamer, you know, it’s a, it’s a big part of the ecosystem. Why don’t we have Bob do this? So I, the partnership I’d like to say is organic because I’m not sure, just like I, you know, Jeff knows me and knows how I work. Who knows what will come out of it right now. We’re just looking at ways to share content, to, you know, promote each other cross memberships. Uh, there’s a few other things in place, but you know, as far as there could be possibility of events, there could be all sorts of things that come out of it. And I think it’s just a matter of, you know, I was talking to Corey and I said, Corey, you know, this is really exciting. You’re, you know, I’m able to cover WooCommerce for you. And you’re bringing me into a larger audience where I can be even, you know, seen a bit more than I would just do my site, my community. And he said that, you know, it’s yeah, it was like this, this is going to be the perfect partnership. I mean, it just makes sense.
Speaker 1 00:24:45 Tell you about, I’m proud of you, you know, that I’m real proud of you because you’ve, you’ve done, you’ve been working at this for a long time. I mean, how long have you been covering this niche known as commerce, which is not really initiating,
Speaker 3 00:25:00 So let’s see how so I started in 2007 with WordPress 2010. Bob WP started, I actually was playing around with woo commerce when it came out in 2011 and I started talking more and more about it, I would say around 2014 or so. And I just grew that niche even more. It was like, you know, I saw the, saw the value there. I saw the, you know, I, I’m not some visionary, but I saw where things were possibly going and yeah, just grew it out. And it, you know, this recent change with do the Wu, putting that focus on, it was a point in my life for, I needed to get back more into the community side of things and connect with people because I know a lot of people in this space I’ve have a lot of friendships, partnerships, um, colleagues I’ve worked with.
Speaker 3 00:25:56 And I thought, you know, I w I want to get in there and I want to be able to connect people. And I also want to bring an elevate the Wu builders because there was really, it was a bit fragmented, the WooCommerce developer, that whole bit of that ecosystem. And I thought, well, you know, Hey, I’m going to give it a try. I’m going to try to pull it together and just start introducing and letting people know who’s, who’s doing all this cool stuff. And it doesn’t always have to be the big names, you know, just all these developers that are working hard on, but now products and services. So it’s, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s one of those things in my life, you know, it’s, I’m, I’m, uh, quite a bit older than most people in this space, but oh, come on. You’re not a day over. Yeah. That’s a good spot. Yeah. I’m not a day over 80, you know,
Speaker 1 00:26:46 I can only say that because mob and I are good friends and we make each other laugh. So,
Speaker 3 00:26:51 You know, I, I tell I got a
Speaker 1 00:26:53 Free,
Speaker 3 00:26:54 Yeah, I was gonna say, I got, I tell Jeff to get off my lawn all the time, you know,
Speaker 1 00:26:58 So I’m covered in sand,
Speaker 3 00:27:03 But I’m really excited about this partnership because it’s just going to be, I believe, you know, they’re building a, they’re looking at creating some networks with some, you know, partners that will fill some voids and also bring a more collaborative effort. And we’re, you know, we each own our own thing, but there’s, there’s a lot of stuff we can do to support each other and cross promote and cross share content because we’re, you know, doing so many different kinds of mediums.
Speaker 1 00:27:33 Well, I mean, I mean, look at what post status is. It’s a, I mean, that’s the hangout, that’s the group where you go to that’s the, uh, the business owners, the builders, the agency, people, the WooCommerce people. I mean, you, this is a perfect match for you. And you’re, I think you’re acutely aware of what you’ve been able to carve out for yourself in the WordPress space with this WooCommerce. And, uh, based on what we’ve seen, WooCommerce has nothing to do, but grow and become even more of an influence of e-commerce across the web. And if I’m in post statuses position, and I want to introduce ways of, of Brene w WooCommerce content and connections into my established community, it makes perfect sense to bring somebody in. Who’s already been doing that for years. Hey, Bob been doing this, he knows what’s going on. He’s got connections. Why don’t we just partner up with them? Bam. You know, it’s a, it’s like peanut butter and jelly, man.
Speaker 3 00:28:28 I think I did say that, right. I said, peanut butter, jelly, P and J sandwich and milk. You know, I, that was one of my analogies in the little post I wrote. I think it was, that sounds good. Yeah. And then I said, pineapple on pizza and I thought, well, I’ve taken it too far. I’m going to freak out a lot of people that, so,
Speaker 1 00:28:46 Because that is not doing the Wu right there, although I like on apple and pizza, speaking of doing the womb, I’ll come with Kimber creative or in your experience with press Titan. I know we’ve talked about like Shopify and some experience over with e-commerce. Um, uh, well, what are your thoughts so far on woo commerce? And maybe it may be its future, you know, uh, do you do the woo
Speaker 2 00:29:09 Uh, here and there. I mean, we’ll come versus, you know, I like to stay informed on what’s happening and it makes it easy when someone’s already kind of curating all that information for me. So I definitely appreciate that. Um, but, uh, a lot of what we do in terms of e-commerce stuff has been relatively simplistic. Um, you know, it’s a store with a couple of products, maybe some coupons and things like that. I think the biggest store that I manage and WooCommerce has maybe like 200 products, um, and it’s all like downloadable products. And then a lot of the stores that I work with are all, uh, you know, connected to like print on demand services or things like that. Um, but overall, I mean, you know what, commerce is fine, but you know, as soon as you get into the woo commerce world, it’s not even really WordPress anymore. I mean, it has its own set of like plugins that extend the features of it. Like, you know, you use some of the features of WordPress, but WooCommerce is really its own beast with its own kind of community, its own kind of everything. So, um, I, I, you know, I don’t think about them necessarily being the same, even though we’ll commerce is supposed to just be a plugin for WordPress.
Speaker 1 00:30:18 Oh, it’s so much more.
Speaker 3 00:30:20 Yeah. And I, you know what I’ve done with the sh um, podcasts more and more, and even with the site is I put myself in the shoes of the developer, anybody building stuff. And I said, you know, I have to help them understand that they need to keep on top of WordPress. So you can, like, you were just saying, they can’t just stay in the Wu bubble, you know, be over there and think everything’s going good if they don’t, you know, ride the wave of everything that’s going on with WordPress. So I try to bring in people from WordPress core and people talking more, Hey, some of our shows, we don’t even hardly talk about WooCommerce, but it’s important for them to understand because heck you know, um, moose sits on top of WordPress. So there’s that I don’t want to say disconnect, but I’m hoping with some of them it’s like, you know, pay attention to both because both of these, you know, WordPress is moving at a fast pace right now. And you know, if you’re going to be doing commerce or doing the Wu or, or whatever, you know, you, you need to make sure that’s just as much of a priority as your, your focus on WooCommerce.
Speaker 1 00:31:37 Is there anybody else out there? You know, somebody recently told me, they said, I can’t think of WordPress without thinking of Jeff Rowe. And I took, that’s a compliment. I, I was very honored by that. And I think you absolutely could be the guy who I can’t think of who commerce without thinking about Bob Dunn and do the will, but mostly for the, do the work. I mean, it’s so memorable. I’m a champion of that. Um, that’s like one of the best things you could have ever created, but is there anybody else like you out there too, who covers, who commerce, like you do E commerce specific people,
Speaker 3 00:32:11 You know, there’s people that everybody touches on BU and some touch on. Yeah. And I think it’s, I don’t want to phrase it in this way, but it’s kind of like, you know, over the last couple of years, everybody’s jumping more on the bandwagon, boxcar and yeah. And you know, they’re, they’re really, I mean, it’s like, Hey, you know, we got to start talking about this, cause this is the future. And everybody’s feeling like, you know, I mean, people are suddenly having to start to build sites with WooCommerce because our clients are on need to move online or they, you know, they may find another option. But yeah, there’s not anybody that, except for the builders, a lot of the people that are, you know, really niched down, either in move products or building moves sites, there’s not a lot of anyone that’s just as focused and you know, some people, I mean, people thought I was crazy when I branded myself Bob WP, it’s like, are you, do you really want to do that? And I’m like, Hey, you know, it, it works for me. And it’s been a godsend for me for, you know, over a decade. And the same thing with this, I had some people questioned me. Do you really want to just focus on this? And I said, well, you know where I’m at in my life. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. And I’m one to kind of ride the wave and change with whatever changes, you know, I’m not
Speaker 1 00:33:44 Going to change log, change, log a mile long if ever.
Speaker 3 00:33:48 And I don’t, you know, I mean, I, I feel for any changes with WordPress core, anything for that affects Wu builders because they got these products, these services that directly affects I’m fortunate because I can change with whatever it needs to be changed. You know, I’m, I’m just putting the word out and helping people get them selves noticed in the community. And, you know, no matter what twist or turn move commerce takes, I just, I bred right along with it.
Speaker 1 00:34:19 Uh, speaking of changes, did you happen to catch the article written by Justin tail equity pretty much gave an update on the status of WooCommerce and blacks and black themes and full site editing and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 00:34:29 You know, I didn’t, that’s weird. I am surprised I didn’t see that.
Speaker 1 00:34:33 Uh, geez, I’m sorry to put you on the spotlight that you, now, this is the guy who covers everything wound. How well
Speaker 3 00:34:41 Know I probably saw it. It’s maybe if I look at my bookmarks, you know, it’s, I got it
Speaker 1 00:34:47 Too many of them, the gist of the article. And it was a great article by the way, um, is that Justin talked with some folks behind WooCommerce and pretty much got a status update on what they were working on in terms of blacks and black themes. And they were talking about how, you know, will commerce. They can’t just go in Willy nilly that basically there about a year, year and a half away from actually having, let’s say a full site editing theme, or really implementing blocks or doing things with w with themes and WooCommerce, because there’s a lot of things that they have to take care of or change or implement into eCommerce for everything to work so well. So while a lot of the WordPress side of things, WordPress 5.9 December, there’s already about 27 themes on the directory that could take advantage of full site editing when it comes to woo commerce. Uh, there’s not going to be any full editing, specific themes out of the gate. Uh, at least not officially from WooCommerce. And if I remember, I think they also said some sort of news, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but if, you know, did they mention that they’re going to officially retire the storefront theme, which I think is the default theme and will commerce,
Speaker 3 00:35:54 You know, I don’t remember hearing that, but yeah, you could be, maybe you dream it, you’d say, do the Wu too many times during the day, you know, you’re off in another world.
Speaker 3 00:36:07 Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because we’ve been one of the parts of the podcasts that I’m kind of proud of is we’ve been at least once a month bringing in somebody from core talking. And sometimes it’s a marketplace person. We’ve had, um, a couple of people come in and talk about blocks because when I was first thinking of this idea, one of the things that people were telling me all the time is, Hey, you know, who are the people behind WooCommerce? They’re never out there talking about anything. You know, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but they just felt like they weren’t, you know, we’d like to hear from them directly. So I bring in these every month I bring somebody in that really opens up and very honest, and they have, uh, uh, you know, we have a couple of co-hosts or a panel that asks them questions and drill them on things. And, uh, it’s, it’s quite educational. So they’ve, we’ve had a lot of talk around the blocks. We’ve had a lot of talk around the marketplace, LA you know, stuff, and we’re going to be having Paul this month, come in. It does CEO. Woo commerce. He’s going to come in and talk a little bit about looking at this past year and kind of what’s coming up in the next year.
Speaker 1 00:37:18 No, it’s fun about doing interviews like that with those types of people, is that someone like you monitors the space and you’re probably reading comments, you’re probably reading reviews and you can kind of, you know, on Twitter, you can get a pulse for what people were feeling and what people were thinking. And being able to take that information as maybe a casual user or a developer or a builder, and be able to, to ask the people directly who may be, may be in charge of those things, or have a means of getting those things, those concerns that you have noticed to the right people that that’s like one of the funnest part of doing those types of interviews.
Speaker 3 00:37:53 Exactly. Yep.
Speaker 1 00:37:56 Um, so before you get to this last topic, which is, uh, kind of a random thing I wanted to talk about, cause there’s time you, you recently underwent a big rebranding. I mean, you really you’re really doing the wheel now. I mean, it is ramped up and, uh, for people check it out, it’s do the woo IO for the domain. And you worked with, uh, was it maintained? What the studios.
Speaker 3 00:38:19 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That’s the first time I’ve ever hired a, um, anybody to ever design one of my websites ever. Wow. Yeah. So it was a learning experience for me. It was a great experience, but it was, you know, I, and I, I don’t need to, you know, there’s, I wrote a couple of posts on it, so people can go read those. But when I had the opportunity to do this, I, I was frozen because I thought, man, I know a lot of agencies, how do I choose one? You know, I was just, I, I didn’t even know where to start, because again, I’ve been doing my own sites, you know, putting them together my needs, but I, I needed somebody to come in and bring in a fresh perspective because this really wasn’t the brand of Bob WP anymore. This is a brand to do the boot and, and that is one of the reasons and it turned out, um, I couldn’t have wished for anything better.
Speaker 1 00:39:18 No, it’s awesome. This is the dude that will batch car
Speaker 3 00:39:20 On Adobe pay mainland. One of those things about your rebrand. It’s like a man who has a box car. You know, I, I bought a lot of advertising in over 30 years of running a business and I’ve never had my own box car. So this is like, this is like one of those, um, how, what is this? This is my bucket list. You know, car knocked off there, you know, it’s yours, man.
Speaker 1 00:39:46 You could use it for whatever you want anyway. So what would you, uh, what would you judge you a grade yourself in terms of being a client for maintain? Were you a good client where you’re
Speaker 3 00:39:57 No, it was really funny because they, you know, of course they had to say, cause I paid them a lot of money that I was an excellent client, but I was, I was probably, you know, if I stepped back, I was a good client because I left, I gave them enough information, but I left a lot of decisions up to them. You know, when they would put something by me, I’d look at it and say, you know, okay, maybe this is why I don’t like it, or I like it, but you know what, I’m building, you know, the audience, your developers, you tell me what you think is best. So there was a lot of instances like that. I let them run with a lot of the logo design. I had no idea the color palette. I had no idea. I said, you know, I said, I’m hiring you because you’re the experts.
Speaker 3 00:40:46 I mean, I used to do logo design back in the day, but my logo design that part of my brain has evaporated. So I’m not quite there as much as I used to be. So I felt like I was, you know, a good customer, except the funny thing was, and I, I just talked to Vito with, um, a terror that used to be WP feedback. That’s the system they use. And what was really interesting about that is I started there’s when you go in and you do go through the proofing thing, they will, you know, you go back and forth and then they will close out each comment that you’ve made on the site. Well, I started closing them out because I thought, well, I’m done with this. Why don’t I just close this one out? So they, me ticking away at all these, and they didn’t get freaked out or anything, but they normally do it for the customer, for the ease, you know, with their client. And for me it was like, it just, wasn’t an assumption. Well, you did a good job. I like what this looks like. I’m closing it out. So they suddenly started seeing a mall closing out and thinking, oh, I guess Bob’s kind of taken over that part of it.
Speaker 1 00:41:55 Favorite clients.
Speaker 2 00:41:57 Yeah. My favorite clients in the agency space are the ones that jump in and are willing to kind of be really engaged. So I’m sure they appreciated that. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:42:05 Yeah. And I, you know, and it, it was, it was sometimes I’d tell them, well, you know, you gave me a lot. They said, well, you gave us the right information we needed. It just was, I left a lot of the creative end of things, up to them.
Speaker 1 00:42:20 Yeah. But you know, I think a lot of agencies out there are a lot of people listening to build sites out there listening to this are like, Bob, I need more clients like you, man.
Speaker 3 00:42:30 Well, I’m not going to be building. Hopefully won’t be going through this anytime soon again. But,
Speaker 1 00:42:36 Uh, so well they did a great job. It looks great. The colors are nice to do the wheel. It’s flat. It’s everything looks great. You did a good job. They did a good job. Yeah. They did a, so we had a bit of breaking news. I didn’t see this, uh, uh, Malcolm, uh, share with us what you found.
Speaker 2 00:42:54 Yeah. So what we’re doing the podcast, uh, I noticed on Twitter that the WordPress Twitter account just posted about five minutes ago, that’s the state of the word 20, 21 has been announced. So, um, on
Speaker 1 00:43:06 December, there’s a lot of questions on whether that was going to happen or
Speaker 2 00:43:10 Yeah. Yeah. December 14th, between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM. Uh, Eastern.
Speaker 1 00:43:16 Yeah. It’s going to take place in New York city, which is poly. I know Matt has a place in New York city, so it’s probably going to be right within his home. He’s going to do it.
Speaker 2 00:43:25 Yeah. So he’s going to do a retrospective of 20, 21 discuss the latest trends he’s seeing celebrate community’s amazing wins and explore the future.
Speaker 1 00:43:34 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Mentioned the topics mentioned that three and non fungible tokens.
Speaker 2 00:43:42 I cannot believe that that is part of the list. So the topics are like WordPress five dot nine and open verse to web three and non NFTE. So NFTs and web three are going to be part of this, uh, state of the word. I, I mean, wow. I didn’t think it was going to be something that we would focus on this early. I thought it would maybe be next year or the year after that we would see something like that. So I’m kind of, that gets me really excited about, but listening in on this.
Speaker 1 00:44:06 So if anybody actually out there has a question that you would like to ask Matt with the potential of having them answer it, uh, during the state of the word, there is a domain ask hyphen mat@workcamp.org, or you can ask during the live stream chat on YouTube, which I imagine is meant to be quite busy. So it’s probably better to get your email in ahead of time, at least doing questions this way means we won’t have people adding on and adding on and adding on to their comment was turns into an essay which turns into a life story, which turns into a documentary, which by the time it’s over, they’re the only ones left in the room talking. So hopefully this, this goes over well, and I’m looking forward to it again, it’s December 14th at 10:00 AM, 10:00 AM and noon. Wow. Two hours. Yeah. I was going to be allowed to talk about, uh, and that’s uh, uh, did WooCommerce already do their, uh don’t they do a state of Lu. Did they already do that earlier this year?
Speaker 3 00:45:07 You know, they didn’t, they, um, yeah,
Speaker 1 00:45:10 Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:45:13 Yeah. It was. And they decided they weren’t quite, as, I don’t know why they decided not to do it in a blue sash. I think they, you know, did a few presentations and kind of pulled back on that. And I’m not sure if they’re going to be pulling something together that I thought I heard murmurings of it earlier. And then I haven’t heard anything else since then. So, um, yeah, I’m not sure.
Speaker 1 00:45:36 I always enjoyed the state of the, we was kind of a, an overview of what’s going on and what they’re working on. I remember when they did the, uh, the state of the Wolf few years ago and they announced the, uh, the blue commerce admin UI experiment. It was like, so that’s been like three or four years now where, where they were experimenting with the backend and changing everything to react and JavaScript based. And it looked nice. I haven’t used it. Uh, have they actually implemented that UI and commerce? Have you noticed, or is this still experimental?
Speaker 3 00:46:04 They’ve been, they actually have it in there and they’re constantly, I mean, it’s part of it now, but it’s, I’m constantly, um, changing. Yeah. It’s like they, they’re doing updates on it all the time.
Speaker 1 00:46:17 So one of the things I wanted to talk about at the end of the show here, and this is, uh, just something that kind of candid, this is something I think about from time to time. Um, I, I read an article today. That’s pretty lengthy as by Paul Lacey. And he talks about his feelings of WordPress. What has gone on over the years and basically why he’s ending up having to take a break and step away from WordPress. It’s a very detailed, very well thought out essay, definitely worth your time to read. I will link linked to it in the show notes, but he also mentioned within the article, Morton ran Hendrickson. And that kind of brought me back to thinking about his activity. And I really enjoy following Morton Ren Hendrickson, who by the way, and Malcolm will enjoy this news. He is now officially a Canadian.
Speaker 3 00:47:09 I saw
Speaker 1 00:47:09 That you have just pretty cool. Congratulations, Morton and Morton to me is a highly intelligent individual who makes me think he always comes up with these thought provoking ways of perspectives that just, you know, get my imagination and my creativity flowing. And he was a big th th the articles and the things he saying back when Gutenberg was getting ready to be merged into WordPress on things to consider and, and what have you. They’re all very good things, but he hasn’t really been involved in the WordPress scene. I wanted to get his take on on four years later after he had published an article about the measures of success for Gutenberg. And he basically said, look, I’m not involved in the space anymore. So what I had to say does that matter. So I asked him, I said, well, why, why don’t you participate in the WordPress scene anymore?
Speaker 1 00:48:00 And he says, quote, I played my part. I did what I could and decided to move on to other things and quote, and that made me sad. I, I really enjoyed his, he had such a passion and he was big on accessibility. He had a lot of good ideas, but I think, I think him and so many other people like him and the WordPress scene that they’re, they’re so passionate and want to do what they can to contribute into further WordPress to make it go. But they just end up encountering roadblock after roadblock for whatever reason, this, that, and the other, whether it’s a meetings or people are getting buy-in or what have you. And I was just thinking, man, it would be so cool if somehow, during these periods of time of WordPress, WordPress is existence where a Morton shows up and they’re very passionate about these certain things.
Speaker 1 00:48:48 If just somehow there could be pathways to translate those, those passion projects, those passion things into, um, things that roll WordPress along that, uh, could be part, could create rapid improvement for the project, whether inside or outside or around coral, what have you. And I was thinking about, you know, churn, well, we ever reach a point of, of churn or, you know, the, the, there’s not enough people coming in to the WordPress community that are coming into the space because they’re just running into roadblock after roadblock. And they ended up just leaving a project because Hey, instead of wasting their time and their energy, they could be out contributing somewhere else or doing something that they can control that they can actually contribute to, or that they have a say or a purpose in, um, in, in, in talking about this, uh, it was also brought up that, well, this is probably a non-issue because if you need somebody or a group of people to get things moving along within a specific section of WordPress, automatic could just place people from their payroll and say, Hey, work here.
Speaker 1 00:49:55 And this is your five for the future contribution. Uh, and there’s already concerns about this going on. And some of the members, well, some of the members of the contributor teams where, you know, each, each one of these teams are, is vying for and working as hard as they can to recruit, to educate and to keep up with churn and just get people involved with their section of WordPress. And if they can’t get those people, uh, there are any not getting, uh, volunteers or contributors from automatic. Uh, and that’s not a bad thing per, uh, but obviously we’d like to see more of a, uh, a spread out distribution of contributions and who’s involved in these teams and whatnot. But anyways, I just wanted to throw that out there and maybe I’ll get your thoughts on that Malcolm about the churn of contributors and, you know, the w are we ever gonna see WordPress run out of free labor? And everything’s going to be sponsored by one company or another mainly probably automatic.
Speaker 2 00:50:52 I mean, thankfully because of plug-ins and because of themes, I don’t think that that’s ever going to be a huge issue. I think people will always be able to find a way to contribute in some meaningful way. Um, there are lots of drives for, you know, documentation and videos and training and all those things that are not necessarily programmer centric as well. So, um, I, when you brought this up, though, I immediately thought of like, you know, um, Michael Heilman, who was binary Bonzai slash the, the guy who like developed the Kubrick theme. He now works at Squarespace as a designer, right? So like, even though he’s not in the WordPress space anymore, he’s still focused on like helping CMSs be the best they can be. And eventually I think there will be a CMS that comes out, um, that knocks everyone’s socks off and people flock to it.
Speaker 2 00:51:37 And I mean, you know, just like, you know, moveable type before WordPress and all these other CMSs that existed before WordPress, there will be something that comes after WordPress that will draw people away. Um, but I think that it’ll, it’ll always have a place in the market. I mean, people still run movable type people still run Modex people still run like all of these Joomla for some reason. I don’t know why, but they do. So, um, I, you know, I think it will always continue to be around and do its thing. And, um, you know, I think that the hard part though, is, you know, these new people as they come in, they don’t, they don’t know, um, you know, the, the, the well-worn paths that have been kind of carved for them to be able to use this software and the people that did that hard work. Um, we lose that history so easily, even though the internet exists and all of this stuff is out there somewhere. Um, that information just kind of dies a little bit or fades away. And, uh, that’s always hard because, uh, you know, those people did do something amazing and, uh, you know, they should be remembered for the effort because it has built the careers of so many people. And now I’m just waxing poetic. But so,
Speaker 1 00:52:46 I mean, Bob, Bob has been, he said he was saving, saving up for me, and I want, I want him to unload.
Speaker 3 00:52:51 Um, you know, uh, this is a interesting thing for me because, um, you know, I was in the outside of WordPress for, you know, two to three decades doing freelancing and stuff like that. And then I got into WordPress. And when I first got into WordPress, I mean, I loved it. I loved the community. And I thought there was this impression. I got that. My God, you know, is this all puppy dogs and, you know, licorice or something? Is it almost like everybody was so sensitive to everything, you know, and what, um, you know, it was like a perfect little world and a lot of little things would come along and disrupt and the roadblocks up. And I came in looking at it as somebody from the outside and thinking, okay, this is community. Community is going to change. Software is going to change, especially if you run a community on top of software, I mean, it’s an evitable, no matter what, you know, I mean that, that’s a common sense.
Speaker 3 00:53:50 Uh, I, you know, I, it’s strange because I was this morning, I was thinking about it. I was thinking, you know, I think the community has versions of WordPress and I thought of three versions. I thought of, you know, WordPress community 1.0 was when it started. And then there was 2.0, that was around 2007 to 2010. And that’s when a lot of the people that you’re talking about came into the space and started businesses. I talked to a lot of people, um, that we’ve been around a while and we’re all saying, yeah, it was around that same time that we got into it. Now I think we’re at 3.0, where, you know, with the acquisitions, with all this stuff changing it’s yeah. It’s a dramatic change. And I think it’s it, you know, and, and it does come at a bit of a sacrifice to the community, especially for people that have hit those roadblocks and I, but on the other hand, as many times, and as many things I’ve been involved with over my life it’s, and, and I’ll take Paul, for example, what, um, the article that you were talking about Jeff is I am glad when I see people reach a point and, you know, whatever, and I sad to see them go and I hate to see the frustration they have, but I love it when they’re smart enough to make that shift instead of wallowing and, you know, continuing to be frustrated and complaining.
Speaker 3 00:55:23 Cause some people he basically said in there that he on the podcast that he was on, he was a buzzkill. Yeah. You know, and it was, yeah, it’s this moment that you realize that this no longer is for me. And it’s, you know, there could be reasons you, you know, whatever the reasons are you shift you. And I love that what he said about I, and I shouldn’t say lover, that’s kind of a strong word, but WordPress, as a tool, I remember when I was doing workshops back in 2009, 2010, those were my first WordPress workshops. And I’d go to, you know, all the I’d have these local workshops and everybody there, nobody there gave a whatever about the community. They were there because WordPress was a tool. They didn’t really care about getting involved with the community. Contributing WordPress was simply that, you know, they use it for their business and they wanted to learn it and they want to do, you know, gives as much help as they could.
Speaker 3 00:56:23 But that community part just didn’t play into it for them. And I think that’s the thing is, you know, sometimes we separate, I mean, they’re one in the same, I mean, essentially one can’t do without the other, but you know, there, there is this software, there’s this tool and there’s this community. And I was telling Jeff and I said it earlier and he actually said something on Twitter about it is that I think we just get stuck in this WordPress and bubble. And we feel that, you know, we get very intense over things and we get intense over the community and what’s happening. And we think the community’s defragmenting and it’s imploding and everything. But I talked to, I talked to people day after day that are just stepping into the WordPress space and all they say every time is, wow. You know, we, um, we’re used to doing it this way.
Speaker 3 00:57:16 This is how we do advertise shop products. And they say, but that community is so unique. I’ve learned that you’ve got to really build that trust in that community. I mean, the community is still incredibly strong and I don’t think it’s, we’re losing. I mean, we’re losing a lot of good people, but I I’m a very optimistic person. And I think that, and what you were saying, Malcolm, I feel like there’s going to be a lot of people that are going to get into it. Yeah, sure. There’s always roadblocks. I don’t care what you do, especially if you’re in the business side of things that you, yeah. You just bail because it’s just too much for you, but there’s going to be people that are going to find those spots and they’re going to start paving their own roads. And I really think that we aren’t, you know, it’s, it’s tough to get into it and they’re learning that it takes time. I mean, look at, you know, how long we’ve been in it and we’ve spent the time cultivating it. So it’s not something that just happens overnight. And it does, it is a very unique community. And I think it’s, yeah, I just, I dunno, I,
Speaker 1 00:58:28 And you bring all this up and it reminds me of that. I appreciated the fact that because you speak to all these people, I’m an inside baseball kind of, I am stuck deep within the inner bubble of WordPress. And I’m one of those people who sees this personally, this company, or this company gets acquired here and oh my God, what’s going on. Things are imploding, you know, and that’s my world. That’s what I’m in. But you bring in the outside in perspective, which is completely different. I am out of touch with that. And I was just thinking about that’s. One of the things I enjoyed enjoyed about word camps is there would be a lot of people showing up to their first word camp who are either just learning about WordPress or they’re, they’re looking to accomplish something with WordPress. And as you mentioned, the community is a large part as to why they’re involved at that work, whether even there at that work camp and using WordPress and not kind of wish, uh, not kind of want to go to work camps again, to get in touch with all those people, because that was, those were my, uh, viewpoints or reports to the outside world, the outside looking in perspective that I, uh, that I don’t have anymore.
Speaker 3 00:59:34 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:59:36 So someone popped this bubble I’m in police.
Speaker 3 00:59:39 And I mean, it’s not a bad bubble either. You know, I, I mean, I, I enjoy where I’m at and stuff, but it’s just, it really is. And, you know, I see a lot of developers talking, you know, learning different things. Don’t just learn WordPress, you know, learn all these different other frameworks or, you know, whatever, but it is it’s, um, you know, and I, I think, you know, and yeah, I can’t speak to core and what’s going on, but the teams there, and, you know, I know there, you know, obviously from what I’ve read, I know Martin, well, I know his frustrations he had, and you know, there, there is there’s frustrations and there’s frustrations in any aspect of some kind of a community. And, uh, I imagine if we stepped into other communities, you know, we’d, we’d see them, you know, wallowing in their frustrations and people bailing out just for specific reasons as well. And it’s not, I’m not saying that’s a good thing and it should be happening, but, and that we should just accept it, but we do what we can. And, you know, there are people that have made incredible strides. Sometimes I think we focus too much on, okay, this is happening. These people are leaving, but what about these people that are still sticking around and doing amazing stuff. So,
Speaker 1 01:00:51 And what about it? What about every week in this post? You see, we have this many new contributors
Speaker 3 01:00:57 And Malcolm was exactly right about, you know, the plugins and all these people building these products. I mean, it’s incredible. They keep, they keep coming in and they’re, you know, a lot of them are excited about getting into the space and, and being part of it. And, you know, they may be
Speaker 1 01:01:13 Worried about what you’re
Speaker 3 01:01:14 Saying. Yeah. Yeah. I’m, you know, I’m, I’m along for that, I was worried about it. Yeah. No, I know you thinking about it. Not worrying
Speaker 1 01:01:22 No. Back in the day, back in the day, I think, uh, I used to like evangelize or really be up on the high horse on WordPress and Malcolm would come on the show and just buzz kill me, man.
Speaker 2 01:01:34 No, I would add a level of,
Speaker 1 01:01:37 Oh, that’s what they call it nowadays. Give them the chill
Speaker 3 01:01:40 Pill, right?
Speaker 1 01:01:44 Yeah. Any, any final thoughts Malcolm on this whole subject before we wrap it up?
Speaker 2 01:01:49 Um, I think, I think one of the interesting parts to me, and one of the things that I love about coming on the show with you, Jeff, is, um, you know, you talk about these different perspectives, like the inside out and outside in and knowing all the players and stuff like that. And for me, my personal experience, I’m a very kind of heads down, do the work kind of WordPress person. Um, you know, even talking to colleagues that can be creative. Um, it, it’s funny how often I get told, oh, you’ve done that with that company. Or you did this over here, or when did you do that? Or I’ll even mention like this podcast. And I’m like, you’re the person that goes in with, with Jeff with that. And it’s so funny because I’m just, I’m, I’m very much, you know, behind the scenes, just doing my work, live in my life kind of thing.
Speaker 2 01:02:34 Um, and thanks to, you know, WordPress existing, cause that’s been a major part of my career. Um, but I’m not as integrated as the two of you and to all of these other community community things that are happening, I stay up to date on what’s happening, but I’m, I’m the behind the scenes guy, right. I just lurk on post status. So I, you know, I had a colleague of mine say like, you’re not on post status. And then I messaged him on there and he’s like, actually you are so like, it’s, it’s just the different perspectives that we bring to this. And I think that’s why I really enjoy doing this kind of show with you.
Speaker 1 01:03:04 I enjoy doing the show because if I ever go out to work camp San Francisco, again, I’ll get a group of people from Japan, all fanboy me and want to take pictures with me. And that was awesome. I’ll never forget that I bring that up all the time. I’m like, wait a minute. People in Japan, they know who I am. They oh, you just rolled again. And then, you know, they get all excited.
Speaker 2 01:03:23 I mean, I guess, I guess that leads into the last thing that we always have to talk about. Right. Which is if you’re ever going to be able to go to another word camp, someone’s got to pay the bill. Yeah. And so if, if you have a chance, everyone definitely check out IBP, mainline.com, there’s different options to support this show, uh, everything that Jeff is doing on WP mainline.com, uh, including for $49 for an entire year, 12 months, you can be a rail fan and a w while that doesn’t necessarily give you anything special, as of yet, it keeps the show running so that we can keep coming back and doing this. So go ahead and check that out, please.
Speaker 1 01:03:55 And, uh, on top of that, I’m going to give our listeners here in exclusive cause because why not? I haven’t mentioned this on to what I’ve been trying. I’ve been hyping that there have been two new bass card designs, but I haven’t told or shown anybody, but they are. So for our listeners today for listening, uh, there’s going to be a new bikes card designed for paid memberships pro, which is an awesome membership pro plugin, uh, another husband, wife, team company, Jason and Kim Coleman. They do a wonderful job over there. And the second one is for, we glide a very popular translation plugin for WordPress, and both of those companies have purchased podcast advertising, uh, for, for the show for the WP mainline. So that means that, uh, there’s going to be a fresh load of coal put into the steam engine. We’re just going to keep mine, uh, chugging man.
Speaker 1 01:04:45 So thank you very much to paid membership pro. And we got for not only purchasing boxcars, uh, but for purchasing podcast advertising. And, uh, I’ll be doing some kind of ad read or something here within the next month or two for both of those companies. And I’ve seen the paid membership pro uh, bicycle design is really cool. It’s the first two door car design that we’ll have on the site. So pay attention to that. And the week, lot one is going to look very sharp with the, with the, with the colors, the color scheme. So keep an eye for those on WP mainline.com. And if you’re interested in purchasing the boxcar, uh, there’s a link there on the website. Uh, so Bob working people keep in touch with you, follow you, do the Wu while they follow you.
Speaker 3 01:05:35 Probably the best places, things that ran with them. Yeah. I know isn’t there though. Do
Speaker 1 01:05:42 You? Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3 01:05:45 Yeah. Malcolm cut them. Okay. Do you have any controls? No. No, of course not.
Speaker 1 01:05:52 Okay. We’ll stay away from pu.
Speaker 3 01:05:55 Yeah, they can go to duke.io and then I’m at DBU on Twitter and also at Bob WP. And you can find me on slack and post status slack, and all sorts of places. Just, just look around and you’ll see me popping up somewhere.
Speaker 1 01:06:11 Absolutely love what you do with WooCommerce. And you’re a great aspect and a asset to the WordPress community really enjoy your work in Malcolm. How about you, sir?
Speaker 2 01:06:23 Uh, you can find me at Twitter at, to find purpose. And of course, if you need anything, just feel free to message me through press titan.com or through Cambra creative,
Speaker 1 01:06:32 Great Twitter name. By the way I’ve taught. I’ve told you this many times already, but they find purpose. It makes me think every time that was a great Twitter name and you can follow me on Twitter at Jeff Rowe, J E F F R zero Mostel find insurance for this episode and all other episodes on WP, mainline.com, just click the podcast link and it’ll be all there for you. So with that, we’re going to wrap it up here, everybody enjoy your weekend. And we’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long as everybody

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 18 of the WP mainline podcast for Friday, November 5th, 2021. I am your host, Jeff Chandler, and joined by Malcolm. Perotti. How you doing, sir? Doing well. How about yourself? I am doing quite well. I, uh, it’s Friday, so we can all be happy about that going into the non-existent weekend, as I like to say. And, uh, it’s a pretty good week for me, actually. I, um, I got into a bit of a groove in a couple of days. There I was, I was rattling off some posts, things that were on my mind, things that were going on in the WordPress space that we’ll get into here in a little bit. In fact, uh, I wanted to a couple of days ago, knowing all these you’re, don’t take this as a bread cause I don’t, I don’t think it’s a break, but in all these years of, uh, writing and working in the WordPress space, I have not worked in eight straight hours a day where I just sit at the computer and monitor everything that’s going on in the space.
Speaker 1 00:01:17 I write, I Polish it, right. I Polish it, participate in all these other little communities for eight hours. I’ve never done that. So I try that this week. It is exhausting. I’m going, what the hell’s the matter with me? Why would I want to do that? It is exhausting. I was monitoring slack channels. I was chatting in various discord groups, discord servers, slack channels, Twitter threads, uh, DMS commenting on posts, reading posts. Uh, I wrote a pretty lengthy article, which netted me 150 bucks. So that was cool. So that was, that was worth it. But, uh, yeah, I, I don’t know. I don’t think I could do eight straight hours of monitoring and participating in the WordPress space and writing about it every day for 40 hours a week. I, I mean, yeah, that’s a job, right. You know, that’s what I’m supposedly, that’s what I’m getting paid to do, but holy smokes, it’s exhausting and people wonder if there’s value or, or any purpose or what have you in the WordPress new space.
Speaker 1 00:02:21 I mean, it’s, it’s tough to do if you don’t have, it’s tough to do independently and on your own, I’d say both independently and in terms of ownership and independently financially, you know, to try and make a living out of it. Very, very tough to do. I’ve never done that before. I always worked for other people. Right. So yeah. Mr. Blogging, pro yeah. Yeah. I brought that up. That’s OG that’s way back there. Most people don’t even know what you’re talking about. So, um, but even then, like, I was fortunate enough to be working on like
Speaker 2 00:02:59 Forever geek and CSS fault and like a few other like non WordPress focused topics at the same time. I don’t think that I have ever specifically spent in turn when I was doing like my WordPress blogging and stuff. I don’t think I ever spent a flight hour a day just on WordPress related stuff.
Speaker 1 00:03:15 I really don’t get burned out so fast. It’s incredible. Yeah. So speaking of the news this week, we’ve had a couple of things happen. The first is that automatic has acquired WP scan. Now WP scan is a WordPress vulnerability databases that has existed for 10 years. Um, it started out as a Ruby as a Ruby script way back in the day, back in 2011 and it eventually turned into, uh, their security scanner, which then led to them developing and releasing their vulnerability database that apparently many, many sites in the WordPress community. And even outside of the WordPress bubble, relying on to figure out vulnerabilities that are in both WordPress core themes and plugins, obviously plugins being the big deal there. So what they’ve said is that the automatic as acquired them and it’s actually being used to power or has been used to power Jetpack scans.
Speaker 1 00:04:12 So for anyone out there wondering if it’s going to be completely rolled into Jetpack yet, there’s still that possibility. But part of it is already in Jetpack scan. So they’re, they’re kind of already halfway there, I suppose. But one of the big things, one of the big concerns that was brought up that I saw in the community is whether or not a WP scan will continue to be available outside of Jetpack. And according to the announcements on both the WP scan website and on Jetpack, the overarching goal is to explore ways to make the API completely free for non-commercial sites and be able to maintain access to the vulnerability database for anyone who wants to have access to it.
Speaker 2 00:04:58 Yeah, but that wasn’t like it that’s kind of a waving the hands kind of thing. Isn’t it? It’s like, look over here, everyone. This is the answer that you’d like to a question you didn’t ask. Right? Like the question was, will it remain separate as a separate tool that we can use outside of jet pack? And they said, well, we’ll make the API available for noncommercial projects. You can like roll your own version of WP scan outside of Jetpack. It kind of sounds like they’re saying, no, it will be integrated into Jetpack and you’ll have to use Jetpack to use this functionality
Speaker 1 00:05:30 And Faye, in fact, they say that, uh, well, in addition to acquiring WP scan the services founders, Ryan do Hurst and Irwin, uh, LaRusso will be joining automatic as employees probably going to work on the team that manages a jet pack scan, right. And, uh, in the near future, it will remain or continue to operate independently. Uh, what the possibility of being fully integrated into Jetpack scan. That’s what they say that they’re going to explore the possibility of fully integrating into Jetpack scans. So, yeah, I mean, and by the way, there’s a, uh, I know WP scan was offering services like plug-in audits and things of that nature. All those things have been sunset now, and they’re just going to be focused on, um, the technology and Jetpack scan and the API that revolves around it. So yeah, they, they kind of hint to, to, it’s just going to turn into Jetpack scan and that’s it, but Hey, there’s always the API, right?
Speaker 1 00:06:29 I mean, that’s a lot of data too. I mean, I, and by the way, it’s, it’s not like if for those out there, if this kind of a burst her bubble, or you’re not a fan of this acquisition, or you’re wondering, well, what am I going to do about, what am I going to get a different database? There are Wordfence has one pet stack has one, almost all of these SickKids security, I think as one, all of these databases or all these security firms that, uh, are in the WordPress space, they each have their own little, um, we’re press vulnerability database. So there’s plenty of other ones out there to use if this acquisition is, if it’s kind of makes you question things or do you want to look at alternatives out there, but, uh, Hey, these folks have been around for 10 years. Uh, there’s a lot of data involved in that, uh, database.
Speaker 1 00:07:16 And, you know, maybe this acquisition is awesome. And by the way, automatic was, uh, had sponsored WP scan for a long time now. So they’re very, uh, very knowledgeable in terms of how the WP scan team operated and what was going on there. So I, and we’ve seen this in the past where automatic has sponsored a, what was it front to front of T? Yeah, that was another team were automatic sponsor for a number of years. And they just said, Hey, why don’t you just come on board? You know? And they ended up acquiring them.
Speaker 2 00:07:47 Yeah. And congratulations to the people. Right. Like getting to go work for the mothership is, uh, I mean, that’s kind of the best outcome you can hope for in a lot of ways. So I think it’s, it’s great for them. I hope it continues to be good for the WordPress community. Um, I’m not like personally, I think I’m on record maybe more than a few times saying I’m not a huge pan in huge fan of jet pack specifically. Um, I love all the individual pieces and I wish I could not necessarily get like the, the fire hose. Right. I want the scalpel. Um, so I think, uh, you know, congratulations to them, super exciting. I’m looking forward to seeing how it, how this changes or increases the development speed or the development complexity of this project. Um, but I still wish that I could just get it and not all of Jetpack.
Speaker 1 00:08:36 Well, I mean, the good news is that Jetpack is kind of moving in that direction. I mean, if we look at video press, it’s a standalone product. If we look at they’ve got jet pack, blue snail was CA which is a standalone thing. Um, jet pack scan, I imagine is probably going to be the same way it’s going to be its own independent, separate thing. And we’re starting to see now that additionally Jetpack was an end all be all solution, but now they’re ripping everything apart, taking things out of jet pack, turning them into their own standalone group of related modules, services and features. And it’s getting to the point now, and I think this is a good move. We’re Jetpack Alec cart. So, you know, you go to the, uh, the, the jet pack website, you pick which modules you want, and then you’d come up with the subscription plan and that’s what you’re paying for.
Speaker 1 00:09:24 I like it. And that’s pretty much what’s going on here. One additional tidbit about this acquisition. No, when I read about it on the Jetpack side of things, the article title says Jetpack acquires them and I’m thinking, well, what do you mean Jetpack jet pack is an entity. It’s a product. It’s a, it’s within automatic. I mean, it’s an automatic acquiring WP scan. So I started thinking because a few weeks ago we mentioned that a jet pack acquired social image generator, right? So I’m thinking, well, what what’s Jetpack doing? Do they have their own pocketbooks? I mean, are they, can I just start acquiring things? They add them in there. So I talked to Rob pew, director of product marketing and automatic. And I asked him if jet pack is its own business entity within automatic. And he responded that it’s not, he said that as automatic expands, they think it makes sense to let people know what part of the company, the acquisition would be most closely aligned to which, which makes sense to me, but it just kind of threw me for a loop there, uh, seeing that jetpacks acquiring things.
Speaker 1 00:10:29 Yeah. I’m glad to give you that clarity. So there you go. And, uh, here’s something cool that I came across this week. The not so secret Santa WordPress community gift exchange. Uh, this actually started was started by Mike Demopolis last year. Um, he had created a gift exchange on a website called Elfster first time I’ve ever seen that website. And, uh, he started it because in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic, you wanted to allow the WordPress community to connect. So what you do is you sign up at Elster to participate and you’ll be placed in a queue with a person you’re purchasing a gift for we’ll be selecting on November 17th and gifts have a $50 spending limit. So participants are encouraged to add an item that they had this whistles steam feature on the site and put on an item or two that’s below the $50 budget to your public wishlist.
Speaker 1 00:11:25 And then at some point you will be given this, uh, uh, secret Santa will be, will be, uh, have the option to pay for your gift. And then you’re going to be paying for somebody else’s gift. And then the, uh, the secret Santa is, will actually be revealed in January of 2022. So you actually find out who purchased a gift for you and the other person will find out, um, who you purchased a gift for. So I can’t wait to I’m I’m going to participate. Cause I think a BMSB in somebody’s secret. Santa is pretty cool being a Santa Claus feels good.
Speaker 2 00:12:02 Uh, I like this a lot. Um, and I was, I was looking at the Elster website. Um,
Speaker 1 00:12:09 You ever heard of Elster before
Speaker 2 00:12:10 This? I know I had it. Um, so amusingly enough when it comes to, um, my wife’s family and my family, we do secret Santa for the adults. And, uh, I actually like coded my own secret Santa tool for that
Speaker 1 00:12:24 Boys. Of course, of course you would.
Speaker 2 00:12:27 I didn’t know what would exist up there or if they would use it. So we use like the tool that I created plus wishlist, or to be able to do the secret Santa stuff and the wishlist and, uh, yeah, no, I was really, I thought this was really cool to see this. I mean, it’s a shame that, uh, it’s not, it’s not built on WordPress. I would love to see someone do a whole secret Santa thing with WordPress and I’m sure someone could do that. So, you know, Hey community, WordPress secret, Santa plugin, maybe question mark that way. It could be WordPress in the future. That powers it. That’d be kind of neat.
Speaker 1 00:12:57 And then on that website, you could have a symptom. Why poo come on, we’ve got to bring out the Santa Claus while there we
Speaker 2 00:13:01 Go. There we
Speaker 1 00:13:02 Go. The last day to RSVP on here is Tuesday, November 16th. So everybody’s got a little bit of time. Course. You’ll find a link to the gift exchange. If you want to sign up on the show notes page, you’ve got about 30 people who have signed up and who are participating. And, uh, you know, I, I can say this cause it’s on a public wishlist guests, just the item that I bought on my wishlist, that’s below the $50 budget. I just want to see, just take a guess.
Speaker 2 00:13:31 I have no idea what
Speaker 1 00:13:33 It’s food related.
Speaker 2 00:13:35 It’s food-related yes, probably sauce,
Speaker 1 00:13:39 Good guests, but no, um, uh, I I’m a fan of popcorn seasonings. And so what I did was I looked up on, uh, Amazon or through this wishlist feature, I found a pack of popcorn seasonings. That’s just below the $50 budget limit. And it comes with six or seven different seasonings, white cheddar, Sirracha some other sweats, caramel, corn or whatever. And I said, Hey, you know what the heck maybe somebody can combine me some popcorn seasoning. Um, I, I actually like, I’ve got, uh, Buffalo, wild wings, salt and vinegar seasoning, which I just love. Sometimes I’ll put that on my popcorn or, uh, because I’m in the Midwest, I have ranch dressing, uh, seasoning that comes into powder. And I put that on my, on my popcorn. Yeah. Whatever you can say, whatever you want. It’s good to me.
Speaker 2 00:14:33 If it makes you happy, that’s all that matters. I just couldn’t. What do you
Speaker 1 00:14:35 Put on your popcorn? Nothing just butter, whatever the butter. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:14:38 Yeah. I’m, I’m, I’m mostly a butter and salt purist, but I do like the, uh, you know, the cheese flavorings are always good or caramel. Popcorn is always good. I’m not a big fan of Chicago mix. I ended up like splitting it. There was two components, um, self, like a whole thing of cheese popcorn and a whole,
Speaker 1 00:14:56 No, no, no, it’s good. A really good cattle corn. That’ll be, that’ll get me going.
Speaker 2 00:15:03 Yeah. Um, and then every once in a while, and maybe I’ll do like a, you know, like a bill or like one of those kinds of seasonings, but pretty rare. I mean, I kinda stick to give me a butter and salt man. Like,
Speaker 1 00:15:15 Do you know my wife for some deal and everything, man. Hey, listeners to my wife always has pickle breath helped me. Okay. So anyway, she didn’t hear that. Any other we’ll see, we’ll see, uh, your second exchange. Uh, what else do we have going on here? Oh, big news. This came out, uh, yesterday word Fest live 2022. Now there is a date, the big orange heart foundation and word Fest live. Volunteers are ready to kick off another global tour of the WordPress community. Now put the sign in your calendar. It’s March 4th, 2022. You can, uh, register for the event right now. The call for speakers will be posted on Monday, November 8th. Uh, and the call for sponsors is also open. Um, and what’s important here about this event is that, uh, 2022 begins a new yearly sponsorship across all the big orange hearts activities, which includes, uh, the March 4th and September 9th, word fast, as well as physical in-person and virtual meetups. So a big horns, heart is starting a new sponsorship campaign to get them through the year. So your donations and sponsorships of the event, as well as throughout the other events throughout the year will be a big help to the big orange heart foundation. And if you’re not familiar with what that group is, it’s a nonprofit dedicated to mental health and supporting each other in this remote world, a remote working environment. And I’m a big fan, huge fan of the big orange hire. And Dan may be in what everybody’s doing over there.
Speaker 2 00:17:01 Yeah, it looks good. I’m looking forward to it. I, again, I mean, it kind of always goes back to the whole more in person. Events is more my jam, but, uh, this is, I think one of the exceptions to that rule,
Speaker 1 00:17:13 You’re not going to do an in-person event involving a global tool epi. I says you, well, I’m not paying for all those international airline tickets and flights no way. But, uh, yeah, I mean, I I’d say, I’d say WordPress is the exception. I mean, it’s, it’s pretty cool. It’s really cool though. How they go from all the various time zones and you can see all the different speakers and different languages. And it’s a, it’s a really cool event. One of, one of its kind very unique in the WordPress space. So voting is now open for the 2021 WP awards. Now this is something new. I see this or participate in it last year for obvious reasons. But this year, uh, the WP awards, which is hosted by the WP weekly, which is a pretty cool WordPress, a newsletter and outfit over there that talks about news.
Speaker 1 00:18:05 And what’s going on in the WordPress space, uh, participants can vote for their favorite WordPress themes, page builders, blogs, and there’s a bunch of other categories and you can vote for your favorite one until November 30th. Now winners will receive bragging rights and increase visibility on the site. WP mainline does make an appearance under the WordPress blogs category. If you want to vote for me, I appreciate it. But I would rather you vote for whatever is your favorite. Whatever’s in your heart. I’m not going to slip you a 20 and tell you to vote for, uh, the devote for me. Um, so that’s just, I appreciate it. Any votes you want to do? It’s cool. But basically, um, what the awards site also allows you to do is it’s a kind of acts as a way to discover some things. There’s some things in those various categories that maybe you’ve never heard of before that a lot of other people are using or at least nominated.
Speaker 1 00:18:59 So if you want to at least check out what products are in the various categories that debt in, in and of itself is pretty educational. If you wanted to check it out, uh, and results will be published during the first week of December now, I’m, I’m, I’m not one to win a popularity, popularity contest. I’m not, I’m just not for me, but for me, I’m not. If you’ve offered me congrats, if not, well, I don’t know what to tell you. Good job vote with, vote with your art. What was your art now? I mean, looking at these categories, if you go down to, uh, you know, WordPress blog. Oh, you want to say, you want to mention no, I was curious, like if you can’t vote for yourself. Okay. Which ones are you interested in under the 16, 17, 18 WordPress blogs, WordPress podcasts and WordPress community.
Speaker 1 00:19:53 Um, man you’re wow. What a way to put me on the spot always, uh, in terms of WordPress blogs, I have to go with WP Tavern. I’m sorry. I mean, I’ve got ties there, but I also really enjoy and appreciate the work and effort that both Sarah Gooding and Justin taillight do on that site in terms of the long form and the detailed reporting that they do on there, that you really, all those other websites, you’re not going to find. You’re not going to find that kind of level of detailed reporting in terms of WordPress podcast. Man, I heard because I haven’t listened to a podcast and we’re so bad. Um, I’m working on getting some AirPods to change that up so I can put some podcasts on the phone, but in terms of podcast, uh, out of the ones are on this list. Uh, the WP minute is up there.
Speaker 1 00:20:50 It’s nice and quick. I can actually listen to that on the computer. That’s by Matt Madeiros, he’s doing a great job over there. And then every now and then maybe a do the wool, my buddy, Bob WP, he does a great job, but do the loo. So, uh, definitely those two. And in terms of WordPress community, um, uh, well, it’s kind of a toss up between post status and hero press. Um, but I’d probably have to decide for now if I was voting today with post status, just because they’re established, they’ve got this incredible network, they’ve got a lot of people, a lot of movers and shakers in that community. Um, you know, it’s, it’s worth the money it’s worth,
Speaker 2 00:21:37 You know, it’s really funny. You just accidentally created a great transition to our next topic,
Speaker 1 00:21:43 Which, I mean, you
Speaker 2 00:21:45 Picked right. You pick do the woo and post that as back to that.
Speaker 1 00:21:50 It was not, I wasn’t, wasn’t even thinking about that. I swear. I swear on my life. I was not even thinking about this transition. Uh, but yeah. How about it? Tell us a little bit about the, the do the woo.
Speaker 2 00:22:01 Yeah, so they, uh, just announced a partnership. I mean they, but it’s, I do that to everyone, but anyways, so they announced the partnership between post status and do the Wu. And, uh, I think it totally makes a ton of sense to me to see that content kind of joining or interacting with, or, or I don’t know, crossing over with the post status community. Um, as you know, more and more business, people are starting to look at, you know, how they can make WordPress into their business solution and how that works the best. Um, I think that this, this amalgamation, this partnership, um, will benefit both parties immensely.
Speaker 1 00:22:45 No, somebody on Twitter told me that they can’t think of WordPress without thinking of me, which I thought was a really cool compliment. But I think it’s gotten to the point now where you can’t think of WooCommerce without thinking about Bob WPS has been doing this now for about 10 years. Yeah. And it’s a great partnership. I mean, listen, if you’re a fair company like post status and you want to get insight and connect your audience and your members and your community to what’s going on in the WooCommerce industry, or just have somebody who knows the ins and outs, it makes perfect sense to bring Bob in. And there you go. Now you’re connected and you’ve got all his insights and everything he’s doing over there for do the wheel, which by the way, he unpeeled a, that must be my favorite thing. Uh, my favorite three words on the show, by the way, um, I’ve noticed as I’ve said that like that’s a drinking game.
Speaker 1 00:23:38 I apologize. You’re probably loaded by now, but if not, uh, Bob unveiled a completely new branding and colors and it looks really good. He worked with WebDevStudios, uh, to do that. So definitely check it out. I’ll have a link to do the will in the show notes, but this just makes perfect sense. And I think Bob to me is, is, is woo woo commerce. Anytime I think about will commerce, I think about Bob WP and I just love saying, do the woo. I mean, just the louder you say, do the blue, the better it’s out.
Speaker 1 00:24:12 And, uh, and by the way, say I did it again, uh, take a drink. Uh, um, if you visit WP mainline.com, you can actually check out the, do the Woobox car. It looks really cool. We unveiled, uh, Bob WPS backs card design, and speaking of boxcars, I have a new one that has been designed and, uh, I’m hoping to reveal it either tonight or at some point this weekend. So yeah, the more bike, the more box cars we can have design the better. And in light of this partnership that Bob was doing with post status, he is, uh, Bob was working with Corey and the team on a special discount for do the woo friends who want to join post status. So if you’re a friend of do the woo, which is kind of, uh, the, uh, uh, subscription or community membership that Bob runs, you’ll be able to get a good discount on the post status network. And the post status network is worth the money because that’s where the movers and shakers are. It’s, it’s primarily like the business hub of WordPress is like what I like to call it. And me, I just liked to hang out there as a fly on the wall, just monitoring what’s going on there. Cause there’s some, there’s some juicy stuff that sometimes goes on there that I can turn into, uh, some good content.
Speaker 2 00:25:31 Yeah. Funnily enough. Um, one of the people that I work with, um, mark , who was a WordPress engineer for, uh, camera creative. He recently, he and I were talking and he was like, like, why aren’t you on post status? And I’m like, I am. And he’s like, no, you’re not, I’ve never seen you on there. And so I instant messaged him from post status slack, and he’s like, oh, you are how odd? Like, I’m like, I’m just there to watch. I’m not necessarily there to like think or interact too much. I’m just there to see what’s going on and keep my pulse on, on the finger of WordPress. So, uh, yeah, I it’s, it was just funny that he was like, you’re not part of that community. So I kind of am, but just not actively
Speaker 1 00:26:11 Speaking of community, uh, one company that has making inroads and just doing all sorts of things, whether it’s webinars or educational material podcasts, sponsoring events is GoDaddy. And if you’re looking to increase your productivity, one tool that helps thousands of what developers and designers do more everyday is GoDaddy pro uh, combining site client and project management. GoDaddy pro is an all in one solution made by and for web professionals, whether you’re new to web design or looking to grow your business, you’ll find tools, product guidance, and support to help you deliver results for clients you can manage and monitor all of your clients were precise from a single place, no matter where they’re hosted. And with a single click, you can perform bulk updates, backup security checks, and more to save time and free up your day. For more information, you can check out, go to eddie.com forward slash pro, or, you know, if you’re like me, you just stop the car, stop, whatever you’re doing immediately go on the mobile phone, click a link.
Speaker 1 00:27:10 Now I know you’re not going to do that, but links to GoDaddy pro and the information related to their services will be available on the show notes post and huge thank you to both Adam Warner and go to Eddie for renewing their sponsorship and advertising package. Uh, the WP mainline show very much appreciate it. That means Turkey dinner for Thanksgiving. It means I’ll be able to pay a car bill and a Ford could stop calling me, asking me where the money is at least for this month. And then, you know, I was able to pay a few other bills and thanks in part to add a mortar and go daddy’s commitment and ability to sponsor and support me and the work that we do here on WP mainland. I very much appreciate that. And for my listeners out there, please, if you could please give Adam Warner and go to Eddie pro some love on behalf of me, cause it’s super appreciative. I’m super appreciative of what they’ve, uh, what they’re doing.
Speaker 1 00:28:07 And with that, uh, you know, this is something that has come up in a topic of discussion throughout October and now in early November. And it looks like Justin has weighed in now where wow, it’s actually got 27 comments now. Yeah. He says that WordPress has never offered an idea writing experience. And he goes on and talks about his experience of writing in the WordPress editor, writing long posts, writing short posts. And basically it comes down to, he doesn’t use the WordPress editor, uh, for long form, whatever. He just uses it primarily to, uh, to mess around with blocks. He copies from his editor and posted into WordPress. It messes around the blocks. Like they lay up just right and, uh, and that’s about it, but he pretty much agrees that WordPress is, uh, is not really a good writing experience. Like he, he’s not gonna, he says, quote, I cannot imagine writing a novel in WordPress without first creating the plugin to edit the extra bits such as scene and character cars and cut away almost everything else.
Speaker 1 00:29:15 The editing cabinets might be acceptable with the right style adjustments. And he also says that note, if anyone, if anyone wants to build it, he would be happy to offer direct feedback. Uh, it’s just, again, with the WordPress writing experience, I I’m coming to GRA, I’ve mentioned this. I don’t know how many shows in a row, but I’m coming to grips now with the fact that when I’m in the post editor, I’m not writing I’m. And for me, that kind of sucks. I like writing. I don’t really, I don’t really like building and, uh, that’s pretty much what we’re going to end up doing now, whether it’s a poster page, you get to build it block by block. And, uh, and at least in terms of writing right now, like for example, earlier this week, I did a writing exercise actually is something very simple.
Speaker 1 00:30:04 Uh, I took, I use Google docs for the show notes for WP mainline, and we have a list of URLs in there. So what I do when I’m writing the show notes post in WordPress is I’ll create a block and a list block. I’ll go to the Google docs, I’ll copy the links. And then I’ll paste those links into the list block. And what happens, the less block gets transformed into a paragraph block in each row, design its own line as a paragraph block. That is not the way I think it should work. That’s not the way I expect it to work. I expect it to list all the URLs in the list, block in an unordered list. And then I can just move on. But now what happens is I have to, uh, I have to know about the fact that if I hold down the shift key, I have to select the various paragraph blocks and then transform those back into a list block.
Speaker 1 00:30:57 And that works. And it just, it’s one of those things. It’s about flow. And it’s about knowing the Gutenberg way of doing things. And I, I don’t necessarily agree or like the way or the Gutenberg way of doing things. Cause it’s just, it’s, it’s an unnatural flow. And it really comes down to like, my biggest issues is copying from one source and pasting it into WordPress and just having to spend so much time, uh, training and finagling, get it to work in the Gutenberg way. Now it’s like, it’s like, Hey WordPress, I know I want to list block and I’m copying a list. And so if I paste the list here, don’t change it to a paragraph. What are you doing? Stop it. And uh, if there’s, I also thought about doing a live stream where I just write a long post on WordPress and everybody could see how many times I say the F-bomb. I pull my hair out. I say, why I go on, you know, I say all these things, I think that’d be kind of entertaining, but, uh, I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it’s an idea worth exploring, but I’m, I’m noticing in the comments here. There are so many people using Unisys and third party apps.
Speaker 2 00:32:02 I have a favorite comment. I’m going to butcher the name Hannah’s Swatson, um, posts that none of our clients use. The block editor since blocks became mandatory. They had one classic block and go for, and start from there. I laughed so hard when I read that because I can feel it. Like I can feel it deep in my soul like that, that like, well, we have to use blocks now, classic block done. Like, oh, just, it made me laugh so hard. I love it.
Speaker 1 00:32:29 Yeah. And then somebody gave me the idea. They said, well, what if, um, what if you’re, uh, in the Google doc, you arrange, you, you create an unknown owner, an order list within the Google doc, and then you copy that into WordPress should maintain and keep the four main, right? Nope. Still, still doesn’t work. That transforms things into various blocks. So what I, you know, I have the same problem with quilt blocks. If I copy two paragraphs, more than one paragraph from an article that I want to put into a quote, if I copy that and paste it into a quote block, it’ll turn both of those paragraphs into a paragraph block. I have to select those two blocks. Retransform them back to a quilt block. It’s like, come on, man. What’s why isn’t this not working now? I haven’t tried this in Ms. Word, but supposedly from what I’ve heard, the formatting stays the same or WordPress, at least doesn’t transform blocks when you’re copying from Ms.
Speaker 1 00:33:22 Word and pasting it into WordPress. So I’m going to give that a try, but, but I refuse to write any third-party app or third party tool. I mean, a lot of people keep suggesting, well, why don’t you just use the classic editor? Why don’t you just do this and that? I mean, I could, but I think that’s the easy way out. And I just, I’m doing this. I’m going through all the friction because I want the experience and core of the black editor to be better than what it is. And, uh, I, I feel, but by, by going through the trenches and participating in the war or the battle that is me in the post editor, that, uh, we will get results one sooner or later. I hope please,
Speaker 1 00:34:05 Well, maybe I should do that. You know, I should, I should actually do that. Her suggested, just add a classic black and then see how it goes. I should actually do that and write about the experience. I, I, I’m very curious now, so the next big poster, right. I’m actually gonna do that. I’m just the first block I create is going to be classic. And then I’m going to write everything in there. And, um, ma’am, I gotta tell you if, if, if it’s just nice and everything works and, um, it has a nice flow I’m, I’m going to be disappointed, but I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I’m going to do from now on. And this might have a good point here. And the last article that we’re going to talk about in today’s show something you brought up. I have not read this yet, but I have heard about the topic and it’s been talked about, uh, recently is eight ways to automate, automate your WordPress blog with artificial intelligence. And this was published on Donna torque mag. Yup.
Speaker 2 00:34:55 Yeah. And I wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention because I think it’s a topic that is, you know, this is technology, these, these are things that are already being done behind the scenes, probably on a lot of your favorite websites. Um, a little bit tongue in cheek. I wanted to put it in front of you, Jeff, so that you could see like, Hey Jeff, look, you can double the amount of content you create. Just use some of these AI tools.
Speaker 1 00:35:18 Um, well I was saying, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, right? Like sometimes in the way I was writing content, I said, what am I doing? I can just have an AI bot do this.
Speaker 2 00:35:28 It’s almost, it’s almost at that point, it’s actually kind of crazy at how good some of these writing tools have become. Um, I know a lot of people are huge fans of Jarvis and the tool that they have there to be able to kind of help like expand very kind of simple briefs or like create like summaries or, um, you know, just kind of do, do these like content manipulation things, um, to improve your writing or to, um, grow your writing. And like, there’s, you know, I know for a fact that there are giant news organizations that are using this on like AFP feeds or on like, um, uh, associated press feeds rather to kind of take content, um, rewrite it, uh, SEO the heck out of it and basically get it ready, um, on their site in a way that Google doesn’t see it as duplicate content. And, uh, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this stuff continues to kind of, you know, be more, you know,
Speaker 1 00:36:30 You think there are freelance writers out there and WordPress on some of these WordPress sites where they’re not actually writing the full thing you’re using these tools.
Speaker 2 00:36:38 I hope not. I mean, come on, like at the end of the day, it’s going to happen. I mean,
Speaker 1 00:36:45 I mean, for these people who freelance and their work, they’re writing from multiple different WordPress.
Speaker 2 00:36:50 Yeah. I mean like how hard would it be right to do a list post of like 20 best plugins for X, right? And then you resort that order, you get a tool like Jarvis to, um, rewrite the whole thing, make sure it passes Copyscape and boom, you have, you know, similar content or similar context in a different order ready for another site to use and Google will see it as unique content. Um, it’s going to happen. It probably already has happened. Um, I just think it’s, it’s something that we all need to kind of be more aware of that this is going to happen. And I remember actually probably about a decade ago, it started with sports scores, like ups for different sporting events were being done by AI because the, it wasn’t very difficult for an AI to take sports scores, team names, and be able to build things like build out a, a reasonable, reasonable, short post or summary of the game based on the information on data. Um, but these tools are getting smarter all the time. Like the stuff I’ve seen for GPT three just blows me away at how well it can. Right. It’s not the best at like fact checking. So sometimes it’ll make like really strange errors when it comes to like things that should have been factual and not necessarily changed. Um, but in terms of the other, the flow, otherwise it’s probably better than most English as a second language writers.
Speaker 1 00:38:13 Do you think at this point, you’d be able to tell whether an article was written by AI or a human being. Do you think you’d be able to tell, I mean, are there certain nuances you can look forward at certain hints?
Speaker 2 00:38:29 I, if, if, if the comparison, if you put two articles in front of me and one of them was written by AI and one of them was written by an English as a second language person, I might be able to tell the probably I would probably not be able to tell every time, um, if it was an English as a first language speaker writing an article versus one of these AIS, I don’t think the AI technology is quite there yet. I think you’d be able to tell the difference. Um, but I’m, I’m guessing within the next like four or so years, we’re going to get to the point where I wouldn’t be able to tell, um, between you writing an article and an AI writing an article on the same topic.
Speaker 1 00:39:06 No, I refuse. I refuse to allow the unique qualities and positive things of Jeffery to be baked into an AI bot.
Speaker 2 00:39:18 I think that’s going to be the next challenge. Someone’s going to like analyze all the writing you’ve ever done into an AI system. And it’s going to pump out, it’s going to be a pump out Jeffer articles faster than you can.
Speaker 1 00:39:29 Oh, stop starfish man stuff at dude. No, me, myself and I are all I have what left and in this space, man, I don’t need that taken away from me please.
Speaker 2 00:39:39 Oh, well, if they give it to you to be able to create content well,
Speaker 1 00:39:43 Yeah. Okay. Okay. Create a Jeff button. I get to control it. You know what not now around this something I could work with that I can, I can mold it into my, to, to, to the, to the Jeffer of the future. I can
Speaker 2 00:39:58 Be like, man, he’s publishing like 10 posts a day.
Speaker 1 00:40:01 Yeah. And I’m over here writing a book called the three hour work week. Uh, yeah. All right. Let’s see. Other than that, um,
Speaker 2 00:40:17 Other than that, um, I think more people need to come and do some podcasts advertising. I think some people need to come and check out the amazing subscription levels that you have on WP main line, um, for
Speaker 1 00:40:33 Less
Speaker 2 00:40:33 Than $50 for the entire year. That’s 12 months of craziness with us. Um, you can join as a rail fan on WP mainline.com. So please go ahead and check that out. Um, that goes a long way to continuing to support this show and the writing that we can get, uh, Jeff wrote today, uh, and maybe the bot someday. So $49 a year, please go check it out on WP mainline.com.
Speaker 1 00:40:56 And it’s a loop Lee, thank you very much, sir, for that. And with that, we’re going to close out the show so we can begin our non-existent weekend, or you can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes on dumpy tat pole. Oh boy, that’s a, Hm, no, I am not going to edit it now. I’ll let that be amazing. That’s the first time you can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes on WP main line that calm, just click on the podcast and you’ll find everything you need right there. And you can follow me on Twitter at Jeff Rowe, J E F F R zero and Malcolm. You can find me on Twitter at find purpose, all one word. And if you need anything in the WordPress world, I work@canberracreativeandpresstitan.com. And here we are in November, man, it’s just going to, you already had your Thanksgiving. So I got to have mine, but now you’ve got a Christmas. I mean, this is, this is crunch time during the year. This is that time of the year where you go to bed and start you wake up. It’s dark. And it was frosty this morning. Like there, our grass was crunchy. So it’s getting cold here very quickly. Yes. In the, all right, everybody enjoy your weekend. And we’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long as a buddy,

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 17 of the WP mainline podcasts for Saturday, October 30th, 2021. I’m your host, Jeff Chandler joined by Malcolm Peralta. How you doing sir? Doing well and yourself? I’m, uh, I’m doing pretty well. I, I reasonable. Yeah, we’re recording on a Saturday. Usually we record it on a Friday, but I had an anxiety issue yesterday. And, uh, when I have those, sometimes they’re bad. Sometimes they’re manageable, but yesterday it just took me all day to recover and uh, couldn’t quite get back into the groove kind of a waste of a day. It sucks. But, uh, I was actually have been doing pretty well, you know, in terms of anxiety and anxiety attacks and stuff like that. So I don’t know, it just kind of crept up. I don’t know where, but I took my medicine and I was AOK by the time the evening came.
Speaker 1 00:01:14 So I wanna thank you Malcolm for, uh, spending some of your Saturday with it. You know, folks out there, they say, uh, they say weekend, you know, there’s no such thing as weekends anymore. The week is never ending. It never ends. Um, so good to have you here. And, uh, we also have a special guest with us. That’s going to help us dissect the news of the week. Uh, Liam Dempsey, sir. Thank you very much for spending some of your Saturday with us. Hey, my pleasure. Thanks so much for the invite and for the opportunity to join you and Malcolm and excited to be here. All right. So let’s talk about our first story of the week and, uh, this is, uh, referring to animated plugin icons. Now that’s something that’s new to you. Uh, you’re not the only one. There are new to me.
Speaker 1 00:02:02 Um, in recent weeks I’ve seen people, um, mostly on Twitter, uh, bring these up about animated icons about how they hate them and they should burn and no good. And we shouldn’t have them on, uh, Scott Kingsley, Clarke published a poll on Twitter, asking folks, what do they think about, uh, more plugin icons becoming animated in his two, uh, poll options where yay, animated plug-in icons or, or, or to burn them on. Not surprisingly, most people have voted to bring them on. I’ve never seen, I don’t really browse to plugin directory that much I’m looking for. I’m looking for something, you know, but, uh, Scott shared a few examples of, um, uh, of some plugins that are doing this, like give, give WP is doing that a lot of plugins by WPM. You Def, uh, have plugin animated, animated plugin icons, and, um, some of them are flashy and others are, uh, you know, kind of subtle, you know, you really got to like stare at the icon to see it, but nevertheless, uh, more and more plugins are taking advantage of, uh, being able to, uh, to animate their icon.
Speaker 1 00:03:14 So I, I did some research on this and it turns out that within the past, uh, year or so on the plugin review and the made us slack channels and the WordPress slack instance, the notion of trying to get, uh, animated plug-in icons banned from the directory has been a, uh, has been brought up a few times. And, um, basically what it comes down to is, uh, the, the team, there were folks suggesting that there’d be a guideline added to the detailed plugin review guidelines that said that would ban, uh, animated icons. But the team basically said, you know, as long as the file size is kept down and it’s not, uh, egregious that they’re going to allow it. Um, but, but now it seems that some folks have brought up the accessibility concerns related to animated plug-in icons. I think those are legitimate. Uh, like for instance, um, uh, in terms of, uh, accessibility, one of the guidelines for WCG 21 says that moving blinking and scrolling refers to content, which the visible content can easily sense of motion.
Speaker 1 00:04:19 Common examples include motion, pictures, synchronize media presentations, animations real-time games, and scrolling stock tickers. And, uh, basically folks should have the ability to stop or pause them, which you cannot do on the plugin directory. So there’s accessibility concerns there. Um, but the reason why they haven’t added a guideline is because it’s practically unenforceable. It, it, it, it, it adds too much work to the plugin review team. There are technical hurdles that have to be overcome in order to detect an animated image. Uh, but there is a ticket on track. Uh, we’re there working on some solutions on how to detect, uh, animated images and pre, uh, prevent them from even getting to the plugin directory, which would save the review team a whole lot of trouble to automate this process. And based on everything I’ve read, uh, plugin animated plug icons eventually will be banned or blocked, or just won’t be allowed on the plugin directory.
Speaker 1 00:05:23 And, uh, I, I don’t mind that at all. I, I, I kinda, I kinda cringe thinking about doing a search for plugins, and then on the plugin page seeing about, you know, I don’t know, 6, 7, 8 different icons dancing, being flashy, doing all these weird things. I’m more of a, just keep it static, a static image. You don’t need to be animated, but I understand why developers would, would, uh, participate in having an animated icon because it’s a point of differentiation or point of difference in terms of all the search results. And if you’re as animated, it could stand out. It can garner the eyes of a potential user versus one that’s static. And I don’t know, but, uh, eventually animated pulling in icons. It’s going to be a no go.
Speaker 2 00:06:07 What do you think about that, Liam?
Speaker 3 00:06:09 Well, I’m, I’m with Jeff on a it’s new to me, the, the WP mainline article was where I first heard about it, saw it on Twitter and read up on it. And, uh, equally blessed from us. I don’t surf the plugin library, all that, often I to go for what I want, uh, or what Ray recommended, but what the recommendations are for this project or that task. Um, and I think Jeff kind of covered it nicely that from a marketing standpoint, the animation makes sense, as long as the files aren’t huge and the animation is, I don’t know what cost, you know, what, what their definition of ridiculous or over the top or too much is. But I think the, the real stop, the real no-go for me is accessibility. And if we’re as a project, I’d love to see WordPress demonstrate best practices around accessibility. And if that’s something that we can do, then I think that’s something that we should do. And therefore then I think the, the animation sounds like it has to be,
Speaker 2 00:07:11 But isn’t that kind of like, um, like a false argument in a way relating to this. Like, it seems like they’re trying to figure out how can we make it so that this whole thing seems a little bit more important, um, versus like, how do we address, like why this is happening and how we can deal with it. The idea of it being a technical hurdle to like detect animations and stuff like that. That is so outrageous to me. And so silly to me, like these are some of the best developers in the world, and they can’t like force people to use a static JPEG and make sure that it’s just a JPEG and not, uh, a gift that’s been like given a JPEG extension. Like, I don’t know. I just, I look at this and I kind of laugh because it should be a simple matter in my, in my opinion.
Speaker 2 00:07:53 And I’m leaving it up to the reviewer to determine whether or not an animated GIF is good or bad. It seems like a really bad idea to me because someone might think it’s good and another person thinks it’s bad. Like where do you kind of draw those lines? And how do you really define that? Um, and then the whole accessibility argument, like I said, I just, it’s kind of silly to me. Like, it’s I get that, they’re there, you know, we, we want to be more accessible and we want to be more approachable in that respect, but I don’t think that that is the argument that should make or break this specific thing. Um, I think that accessibility in terms of, you know, animated content on web pages has come a long way, especially over the last like three to five years. Um, and so if we’re going to go down that direction, that doesn’t necessarily ban animations, it just makes it more of a complicated process that only the wealthy plugin companies can really afford to have someone work on. Um, I think just, just ban it outright, um, block PNGs, block gifts, make it, make us, and that’s, what’s going to happen. That’s what’s going to,
Speaker 2 00:08:55 Because it’s just, it’s another opportunity for marketing opportunity to kind of grab attention. Um, and it’s going to make the whole thing look ridiculous. Like the next time you searched for a form plugin and everything’s moving all over your screen, raising
Speaker 1 00:09:09 Like
Speaker 2 00:09:10 Exactly what I’m
Speaker 1 00:09:11 Looking at the repository makes me cringe.
Speaker 2 00:09:14 We’d make fun of Invitae sometimes for like theme forest and stuff like that, but they also have a, um, a plugin area as well, and they don’t allow animated pictures for their plugin repository. So like if themed, like, if Enbato, doesn’t like, why the heck would WordPress? I don’t know. It’s just silly to me.
Speaker 1 00:09:31 Well, they are working on the technical aspects of it. And, uh, what you said it will be black. It will be done. And it will be in a way to where it does not, uh, create more of a backlog for the plug-in review team because that’s, that’s, uh, that’s really what we’re aiming here for. And then there’s also, uh, there’s also suggesting here by Alan Fuller about, um, maybe, uh, because developers would use them to stand out in the search list. What if the plugin search algorithm could be tech, animations and very animated icons at the bottom? So plug-in downs would quickly revert to static, but then That, that, that means that animated icons would be allowed that like, it’s a thing, but we don’t want it to be a thing. I don’t want it to be a failure.
Speaker 2 00:10:17 And I mean, what issue are we truly trying to address here? Like if we’re trying to address the fact that people spending a lot of time and effort creating plugins and themes for WordPress are not feeling that this little icon is giving them the marketing that they need. And maybe we should try to figure out that, like, addressing that specific problem, rather than like this amusing, like stupid side quest of like, should we allow animations or not, like, let’s look at the real problem here and try to address that.
Speaker 1 00:10:46 Uh, speaking of plugins, Josh Pollack, who is the co-founder of Qadira WordPress, which was acquired in 2019, my Saturday drive, uh, he’s announced a new project he’s working on called plugin machine. Uh, and it’s aimed at making WordPress plugin developers lives easier. Um, so what plugin machine does it lays the foundation for developers to add new features, to existing plugins. It, uh, it’ll help you create new plugins and packaging plugins for release, and there’s going to be a web web application that developers can use to create and modify plugins. In addition to a command line interface and API, and a quote, and talking about the project just says, quote, I am very interested in helping WordPress developers build more stable plugins and helping solve ecosystem level problems. For example, performance issues caused by commercial plug-in updates, developer tooling, like I’m interested in building aimed to engineers.
Speaker 1 00:11:43 And that site builders is under invested in it’s a smaller market. I believe the downstream effects are huge for those who serve site builders and spend too much time on bugs conflicts and words that eats up valuable time and resources that could be spent, um, inviting and working on your plugin and quilt. So a lot of people are excited by I’ve seen, ah, the notion on Twitter. He’s got a lot of enthusiasm. A lot of people are chomping at the bit to use this tool and what he’s working on. So, uh, for him to have this kind of, uh, excitement before even releasing anything, I think he might be onto something.
Speaker 2 00:12:20 It seems like it’s like an advanced boiler plate in a way.
Speaker 1 00:12:23 Yeah. I mean, it kinda, that kind of sounds that way.
Speaker 3 00:12:27 That’s how I read it. And I’m not a developer, I’m a designer, so
Speaker 2 00:12:32 Three non-developers on this call. Let’s try to dissect this development plug it, it looks cool. It doesn’t do anything for me specifically, but I mean, I’m sure there are people that can be excited about this.
Speaker 3 00:12:44 I’m super excited for it because Josh does amazing work, uh, you know, setting aside that he’s just a really nice guy and he’s very community oriented, uh, caldera forms as a plugin, filled a niche in ways that at least in my view, other plugins forms, plugins hadn’t and, uh, it’s just a different take. And it’s clear when you open up that plugin that he thinks differently about things and a lot of other, a lot of other folks. So even though it sounds at this stage that the plug-in tool that he’s making, the machine that he’s making is not going to be something that I’m going to buy a license for. Uh, cause it’s not really geared for me. I’m still excited to see what he brings out because he, he makes good products. And if he’s to just point, if this many people are really excited about it, clearly there was a void there there’s a need. And I’d love to see what Jay, how Josh approaches and how he tries to solve that.
Speaker 2 00:13:41 Do you use a boilerplate for your design? Like, do you, if you’re like in Figma or whatever, do you pull in like resources that other people have created as kind of the starting point for your design work?
Speaker 3 00:13:52 That’s a good question. And, and I don’t have a universal yes or no for that. Um, know I’ve been doing this long enough that I feel like I probably have a template in my mind that just my style, my design, what looks good to me, but no, I don’t. I’m not like, oh yeah, I always use the 1, 2, 3 library to get columns or rows or form layouts or this and that.
Speaker 1 00:14:18 Let’s get in my DeLorean, go back about six, seven years. I use a theme framework,
Speaker 2 00:14:24 But I mean, like I, the reason I bring that up is because I wonder if it’s the same thing with developers. Like while there will be an interest in a weather plate, how quickly after that does do people start going well, I mean, this is cool, but I have my specific singular needs and kind of have to build it from scratch every time anyways, because this lets me do a quick proof of concept, but then whenever I want to do my own thing, I do it from scratch. Um, and so I wonder if development is similar in that respect where a lot of developers might find this interesting, but the actual, like, um, you know, at the end of the day, will they actually want to use it, uh, and, and really kind of be part of this process.
Speaker 1 00:15:03 I mean, I guess Josh has tool, the plug-in machine has to be better than what the actual developers using for their own boilerplate. Right. You know, it has to make it more convenient in, in, in many ways for them to replace whatever tools or boiler plates they’re using now. And that, can we just give Josh props for calling it plugging machine? Cause that’s like, that’s what it does. It just helps you create and do all these cool things with plugins. I mean, it’s a perfect name, finally, finally, a great name for a great product. So, uh, everybody’s psyched about that and good luck to Josh and he’s a, he’s kind of gearing up. He’s, he’s a few people have been able to beta test it and, um, he’s getting ready to do a soft launch here in the next few weeks. Well, speaking of design and developers and whatnot, um, you publish this link here. Hey, Erica Corcovado is getting mentioned on the show yet again, second week in a row. Um, but he, uh, published a post and was a specky boy speaking the way that calm an introduction to the WordPress theme, that Jason file and this whole theme that Jason file stuff has been getting a lot of press lately. And, uh, I know Liam, you just recently, um, finished up and released a client project. Uh, what’s your take on the theme that Jason file.
Speaker 3 00:16:29 Yeah, that’s I was, I was looking at, uh, at Eric’s posts and that’s a lot more technical than I get into it. So I, I I’m thinking about that blocks are still complicated to make, from my perspective, as a designer, uh, you know, I can read a little bit of code. I can kind of make something for it, but I am, I don’t think like a developer, my, my first process is it not, let me see if I can write some code, you know, that’s probably my approach is more ultimately comes to code. Let me turn to somebody who knows how to do it, but I like the idea of something that is a bit more portable between different projects or different websites or different systems that I really like where everything isn’t at the block level or in the database. It’s a little bit easier to just grab this from one theme and pop it into another kind of getting back to that boiler plate or that starter theme.
Speaker 1 00:17:25 So basically what theme that Jason is, it’s a canonical way to define the settings of the block out of there. And what it does is it offers steam developers, granular control over how various blocks are styled and what options are available to users in the back end. So it allows for like a site-wide defaults for styling colors, fonts, even the editor itself, but it also enables developers to go deeper and manage things any per block basis. So I was kind of, I read this article and I was kind of thinking, you know, back in the day, if I saw something I liked on a website, like how something looked out, just looking use the inspector tool, maybe find the CSS that’s related to it and try and pick and choose, copy and paste some of that stuff into my own website, which I dunno, it seemed, it seemed like it would work. Usually it doesn’t, but it seems like with this, uh, kind of portable new theme that Jason filed technique for themes and styling, that I’d be able to pick and choose different bits and pieces from within the, within that theme, that Jason file, add it to my own theme that Jason file for the theme I’m using. And I think it would a kind of a little bit like plug and play. It seems like that it seems like that’s going to be possible.
Speaker 2 00:18:39 Uh, maybe a little bit more. I think there’s still some complexity there in terms of like, um, how, you know, how blocks work and stuff like that. The article kind of shows, um, using like the 2019 theme and some like of the default themes, what theme dot Jason, like quote unquote options are available. Um, but yeah, when I looked at this as someone who was like a tinkerer, um, I don’t consider myself a developer either. I look at this and I’m like, Ooh, this feels empowering, like to the, you know, the quick ability to like set things as true and false to enable or disable options. Um, that’s super helpful to me because some of the sites that I help manage the like publishing staff are not tech savvy at all. And so if I can disable some of these options to make it so that they can even kind of mess up the look and feel of a site, I mean, that seems like a really good thing.
Speaker 2 00:19:26 And I kind of goes back to the discussion we’ve had previously where I liked the idea of, you know, making the publishing of content feel very simple for the people that that’s all they want to do. Right? So the idea of having blocks that are locked in position where you can change the text and the image, but you can’t like move the block or totally mess it up. The idea that now we can turn off a bunch of these options and make it very simplistic for, you know, a writer or a publisher to be able to interact with these things on your site. I just, I love this direction. I love these options that we’re being given.
Speaker 1 00:20:01 So this, sorry, go ahead, Jeff. I was just going to say that kind of branches off in a 12, a broader conversation where I’ve I’ve, um, I’ve been participating in the Twitter spaces were press Hangouts that Brad Williams has been doing on Fridays at 1:00 PM. I think it’s at 1:00 PM on Fridays and there’s a left turn. There’s a lot of people that hang out there and I was listening to a lot of, um, agency type people describe, you know, how they build sites for clients. And I asked a question. I said, you know, basically what you’re telling me is no, why don’t you just either create your own CMS or you’re practically stripping WordPress down to the bare bones. I mean, why not just create your own CMS? And they said, no. I mean, WordPress has all of these things and it wouldn’t, doesn’t make sense to recreate of that work that’s available. But, but by and large, it seems like for all these various client projects, the it’s always about slumming down WordPress to the bare nitty gritty and give the client only what they need to get the job done. That’s kinda, that’s kind of what you were describing there, Malcolm. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 00:21:05 Yeah. I mean really excited by that because we’re just because we can make everything purple on a website doesn’t mean we should. And, and one of the great things about the block editor, if people can do whatever they want, but that’s also a real danger from a design consistency, you, or, you know, presentational consistency. And so if you’ve got four or five different people and somebody always makes a heading purple and somebody else makes it orange, there’s, you know, there’s, there’s some problems with that and locking that down, uh, helps visual presentation, consistency among other things. So I liked that idea and that it’s going to be a simple editable file. It’s pretty exciting to me.
Speaker 2 00:21:46 Have you had to deal with that much in your career, Liam, where a, you hand over a project and it’s beautiful and perfect. And it’s your little baby and you’re happy with it and go fly Liberty and then like, you know, six months later.
Speaker 1 00:22:00 Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:22:00 Exactly.
Speaker 3 00:22:04 Question Malcolm. Yeah, of course, of course. Um, and you know, one of the, one of the things that, that the block editor gets built, that I send out, anybody can build these things and anybody can design these things. And I think that’s something that really gets left out of the equation. A lot in talking about the block editor is that yes, you know, with a little bit of guidance and some self-training, everybody, anybody can do a page layout, or you can make a three column layout. You can make a, uh, you can use the tools that WordPress now has within them to, to make websites. But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be well-designed. It doesn’t mean that the fonts are going to be consistent. It doesn’t mean that the colors are going to work within the brand in that way. And since we’re on the conversation today, I’ll just share that as something that I think gets left out a lot, that, that just because we can doesn’t mean we should, right. I mean, technically in WordPress, we could go into the theme editor and edit our themes directly there, we shouldn’t. And there was a notice there, if you go in there, WordPress has a notice that says, don’t do this. You really don’t want to do this, only do this. If you know what you’re doing.
Speaker 1 00:23:13 And speaking to that, uh, what was one of the things that in your experience when you, cause you just recently built a, uh, a client site using the black editor, I think you use off core blocks. And one of the things you had mentioned was, uh, you you’d like to see more abilities, more like, I guess, what was it, filters and hooks to be able to lock things down more.
Speaker 3 00:23:34 Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly, it, it, it’s, again, I’ve filtered student hooks, you know, I know what those phrases mean in a WordPress sense, but I don’t know actually how to use them. And I’m looking for the plugin that has the, that I need and maybe this theme Jason’s going there. I think, and one of the times I spoke about that project, Jeff, uh, rich Tabor was on the call and talked about the various signage. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:23:56 And if there’s anyone he knows about that, Jason, it’s him.
Speaker 3 00:23:59 Yeah. He’s dialed into it. So I think that’s what we’re looking for. And it’s really to enable clients to keep and maintain what they’ve paid for. They’ve paid for design, they’ve paid for good construction and we want to help them keep them in the same way that, you know, I don’t log into my accountants, QuickBooks installation and help update my bookkeeping there. Right. That just doesn’t make any sense. Let the accountant keep that. I don’t, I don’t log on to my lawyer’s, uh, server and update the contract that I’ve asked her to update for me. Um, and that’s kind of the same things, right. All my contract and purple. Uh, so, so I think it’s, it’s really about getting the tool to the point where we can hand it off to businesses that might not be in their site everyday. They might not have a marketing team. It might not have a content team. So they’re in there once a month, two times a quarter, and they want to find the right place to update the copy and not accidentally mess the design up. And, and, you know, in the old days that was accustomed the field with advanced fields, right. A custom theme, I’m sorry, with advanced fields, advanced custom fields for my tongue to strip in left. Right. And center. Sorry guys.
Speaker 1 00:25:16 Uh, well, Malcolm I’ve, uh, I’ve been coming to a realization lately. Do you want to know what it is? Of course, um, that when I’m in the WordPress backend in the post editor, I’m not really writing anymore. I’m building, I’m not writing posts, I’m building posts with these blocks and I don’t like it. Uh, and I, but you know, I’m, I’m trying to get to grips with the fact that, um, no, I’m trying to, I’m trying to, right. The conversation has been taking place within the past few weeks, faculty. I think we’ve talked about it now twice on the previous two episodes about the writing experience and WordPress. And it’s trying to, I don’t know, man, it’s a, it’s really bothering me. Like, like a lot of folks are telling me to use classic press or use the classic editor. And it’s like, I don’t, I don’t want to do that.
Speaker 1 00:26:12 I want to just have this, this native. I want the native experience of writing content to work. And I’m me. I don’t use columns. I don’t use this. I don’t use that. I use, uh, quotes, maybe some images, some paragraphs that’s about all I need. And it still feels like a pain because I’m not I’m. I got to manage all these little things in blacks and content areas. And it’s just, ah, I don’t know, it’s driving me nuts, but you know, I’m realizing now that this is the, this is the future. This is the way it’s going to be. I’m just going to have to deal with it with the blacks where I’m not, I don’t write anymore. I’d build.
Speaker 1 00:26:49 So that’s my realization, my little rant. Uh, so speaking of plugins, if you haven’t updated, if you’re an opt-in monster and you haven’t updated to the latest version, you, uh, you better do that, should put that on your priority list. A word friends, published details of several security vulnerabilities. They discovered in the opt-in monster in back on September 28th, 2021. Um, according to the report, OptinMonster monster released a patch the following day. However, there was additional work that needed that needed to be done. I met patch and the fully pass version was released on October 7th as 2.6 0.5. And at the time I wrote up the article, the most recent version was 2.6 0.6. Now the majority of the problem was that the rest API end points that were implemented, uh, they were, they were done so insecurely, which made it possible for unauthenticated users to access them.
Speaker 1 00:27:44 In fact, one of the end points disclosed sensitive data such as the full site path on the server and API keys needed to make requests to the opt in monster website and what that API key, um, an attacker can actually make changes to any campaign associated with the site, uh, uh, site connected sites, connected the opt in monster account and, and malicious JavaScript that would execute anytime a campaign was displayed on the exploited site, uh, very bad, bad stuff, bad way of implementing the rest API end points. However, they’ve patched it up. It should be AOK now. So make sure that you’re running up to monster 2.6 0.5 or above to, uh, protect yourself from those vulnerabilities.
Speaker 2 00:28:28 One of the issues that I have with these kinds of things. Um, so I’m dealing a lot with the client facing side of WordPress these days, and I still receive a lot of anxiety about updating key feature plugins in WordPress, right? What if opt-in monster, if I update it to latest version, it breaks and I have to like walk them through the fact that, well, if you don’t update it, like this is a security vulnerability, and it could be really bad for you. And so it’s sad that I have to help them weigh the pros and cons of that still to this day, um, to determine whether or not it’s it’s worth updating. And, uh, yeah, I don’t know if either of you have ever had that experience before, but it it’s, you know, either on like convincing someone else or, you know, needing to kind of mentally convince yourself, like, okay, I’m going to update this plugin and it’s a key feature or function on my website. And hopefully it still works after I do that.
Speaker 1 00:29:21 Well, I don’t know. I checked my email and it says some plugins have been updated automatically gravity forms is not running, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like sweet. Then I go onto the website just to make sure it’s not white screen.
Speaker 2 00:29:32 Right. Yeah. I mean, but like if your, if your payment solution for advertising died tomorrow because you updated it, I mean, now you got to choose like, do you revert? Do you like work with the developer and try to figure out why your specific instance isn’t working? Did you, you know, like all of those things kind of always come to light every time this happens. And, um, you know, I think it’s, it’s I had hoped at this point in WordPress’s development, it wouldn’t have been a conversation anymore. There’s a lot of things built in to try to help that. But I mean, it doesn’t automatically do like regression testing to make sure all the functionality still works. Um, because it can’t, and it’s, it’s kind of a difficult thing to deal with.
Speaker 1 00:30:11 So, so if you’re working on a client site and you’re, you’re, you’re working with them or you’re, you’re walking them through the upgrade process, do you first back up their site and you tell them to back up their site first before upgrading anything
Speaker 2 00:30:24 At all? Sure. I mean, when I pass off a site, I always give them the whole rigmarole of like how to do it properly and stuff like that. If we’re not just click the
Speaker 1 00:30:31 Button and say to hell with it, let’s go, let’s see what happened. Whereas you do do That’s right. Because if it breaks, when the site comes back, I got something to write about,
Speaker 2 00:30:43 Oh, you’re going to give me a anxiety attack here. Okay. So, no, I don’t want my class do that. Yeah, I know you do, but I do not let my clients do that, but it’s, it’s still a point of frustration, especially when it’s a central business function of the website. I think that, you know, one of the things I deal with sometimes is if they’re not my client, like actively my client anymore. Um, and they click update on a plugin, that’s a central feature of their thing and it breaks. I mean, they look at me going, they look at WordPress going, like, why does WordPress suck? And then they look at me going, like, why did you, why do you suck for making us use this tool as a central feature for our website? Um, and so I think like we just more needs to happen with making sure that these upgrades, especially security upgrades on the balance, you know, make sense and don’t come with any kind of game breaking changes. And, uh, I think that’s always going to be a struggle, but I just think it’s kind of worth pointing out as, as you know, probably like a million people go to update opt-in monster.
Speaker 1 00:31:41 Yeah. It’s been a long time since I’ve upgraded anything on the website and it just burns, it comes back as a white screen. It’s been awhile.
Speaker 3 00:31:51 Yeah, sure. I think a big part of our job in coordinating and working with and in guiding clients is really to educate them and to speak in ways that relate to what they’re used to day-to-day and, you know, makes perfect sense for us that when we update a single plugin, you know, made by a company, even like opt-in monster a solid company, great code, but you know, they’re making it for how many millions of sites and they can’t possibly test on every unique configuration. And even if we’re using a good host and a reputable provider, and we’ve got other quality plugins on there and a quality theme, things can still break, right? I mean, their code is written by humans and it runs on machines made by humans. Inevitably things can break. And I, I, I find that if over time, if we can teach our clients to understand that things break, you know, even their car breaks or computers break the stakes as lawyers or accountants or plumbers or whatever there is, and we just can’t control everything.
Speaker 3 00:32:51 And so it’s, we try to put as much in place as we can, like quality hosting, regular backups back up before you update things, all the kind of best practices that we hear so much about in the WordPress community. Those have come a long way. I mean, if you thought about updating websites 10 years ago, it’s, I mean, now it’s a click of a button, but you used to have to do all this stuff by hand and drag things and SFTP and all the other things that, that, that used to be much more laborious, but now companies have, have made that so much easier. Um, and I wonder if it’s almost like, like, you know, if would be great to get some kind of stat, like, you know, like opt-in monster opt-in monster updated in of the 4 million installs 17 broke the site or something like that. So like, statistically, it’s just, it’s just not really a concern, uh, day to day. I mean, it’s, yes, it’s a real problem. And for the 17 people who cite it, the white screen of death, it’s, it’s huge problem, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop updating plugins because statistically it’s, it’s not,
Speaker 1 00:33:56 It’s a real concern. No, one’s been educated me cause I still use password is my password on the site.
Speaker 3 00:34:01 Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 00:34:03 Killing me. Uh, so let’s see here, um, by the way, uh, GoDaddy has been, uh, if anybody has been looking for, um, like webinars to, to educate yourself on how to create a black and WordPress or, or what’s going on with Gutenberg or even full site editing, if you go to, I think it’s events that go to eddie.com or GoDaddy pro I have a link or URL in the show notes, but th they they’ve been doing a great job lately with a bunch of webinars. Um, Alex has been a great series on how to build a block and how to manipulate it and, uh, assigned colors and things like that to it. So definitely check that out. And, uh, by the way, speaking of go, daddy, uh, if you’re looking to increase your productivity, one tool that helps thousands, maybe even millions of what developers and designers do every day is go to Eddie pro.
Speaker 1 00:34:58 And what GoDaddy pro does that combined site client and project management all under one roof. So, uh, whether you’re new to web design or looking to grow your business, you’ll find free tools, products, guidance, and support to help you deliver results for your clients. Uh, so you can manage clients, you can do all that stuff real easy, real convenient, all from a single place. And who, uh, if you, if you manage a multiple clients, you know, it’s got to be real nice. Now you don’t have to worry about keeping everything in a Excel spreadsheet or anything of that nature. You can have everything right there in one place. So for more information, check it out@godaddy.com forward slash pro. And thank you very much folks for helping me pay the bills.
Speaker 3 00:35:39 I caught. Alex’s a webinar on what was it? Thursday afternoon, Friday?
Speaker 1 00:35:43 Did you see, as it was, was a part three, I think it was three on how to build a block
Speaker 3 00:35:48 And I’ve, I’ve never met him before. I’ve never seen a webinar with him. I’ve never watched a WordPress TV video, and I was only about two thirds paying attention to it. Cause I was trying to get a couple other things done, but my gosh, he’s a fantastic presenter. Has his tone, his approach, his process of walking through it. Uh, I was, I was really impressed. I, I made a mental note to have to come back and actually give it the full attention. Cause I was, I was really impressed by his teaching style.
Speaker 1 00:36:22 Yeah, I agree. I watched about half of it. Uh, I agree. I, his teaching style was on point and, uh, I was actually like understanding kind of what the heck was going
Speaker 2 00:36:33 On. So wait, does that mean Jessica to make a block?
Speaker 1 00:36:36 No, I’m sick of blocks.
Speaker 2 00:36:39 Jeff’s going to make one
Speaker 1 00:36:40 I’m blanking on soft block. Yeah. It’s going to
Speaker 3 00:36:42 Make it live on its production site. Yeah, of course he
Speaker 2 00:36:45 Will.
Speaker 1 00:36:46 Yes. Yes I will. Uh, so how about this, the first WordPress, maybe the first WordPress agency to accept cryptocurrency payments, uh, you linked to this, uh, Malcolm, what do you think about this?
Speaker 2 00:37:04 So I thought it was interesting that WebDevStudios recently completed a project that they were compensated for in Ethereum. I thought that was super interesting. Um, I’m not surprised, uh, you know, the founders like the executive team in that company are very progressive, um, very interested in what’s happening with, you know, uh, NFTs and, uh, cryptocurrencies and blockchain and all those kinds of technologies and how it could potentially, you know, um, work its way into kind of WordPress and publishing and things like that. Um, the, the fact that it was, you know, potentially, uh, you know, multiple thousands of dollars for taking payments in Ethereum. Like I just, I dunno something tickled me about that. And will we see other agencies do these
Speaker 1 00:37:50 It’s a transaction. I mean, I thought it was interesting that when they sold the project for one app, one app was worth 30, a hundred dollars, but now it’s worth $4,447. So they, they made bank on. I met what it is, it’s an investment. Uh, I mean, it could’ve went the other way. So still could have the pick that they received a payment of $3,800 with one app, but that $3,800 turned into $4,447 without having to do anything that’s related to the project. The project was already sold already done, but you know, it could’ve went the other way to worth AF would have dropped in value then, you know, bonus to, I guess, the, uh, the client and what have you. But, so I mean, they, that they’re willing to accept the risk involved with, with ETH and that, uh, if anybody else who’s going to get involved in accept cryptocurrency should also know and respect the risk involved.
Speaker 2 00:38:50 And that’s just, it, isn’t it like, is it worth taking on that risk? I mean, if it’s the difference between getting the client and not getting the client, maybe, but outside of that, I don’t know that I would take on that, that, um, I’m, you know, I am invested in cryptocurrencies, but I’m not like one of those Polish to the moon going to make me a million dollars kind of people about cryptocurrency. So I don’t know that I would take the risk that how
Speaker 1 00:39:15 Much, how much are you gonna charge me in doge coin Coin or whatever? I don’t
Speaker 2 00:39:21 Know. Yeah. And I mean, we’ve seen periods of time where the, it has gone up or down by as much as like 30% over the course of a week. Um, you know, in, in terms of major coins, uh, decentral land, which is a, the coin name, uh, for Manoj, M a N a um, you know, recently over the last week has gone up 221%. Right. So if you’d put in a thousand dollars in that you would have, you know, a $2,000 worth of that coin today in us dollars. So you have no idea and that’s over a week, so you have no idea what these cryptocurrencies are going to do. Um, you might think you do, but you don’t. Uh, and I think it’s, it’s interesting and it’s fun and it’s a gamble. And I mean, I, a lot of people can’t help, but gamble. Um, I guess, you know, the, the risk was probably fairly low when you’re looking at something like, you know, um, Bitcoin or Ethereum or some of those other main coins, but I don’t know. I thought it was kinda neat, but also, I don’t know that I would take that. Bet. What about your land? Would you get paid in a cryptocurrency
Speaker 3 00:40:26 Currently? No. Cause I know almost nothing about it, you know, beyond Twitter scrolling, um, you know, I understand the concept, but in terms of, of, of how to actually trade it. No, I, I wouldn’t, but like you I’m really interested in that and I’d be interested in knowing the size of the project that a web dev took on, because I could see, you know, if it’s 10,000 and, and, and I’m not saying it was, and I don’t, you know, Brad and I are good friends and, but, you know, I don’t ask him about his numbers. So I know nothing about project sizes that they handle. I know they do very big, but I also know they do some smaller ones, uh, that I could see if it was 10,000, I could see like, you know, even my business I’ll take it in that it might be a complete wash.
Speaker 3 00:41:06 I might not get nothing, but for 10,000, I really get to learn about, get the inside scoop. I get, if I was progressed to the point where Brad is in his knowledge, I think it’s a really interesting way to see how that might work. Right. You know, if we think about, well, I don’t really do this kind of, I don’t know, web design, I don’t really build a net system, but let me, let me take that on as a, I want to get into it. I want to learn, I want to know more, so I’ll take more risks knowing that, you know, I might walk away with nothing or, you know, the number of hours that I put into it. Uh, don’t don’t come back to me, but, but I like it. And I would be interested to know, like, how does, how does that work into like bookkeeping and accounting?
Speaker 3 00:41:47 Right. You know, we made taxes thousands and 2.5 F like, well, I don’t know. Um, I’m so bad at bookkeeping and accounting as it is, but I, I was interested to see that and I expect that if it worked out for them, that it could be the kind of thing that I dunno, some Silicon valley backed VC might be inclined to, to come and look for them because they know that the leaders of that company are open and understand it and want to engage with it. And therefore there might be other work there as well. So not just taking it from a kind of novelty money standpoint, I don’t mean novelty in a silly way, but, you know, in a cutting edge way, but also like this could be a differentiator that we’re one of the leading agencies that knows how to build with the biggest or most well-known most popular content management systems. And we understand an Ft
Speaker 2 00:42:45 Or cryptocurrencies or whatever. Yeah. So Jeff, how long, how long until WP mainline allows donations and, uh, you know, doge coin or Shiva, you know, or, you know, Bitcoin or,
Speaker 1 00:42:55 Well, I mean, I do have a metal mask wallet set up, so I do, I do have an NFC Allahu NFT.
Speaker 2 00:43:02 So you got to put your wallet address on your site so everyone can donate, uh, you know, the, like, you know, a sh you know, a singular Sheba, you know, which would be worth like 0.0006 reserves.
Speaker 1 00:43:12 But at least I own it. Yeah, you don’t it easily, I guess. And by the, and by the way, speaking about all this crypto coin and all this stuff, you know, I went to a place last night where it’s a cash, only their systems are down. I said, what the hell is cash? So I had to go run over a discount drug Mart, go to the ATM and in my wallet right now for the first time, in like two years there’s cash in my wallet. And it’s weird. I don’t know. I thought I’d share that story,
Speaker 2 00:43:40 Funnily enough, to kind of go on top of that. Um, I went to the Philippines over a year ago and the only cash in my wallet is money from the Philippines. And I, I never converted it back. And so now I just have this Filipino money in my wallet, and I don’t have any like local Canadian cash or anything like that. It’s just a couple of bills that Filipino money probably worth like the equivalent of like five bucks American or whatever. But yeah, it’s just kinda funny.
Speaker 1 00:44:03 No, wait a minute, have you tried to buy anything? Like, do you just whip it out on the counter and you try and buy something and they just look at you going, what is that? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:44:11 No, I haven’t done that yet, but I probably should. It’d be
Speaker 1 00:44:12 Funny, but one of the pieces of advice that, and this was an interview that Matt Madeiros of WP minute did with Lisa Sabin Wilson. And I think this was good advice. She says, make it easier on yourself and deal with what you know, to be true at the time of the agreement or transaction. If Beth is worth 4,000 USD, then use that as your metric for pricing. Don’t try to speculate on its worth tomorrow or next week. Crypto carries with it a certain amount of risk. So come to terms with that first and then work with what you know, to be true in the moment. And I thought that was good advice. Well, once you start speculating or started thinking about it going up or down and having that kind of speculation involved with the pricing of the project, I think you could get real muddy real fast. So you just, you just, you just pick a point in time and just go with it. I agree. And let the chips fall where they may. Uh, so let’s see that’s about it for stories of the week. Is there anything else really
Speaker 2 00:45:15 Well? I mean, I mean, the, the big thing in my opinion is, oh, here we go. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re not supporting WP main line, Jeff has created a whole bunch of ways to do it, and we will get him to put his metal mask wallet address out there. So you can start sending them money on that way, too. But, um, if you haven’t seen the really cool advertising, like the custom box car things, you definitely gotta go check out WP mainline.com and see those advertisements. He also has a system where you can become a member of the website, and basically that supports this podcast, other content creation, other things that we will eventually get Jeff to do, maybe including even making his own block. Um, so go ahead and check out W2 main line and check out all the different advertising and sponsorship options that are available today.
Speaker 1 00:45:56 Uh, my own block or Jeff will build you a block. It’s kind of funny in between where the signals are on the train and, uh, the railroad, uh, the different sections are called blocks. So there you go. Just, I can’t get away with it, even if I tried even my fast and then my passion for trains blocks, I’ve gotta do a blocks and trains.
Speaker 2 00:46:23 When’s the new box are coming out by the way.
Speaker 1 00:46:25 Uh, if there’s no delay and he launches on Monday, then we will, everyone will see the, do the woo fresh rebranded Mike’s car on Monday. Perfect. Bob WP. And, uh, yeah, I w I would very much like anybody out there. If you’ve got a plug in, if you’ve got a service, you’ve got an agency. I mean, don’t rely on me. Get rid of me bypass the moment, AKA me just buy the box car. You get something really cool made. You can keep it, you could share it. It’ll be on the website. It’ll advertise a point and link to whatever it is you want to advertise. Then you don’t have to worry about me and hope that I write about your flagging product or service. It could be bad review could be good review, but now you just pay me 500 bucks to get something nice and cool on a reputable WordPress site. And then that’s it easy peasy, easy marketing, very sound investment.
Speaker 2 00:47:21 Let me tell you, I mean, yes, of course sounds right.
Speaker 1 00:47:24 Yes, very, very much sound. Uh, so, um, that’s going to do it for this episode of a WP mainline podcast is Saturday edition. You can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes on WP mainline.com, just click the podcast link, and you can follow me on Twitter at Jeffery J E F F R zero, where you can see me rant and rave about how I hate writing in WordPress, because I’m building, I’m not writing anymore. It’s sad and Malcolm, where can we find,
Speaker 2 00:48:01 I mean, you can find me at, uh, find purpose on Twitter and always you can reach out to me through Canberra creative, um, where I’m a product owner and Preston, where I am the co-founder
Speaker 1 00:48:13 And Liam, thank you very much for being a part of, uh, being a part of this crew. And, uh, tell us a little bit about you and where can people follow you?
Speaker 3 00:48:22 Yeah, no, thanks for the invite to be here. And I’m going to take just amendment Jeff to thank you. You started the show by talking about some of the challenges you’re facing in your own life around anxiety and, and that’s not easy to face, and it’s certainly, I would expect not easy to talk about. So thank you that you are talking about that, uh, that helps normalize the challenges that others face. And I’m very grateful to you for, for doing that. And I’ll even go so far as to say, I’ll invite you to think about how you said Friday was kind of a wasted day, but maybe it was a day that was well spent in that you were taking care of yourself. It was not how you intended to spend it. You did not get through your to-do list, but had you tried to get through your to-do list, you might not be in a position to record and get this done today. So thank you very much for, for your putting yourself out there in such a public way. I really appreciate it. That you’re
Speaker 1 00:49:23 Welcome.
Speaker 3 00:49:24 And if you’re looking for me online, you can find me at Liam Dempsey on Twitter, Liam, dempsey.com. And I work with, uh, my own business called lb design, and we’re on a few different outlets and, uh, wow. That’s not really rough. Clearly I’m getting Friday or Saturday afternoon brain, and there’ll be designed that TV like television.
Speaker 1 00:49:47 Nice. Okie dokie. So that’s going to do it for this episode. And, uh, I don’t know, based on some of the things I was talking about earlier, uh, Malcolm may be taking some anxiety meds. I don’t know. We’ll see. Keep you updated. We’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long everybody

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 16 of the WP mainline podcast for Friday, October 22nd, 2021. I am your host, Jeff Chandler joined, uh, by the one and only Malcolm pearls of press Titan and Cambridge creative. Ooh, got that right off the top of the show. Very nice. How you doing, sir? I’m tired, but I’m doing, doing well. Yeah. Feeling a bit sleepy. I’m feeling a little punchy. Actually. I didn’t get much sleep. So I’m like on that verge of like being kind of silly. So I actually got some sleep and I feel sleepy. You didn’t get much sleep at all and you feel the opposite. Yeah, apparently. Yeah. So I wanted to, it says nothing to do with WordPress. I thought we were talking a little bit before the show here about what was going on, but I’ve, I’ve had some, something weird going on with me lately when it comes to sleeping and it is I’ll be sleeping and I will have what I perceive to be a dream.
Speaker 1 00:01:15 I think I’m dreaming and there’ll be a time where, um, I can see myself in the dream. I can see myself sleeping and there comes a point where someone, it feels like someone has coming up beside me next to my bed and is getting ready to either touch me, to hit me to do something. And five or six times now I have woken up while swinging my right hand to the left side of me. You know, as if I’m trying to knock this person out only to wake up and realize there’s no one there, and this has happened about five or six times in a row. And my wife has even commented that she has seen me like kicking and fighting people in bed, you know, in my sleep. I don’t know what’s going on. I joining medication. Do I do I need to, it’s not even like I’m dreaming of being in a fight, defending myself.
Speaker 1 00:02:09 There’s just this one instance where I could see, I could see myself sleeping as if I’m defenseless and someone just, I could just feel the pressure and everything that comes along with it, where someone is just about ready to touch me or do whatever it is I think you’re going to do. And I just, just swing my right arm as hard as I can. And, um, I just, I keep whipping, I keep hitting Aaron. And when I wake up, I’m taking deep breaths. I’m wondering what the hell is going on. You know, that’s not good for you, the anxiety. So I don’t, I don’t know what’s been going on, but it’s happened five or six times now. And I’m starting to get a little bit concerned. Sounds like more doctor time in man. I don’t know. Maybe it, I can’t explain it. I don’t even, you know, if I was my dream, I’m pretty good at remembering my dreams.
Speaker 1 00:02:58 And if was, if I was defending myself or I was in a fight or something like that, like I remember that like you would make sense, but it’s just all of the times now I just envisioned myself and I thought maybe it could be like sleep paralysis, but it’s not that because I can eventually I could fight through it. I can get out of that. Maybe it’s a form of sleep paralysis. I don’t know. Uh, but, uh, I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I need some more doctor time. Geez. I don’t know. Uh, but that’s, that’s why I’ve been kind of feeling sleepy and sleep some kind of whack and thank God my wife sleeps on the other side of the bed or else I could have been in jail for domestic violence. And I didn’t even mean it.
Speaker 2 00:03:37 I actually have a story kind of related to that. And hopefully people won’t take that the wrong way. But, um, I, uh, when I, apparently, when I was slipping one time, um, I moved my arms and I hit my wife in the face while she was sleeping and she kind of woke up and was like, what the heck? And apparently I said to her that I was conducting a symphony and it was going to be epic and
Speaker 2 00:04:01 Conducting a symphony in my dreams. And, uh, yeah. And she was just like, you know, just completely shocked. And like I rubbed her face and was like, go back to sleep, go back to sleep. And then I was, apparently I was asleep the entire time, but I have no recollection of this whatsoever. And flight didn’t leave a mark, but it was one of those funny things where it’s like, no idea. And she’s like, you did, you, did you hit me in the face? Cause you were, you were dealing with a symphony or conducting a symphony. So
Speaker 1 00:04:27 Sleep is weird, man. I’ve, I’ve had dreams where, you know, that feeling you get when you’re on a plane in the turbulence and you have a sudden drop in altitude. I have felt that in my dreams, even though I’m just laying in there, right. I’m just laying in bed sleeping. How can I possibly feel the dropping of altitude when I’m not moving? Right. It makes no sense to me, but I can feel it. It feels real in my dream. Uh, what a, what a wacky world, the state of dreams are, speaking
Speaker 2 00:04:57 Of dreams. I mean WordPress, right?
Speaker 1 00:04:59 Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, I woke up in a dream come true. I’m writing about WordPress living up the WordPress dream. You’re exactly right. Uh, so I actually attended my first WordPress meetup yesterday. This is the first meetup I’ve attended in a long, long time. No, I did not physically go there. I actually attended the word camp Philly, WordPress meetup group. They did a, um, Liam Dempsey did a presentation on, uh, his thoughts from, uh, their first client site built on the black editor. So I was kind of watching that presentation, trying to get the, get a feel for how it went and sort of the feedback they had regarding the black editor. And, uh, one of the surprising things from his presentation that I took away from it was that when they trained the, their clients on how to use the black editor, uh, it actually went fairly smoothly.
Speaker 1 00:05:55 Um, the, the training process was fine and they actually put up on the black Eder rather quickly, which was surprising to me because I’ve heard a bunch of horror stories, but a lot of the stories I’ve heard were from developers, not from the actual clients. Uh, so, so there was that, and they also talked about their experience of limiting blacks and the core blacks versus blacks from, or a black library and how they’re kind of hoping that in the future, there’s more of a, uh, there’s more ways or maybe an easier way for developers or consultants to limit the amount of, of blacks or at least the blocks that, uh, the client can access because the client is probably most of the time when they’re going to use a certain set of blocks. So there’s no sense in providing them access to all the other blacks that exists.
Speaker 1 00:06:46 And there’s a lot of blocks. So, you know, so they were talking about that and, uh, there was a couple other things there, but it just, it was great to actually now, now, now I’ve said that I’m not really big on online presentations and some, but I haven’t done any one of these in a long, long time. And it was again an admit, it felt great. It felt great to chat with other people there, as he’s doing his presentation to ask questions, part of a meetup group, uh, I had a good time and, uh, congrats and a nice job by the people who organize and run the WordCamp Philly meetup group. I had a good time in those. It was pretty cool to attend from Ohio.
Speaker 1 00:07:26 And so, I mean, when you say that you attended, like, I mean, the first question that comes to my mind is, um, did anyone know you were there and who you were? Yes. Yes. A micro-celebrity Nope. I was not a, uh, I was not a micro celebrity. I mean, I, it’s not, like I said, you were a full celebrity. That’s amazing. I, I, uh, yeah, yeah. It’s not like those days where I’d go to work camp, San Francisco. I have a whole group group section from Japan that wants to take my picture. You know, it’s not like, it’s not like, it’s not like that point. Those were the days. But, um, but I announced, Hey, you know, this is Jeff from Ohio. And, you know, I run WP mainline and, you know, some folks said high, but it wasn’t like a big deal. So it was fine.
Speaker 1 00:08:07 It was nice. We all know each other. And I asked a lot of good questions. I, you know, it’s no surprise that I was, I was the most active commenter in the chat because that’s usually when I am just asking questions and sharing some knowledge, stuff like that. But overall it was a pretty good time. Kind of had me yearning for sort of a physical in-person where camp. And then I’m like, Nope, not ready yet. Not ready for that. Or meet ups, I’ll stick with the, with the hybrid or, uh, the online approach for now. And by the way, speaking of work camps, uh, I don’t know if we’ve mentioned this on the show yet, but there is a, uh, there is some work going on now for word camp Porto. I don’t, I think that might be where camp EDU or it might be something separate, but, uh, there there’s there’s work underway, organizing underway for a work camp in Porto, or can’t be you to clarify that and look it up.
Speaker 1 00:09:03 But there’s some things afoot now in terms of organizing and getting some in-person word camps, uh, going on, uh, with that said, there has been some, some articles that have come out this week that have led to some thinking and some discussions. And one of those was published by Justin Fairman, who you might know from LearnDash a plugging that was recently acquired by a stellar WP over there at liquid web. And his post is about Gutenberg with a black editor, and he talks about it as a mats page builder. And he says that he remembers Gutenberg being announced as the, uh, as a, as a, as a, as a page builder. Like it was going to be a great way to, to a front end page builder, but it turns out it hasn’t really turned out to be that way at all. And it’s sort of has transitioned into the same that we call full site editing.
Speaker 1 00:10:01 Now that has kind of taken on it’s a buzzword. And a lot of people are excited about that, but basically the basis of his article is that Gutenberg or what we now see as the black editor, uh, has been advertised as, as a page builder. But then it was advertised as a new revolutionary way of creating content. And at this point he doesn’t see it as being good at either and he doesn’t think a Gutenberg can be, can be good at both at least, or he doesn’t think it’s good at both now. Um, and I, and I tend to, uh, agree with him now. He says that he’ll always recommend WordPress to people looking to build a business that relies upon organic traffic from Google. And as a CMS, WordPress can’t be beat. But when it comes to writing content, he doesn’t even bother with the editor.
Speaker 1 00:10:51 He doesn’t even bother using the classic editor or classic press. He actually uses a, uh, program or service called write freely. So that’s what he uses. And, um, so, so there you go. And he, and he talks about how elementary has been crushing it. And he says that he’ll continue to pull for, for Gutenberg. Uh, he knows it will grow as a page loader, but he’s hopeful that along the way it become, it can become a decent writing tool. Now, Joe, Casabona he read, he published an article in response to Justin’s article and kind of agreed with him that, you know, WordPress really isn’t the editor, or really isn’t the place to go to, to write your content. And he actually lists out, uh, some different tools and things you could use, uh, using a separate writing app. And he actually has a couple of convincing arguments as to why you’d want to do this anyways, such as keeping your content locally.
Speaker 1 00:11:44 And it acts as a backup. You don’t have to worry about losing your internet connection and maybe losing that content that’s in the editor. And all of those are actually really good points, even though WordPress kind of has things built into that to take care of those, but as I’ve experienced in the past, there’s still ways to where you could lose content. If you’re relying on the, uh, on the editor, no hope, hoping that things are saving. And, and what have you all of this to say that seeing these types of articles, it makes me sad because WordPress to me, when I use the editor and well, you know, I’ve said it here multiple times when, when Gutenberg works, it’s great. I can see it as being the future of managing and creating content, but when it breaks, it breaks bad. When you have an invalid Jason response, what do you do?
Speaker 1 00:12:36 That things are broken. You have no idea what to do. You have no idea where to go, what even the first step is to take, to get yourself back to a point where the editor works and, uh, you know, you can get back to writing and there’s still actually some weird things like, like I was reading a bug report the other day, where if you’re using a, a single apostrophe to do something or to write something within, within the editor, it’s it doesn’t work, it’s broken. And there’s also something that really annoys me. In fact, we’re, if you try and copy multiple paragraphs from a, from a blog post and post those into one quote block, it doesn’t work. It ends up your quote block turns into three separate paragraph likes, and you have to finagle the texts to get it all, to fit into a quote block.
Speaker 1 00:13:23 So like, I’m kind of in agreement with these guys and it makes me sad that, and I feel like one of the reasons why we’re kind of in this state right now, where the editors in this state is because it’s in flux, it’s in development where WordPress is in this transitional phase, where the working on all these different facets that requires the editors, the page building the full site, editing the content, authorship and creation is there, but it’s not quite there. I mean, there’s still a lot of work left to be done. And I feel like we’re at this point where we’re just going to have to go through the growing pains until we get to the point where I hope there’s a point where we look back and said, man, this was all worth it. And that’s both on the content creation side and the theme development side and the full site editing experience and all that. I want to get to that point where we look back and say, Matt was right. Everything that we got now today, it was painful to get to this point, but he was right. And WordPress is at, uh, where it needs to be, and it was all worth it. But, you know, until we get to that point where we’re going through these growing pains and man, it sucks. Yep.
Speaker 2 00:14:31 It does. I think one of the issues here, and one of the issues that has always existed is that the block editor is trying to serve too many masters in.
Speaker 1 00:14:41 Right. Right now, right now it certainly feels and looks that way.
Speaker 2 00:14:45 Yeah. It’s, it’s trying to make it so that you can design pages. Um, and then it’s also trying to let you add content to pages. And I think that that’s kind of a mistake when I think about element or for example, I think about using that as a tool to lay out my page, right. Specific pages. Um, if I want to blog with Elementor, I’m laying out like a header and a sidebar and a footer, and then I’m just blogging in normal WordPress where I think Gutenberg is trying to do all of those things and it’s doing none of them perfectly. And it’s leaning more on designing layouts of pages through using blocks as the tool for that, and not enough about how we deal with content. And I’m my biggest concern is we’re going to have a, uh, an issue kind of like what Drupal has, where, you know, the, the understanding or the onboarding of new users to the platform and understanding how to be proficient in it is going to take longer and longer because they’re giving too much power, too many tools too quickly to users.
Speaker 2 00:15:44 I kind of miss the times where we had like, you know, post types or like you could like select that, you know, this one’s going to be a podcast and this one’s just going to be an image gallery and this one’s going to be, um, a quote, right. And you could just select those. And it really kind of simplified the experience and separated out the design from the content management. And I know that, you know, some people want the ability to lay things out, but I kind of see the future as you know, for 99% of us and 99% of the time, I’m not going to create a new custom layout for an individual post or page. Right. Sometimes I might do that, but most of the time, I just want to be able to publish my content, give it a featured image, have it, have it, have some links in some, some quotes in it and get it out there to the world.
Speaker 2 00:16:24 And I think that, uh, you know, we’ve gone too far away from that, that initial need and that, that, you know, we talk about how often things are needed in WordPress. Um, so like, should they be core or should they be plugins? And this, you know, one of the determining factors is will you use this all the time, right? Like, is it something that you need constantly? And I’m kind of wondering, like, do we really, truly need a built-in page layout system like this? Um, maybe, but does it need to be part of the post and publishing process of creating a page or a post, maybe not. Um, I saw a thing where they were locking down blocks, where you could edit the content of the block. Like you could change the photo out, or you could change the text, but you couldn’t move the block around or like adjust certain things with it.
Speaker 1 00:17:09 That’s an amateur
Speaker 2 00:17:09 That’s coming. Yeah. And I thought, that’s, that makes some sense, right? Because you have designers who can design the page and then you have editors and authors who can post content in the page and you shouldn’t really expect the same person to be responsible for both of those things. And you should ideally have a way that the design gets out of the way for authors to publish content. And I think we’re not doing enough of that.
Speaker 1 00:17:34 Yeah. I, I, it’s just like all these years, WordPress, to me, uh, in the editor all those years, I’ve written thousands of posts within the WordPress editor. There were times where I’ve used, uh, Calypso or a different desktop app. Maybe even the mobile app I’ve used other apps, but I’ve always gone back to the editor because I liked the feature set that it has. And I had Owen bed support and I had all these other cool things that some of these others editors didn’t have, but it’s, um, it just, it just bites me as a content author, content producer, as someone who writes posts, where they involve quotes, adding an image here or there maybe a little gallery here. And there’s not things that are not complicated, not too many call to actions or anything like that. It’s just way more, it feels like it’s way more difficult than it has to be.
Speaker 1 00:18:31 And like I said, God forbid if it breaks, because if it breaks, what can I tell you Sol you know, those helpful error messages, right? Yeah. So I, I, I just, it’s just sad to me and I hope I hope sooner rather than later, I know that all of the effort and focus right now is on for say adenine, black themes, black, this and black debt that sort of the design, the look and feel of WordPress. And I really hope sooner rather than later, that a big focus can go back onto the content authorship and generation and, and writing aspects of the editor because there is still a lot of work that has to be done. And man, it just, it just sucks that, you know, that it’s to the point where, uh, you know, people are, are suggesting, Hey, use this editor or use that editor and you’ll have a much better time.
Speaker 1 00:19:29 No, but right. But that’s, that’s the way it is. But then, like I said, I also feel like we’re just kind of in this gray area of the transitional period, and these are just some of the pains that we’re going to have to go through and whether through, and hopefully come out on the other side, a better for it. Speaking of Ella mentor, uh, Ben Pines, this is actually something new is Ben Pines, who was the chief marketing officer for Elementor back in the days. And when it was only installed on about 200,000 sites, now it’s like, what, eight or 9 million. So they’ve experienced some growth over the years. He announced that he is going to be stepping down. He’ll be leaving ELA mentor at the end of this month. Basically it comes down to his, uh, he’s going to be moving on to bigger and better things.
Speaker 1 00:20:18 He feels like his work is done. There are elementary. He helped, uh, over six years span of time to record a bunch of feature release videos. He created a weekly YouTube show. He built a magazine recorded a podcast series that he was able to interview a bunch of, of his marketing heroes. You run a countless number of blog posts. Basically the guy did everything that was necessary to help Ella mentor grow into the page builder that it has become. And he says in his tweets that ELA mentor today is a stronger, more mature company than it ever was. So the time is right for me to take the step. I feel excited about the progress and trajectory trajectory of the company. And can’t wait to see how it continues to evolve and improve the lives of web creators further. And he says, he’s not completely removing himself from the element or community debt. He’s just stepping down as his role. And he will be on the sidelines as a member of participant, still participating in the community. So there’s a lot of kudos and praise that have been handed out to Ben Pines. And, you know, in thinking about it to be sort of near the ground level of a company or a product like ELA mentor and have maybe 200, 300,000 sites that are using it or customers. And then when you leave, it’s in the millions, that’s got to feel pretty damn good. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:21:46 And to stay in a tech position or a tech company for six years nearly, that’s pretty rare too. I mean, that speaks volumes to elementary as a company in making sure that they maintain a positive culture that Ben wanted to stick around for all that time.
Speaker 1 00:22:03 I’ve heard nothing but good things about ELA mentor. I’ve never used it, but when it comes to page builders, uh, there are countless agencies and developers out there that, that turned to elementary. Or like we just mentioned Justin Fairman, he sat elementary, has been killing it. So have you ever used a Elementor? Have you thought anything? Okay. What’s your, what’s your experience been like?
Speaker 2 00:22:24 Um, I mean, I don’t really have any graphic design skill and it makes stuff that I do look really good. So that makes me feel really empowered. Um, and I mean, it, it can feel a little bit slow and jenky sometimes when you’re doing certain actions, but the number of like secondary ad-ons for like WooCommerce and things like that, the ability to lay out pages quickly, the ability to kind of templatize your pages like we were talking about before have like custom headers for different categories, if you want. Like, there’s so many functions that are very kind of easy to do with El mentor and it’s so visually engaging and there’s so much prebuilt stuff. It, it just feels wonderful. And when you’re, when you need to kind of build out like half a dozen of like really good looking cool pages element, where does that like in such a stellar way?
Speaker 2 00:23:14 Um, I will say though, like I’m trying to move away from plugins as much as possible in, in all these different areas. So, um, you know, Elementor is also like in terms of kind of a little bit of a backend way is a bit heavy. Um, they’re really good. Like they’ve optimized the heck out of it for the front end experience. That’s not like weighing down your site as much, but it, uh, you know, it can always use more work there and it’s still not as lightweight as just kind of using a, you know, a well-designed Gutenberg theme. Um, so, but I mean, I, I’ve always been very impressed with it and it’s always made me feel very empowered.
Speaker 1 00:23:49 Speaking of page builders, one of the things and this hearkens back to the presentation I saw last night with Liam Dempsey, he was talking about one of the things that’s built into and Smokey’s making this presence. Now, my wife just got home. So there he is. That’s great. Um, but uh, these page builders, they build in one of the things when they hand the client over or hand the site over to the client is the educational aspects of the training. In this case, they didn’t use a page builder. They just use straight up Gutenberg block editor and some blacks and stuff like that. But then he mentioned that in other times, if they hit the time, they would have done training on the page builder that they use to build the site. And I was thinking all of these different page builders with all this different terminology and all these different ways of accomplishing the same thing. Now, I imagined that you could probably make a college level course of all these different paints builders that you probably have to train clients on before you actually hand the site over to them. If you’re, if you’re using one of them.
Speaker 2 00:24:50 Yeah. I mean, and that’s another reason to try to avoid a lot of these things and stick to core functions, right? Because the core stuff is going to be the easiest to find documentation for and, and typically, and the easiest to get support for. I mean, if you’ve ever gone to your web host and said, I’m having an issue, one of the first things they’re going to say is, have you deactivated all your plugins? Like, so using these third party tools, um, can kind of be a little bit difficult, especially for that learning curve, um, or for that support curve. So, you know, it’s just another reason to try to avoid them as much as possible, even though they are so empowering.
Speaker 1 00:25:23 And I think what you just said, I think that’s why a lot of people, not just agencies, but clients and just maybe everyday users, everyday users who know what’s going on, uh, probably trying to stick with full site editing or full Gutenberg based themes because that’s going to be the easiest to maintain. And like, like all the reasons you just said, and you won’t have to worry about relying on a plugin or a page builder or learning an entirely different set of terminology and the way things work, you just stick with core, speaking of core and blocks back in late August, Matiaz Ventura, the lead architect of Gutenberg, uh, creative and issue on Gutenberg started at the bay on renaming reusable blocks. And he says, and I quote, reusable, blacks have a long history. Now they started as saved blacks and went through some renaming iterations until they settled on reusable blocks.
Speaker 1 00:26:20 This worked alright at the beginning, but with the introduction of patterns, its meaning has started to become fuzzy and confusing in the end. Patterns are also reusable pieces of design. Given the nature of these blocks is to have content in sync, wherever it is displayed at once. Update everywhere. I propose that we change the name in the UI to sync blocks and adjust a black description a little bit to clarify that. So there’s been, and this has kind of come up recently in recent days and there’s been a lot more, there’s been an influx of feedback on this ticket and basically reusable blocks is just what he described. You can save a block or turn it into a reusable block. You can put it in different parts of the website. And when you update it, rev updated across the site in one place, it updates it across the entire site.
Speaker 1 00:27:10 So with that in mind, I was thinking that, uh, global blocks let’s change the name from reusable blocks to global bikes. And I was thinking of like global variables as the precedents for this, where if you use this type of black and you change it once, then the changes affect it globally, which means wherever it is across the site, I’ve seen a number of people who agree or have also suggested this, but there’s also like site-wide content block or there’s been some other terms that have, that have come up. But, but in all this, what I want to bring up is that it’s, it’s an interesting conundrum in that these blocks have names, but some of these blocks, their functionality can overlap to the point where they can do some of the same, if not all of the same things that another black can do. So the name naming them as like almost, oh, you throw your hands up in a year.
Speaker 2 00:28:05 Well, I mean the good news about something like global blocks is that it’s, you know, it’s not too dissimilar from what Elementor calls their things. They use, um, global things as well. So I think one of the issues is not necessarily the naming, it’s the understanding, right? So,
Speaker 1 00:28:21 Oh, so, so you brought this up, but there’s actually a comment by Zeblun Stanfield. He actually said, because there’s a question in the issues is what do the major page builders call them? Because they all have had them for years before Gutenberg. So I’ll quickly run down the list, a Vita global elements, BeaverBuilder global modules, columns, rows, uh, Brizzy global blocks, divvy, global modules, rows sections, Ella mentor, global widgets, oxygen builder, reasonable parts, and visual composer, global templates. So we see all these global use pretty much in all the different page builders in one way or another. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:29:02 Um, but I think, I think the bigger thing is to just make sure that it’s visually distinct, um, you know, we haven’t seen much kind of color in terms of determination for block types or block things in, um, Gutenberg or in the block editor yet. Um, you will, when you’re looking at like the block pattern library of the block library, you’ll see that sometimes people will have their icons in like green or purple or orange or whatever. Um, but when I embed a block into my page and that maybe it’d be called the global block, let’s say we put a global block in it should maybe be highlighted in some way that I know that if I change that it will be changed everywhere.
Speaker 1 00:29:40 Yeah. It should have a little bike
Speaker 2 00:29:43 Visual indicator, right. Because it’s not just about what we call it. It’s about making sure that people understand visually that this ha this change is important to know about. Because if you change it, it will be changed everywhere.
Speaker 1 00:29:58 Yeah. And I can, I can certainly see where you’ve had. You have all these black spread across your website, and then if you use something like the, uh, uh, uh, what’s it called? What’s it called? Uh, the man, the plugin by Nick Diego, where you can do contextually, uh, control where and when, and schedule content or widgets or not, we’ll just put blocks, show up widget your blacks through all the same thing nowadays. Anyways, look at me. I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about anymore, but
Speaker 2 00:30:28 His block
Speaker 1 00:30:28 Visibility plugins. Yes, yes, yes. That allows you to contextually control when and where black show up. You can even schedule content using that plugin when a blight shows up. But I can actually see where if you’ve got a pretty large site and all these different pages, and let’s say you update a specific block for that page and it’s a global block. Well, now you’ve just updated it. And you might’ve added information that’s specific to that page, but now it shows up on a different page, which is wrong. And what if you end up in this, this would be me, I’d end up in a loop where I’d go to this page, change it, go back to that page, change it. And it’d probably take like four or five times before I realized, oh, that’s a global block. What am I doing? Doing this to myself? Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 00:31:10 I don’t. I, and I haven’t used this functionality yet, but is there actually any way to like disconnect them? So let’s say I pull a global block into my page and I’m, I want it to be, I want to use the exact same look and feel, but now I want to change the information, but I don’t want to change it everywhere. Is there a way to like separate it or like disconnect it? So it’s no longer,
Speaker 1 00:31:26 Oh man, I haven’t been to those other ones. I haven’t used the, I haven’t used those blacks extensively, but I want to say that you can click on the transform tool and transform it into a different block. I hope so, but, but I can’t confirm that. Right. All right. So now we’ve got black groups or group blocks. We’ve got black patterns. We have reusable blocks, which are like, you said more, more like global blocks. So, oh man, we have all these different blocks. Naming is hard. I’m glad I’m not in the Mamie business. I got, you know, and Facebook’s going to find out the hard way that naming things are hard.
Speaker 2 00:32:08 Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:32:08 Seriously. Uh, I wanted to give a shout out to Mr. Sean, Andrew. Sean Andrews is a digital designer at, on a medic. He actually has been one of my favorite Twitter accounts to follow as of late because he’s been working on various ideas and he’s just been throwing them out there on Twitter. Like he’s, he’s got this little video where he’s been working on some designs for the, uh, black pen and browser, just kind of his take on things he’s also been working on. Um, like what if student Berg had a way change colors for the selected black and all its inner blocks, which has been kind of neat and has been working on, uh, different like navs and tools and, uh, black controls in the, uh, black toolbar is he also has this concept of what, if you could see your relevant black patterns when adding a WordPress black, which I thought was neat.
Speaker 1 00:32:58 Um, so he’s just posting all these different concept concepts and ideas out there. And it gave me a sense of nostalgia because I remember back in the day, um, this is what it was like in WordPress. He had all these different people with all these different concepts and ideas publishing them on their blog and it was fun. I’m like, okay, you know, that’s, that’s a neat idea. And you know, everything wasn’t hidden or tied into a tweet or an issue or deepened attract ticket somewhere, but people were actually kind of publishing to the world, their ideas, no matter how crazy they might’ve been, you know, it was, it was just fun. And I would like to see, uh, more people in the WordPress community do what Sean Andrews is doing. And just, if you have a concept or an idea, I don’t care how wacky you think it might be.
Speaker 1 00:33:45 Just toss it out there, throw it out there, write about it, publish the blog, post about it. I want to see that stuff. And if you have already done that or you do that on a regular basis, please tell me at me on Twitter or contact me through the WP mainline contact form. I want to follow you. I want to read that kind of stuff. Cause, cause that’s where, you know, ideas are generated. That’s where new things can be developed new features or just, just different takes on different ways to go about things. And, uh, I, I, boy, I’d like to see this, uh, come back or multitudes of people were just throwing their ideas out there.
Speaker 2 00:34:20 That’s actually like to, I’d like to unpack your feelings on that because, um, so do you feel like there’s just not as much kind of like play or exploration in WordPress these days?
Speaker 1 00:34:30 I, I feel like there is for, for like Justin Tadlock, he, he’s done a great job of exploring Gutenberg and the editor and writing about his thoughts and feelings and Sharon knows like on the Tavern. But I, I feel like, I felt like if there is, or if there are that it’s not public, it’s not as public as, uh, or I’m just not seeing it.
Speaker 2 00:34:56 Do you think that’s in part because of how commercialized WordPress has become? Like if you, if you’re a developer and your experimenting with something you don’t necessarily want your next employer to see, you know, potentially writing crummy code or like playing around with something that is kind of silly or awkward or weird, do you think maybe the commercialization of WordPress is kind of slowing that aspect down a little bit, making it yeah.
Speaker 1 00:35:20 And less fun? Nah, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think that’s that big of an issue. I think it’s just more of a, just people were not willing to share or just throw it out there because it could be wacky or it could take someone off or it could, it could, you know, it could affect their employer. It could affect not in fact, but it couldn’t affect their appointment employment. I, you know, it’s, it’s kind of stupid as something like a concept or idea for WordPress would, would do that would affect your negatively impact you in that way, but I can see how it could happen. And that’s just really ridiculous. Yeah. I agree. Come on, man, man. Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. Like, like w if, if, if you’re just do an experiment or you write about it, or you’re saying, Hey, I was playing in the editor and I came up with this and I, and I was kind of, I came up with the concept or an idea of what if it did this, or what if you could do this and then it’d be great to just read that post and have one of those.
Speaker 1 00:36:18 Ah, yeah, that is a good idea. And, but, but I think nowadays those experimentations are like behind the scenes are hidden or they’re deep in a, in an issue somewhere on get hub or still on track. And they’re just not, people are just not blogging to winning. That’s what it is. Yeah. All right. So, um, are you or anybody else out there who are listening, looking to increase your productivity? Well, one of the tools that helps thousands of what developers and designers do more every day is GoDaddy pro combining site client and project management. GoDaddy pro is an all-in-one solution made by and for web professionals, whether you’re new to web design or looking to grow your business, you’ll find free tools, products, guidance, and support to help you deliver results for clients, manage and monitor all of your client’s WordPress sites from a single place, no matter where they’re hosted with a single click, you could perform bulk updates, backups, security checks, and more to save time and free up your day.
Speaker 1 00:37:24 And time is a precious commodity. And boy, could we all use a little more time, right? So for more information, visit godaddy.com or it’s less pro that’ll take you to the hub dashboard where you can learn more about it, or visit WP mainline.com where I’ll have more information and links to go daddy.com/pro, and go to these been like they’ve been doing webinars and hosting conferences, and they’re all over the WordPress space lately and doing all kinds of things contributing back to the project. Uh, so they’re, they’re, they’ve been very active. It’s amazing that you can do that whole ad without needing to read a script. I mean, I’m super impressed. Wow. Thank you very much. You boy, I almost, I almost conscious something I did. I would’ve had to edit that out, but what the, Hey, I do what I gotta do to pay the bills and thank you very much GoDaddy for him.
Speaker 1 00:38:16 That’s awesome. Uh, because of GoDaddy, I don’t have people showing up in an unmarked van with baseball bats. There you go yet. They’ve they’ve delayed the well, they delayed the baseball game. I, yeah, I was going to say inevitable, but that’d be bad. We can prevent that with all of your guys, with all of your people, listeners help all of your folks. We can, we can prevent that from happening. So one of the last things I wanted to talk about in today’s episode was an article by Eric Clark Novak. I bet you, I got that right in the first try. Uh, he, he wrote an article on specky boy where he talks about for casual users. Information I knew were press features can be hard to find. So it goes on and describes what it’s like for a new user these days to figure out what’s new in WordPress.
Speaker 1 00:39:05 What’s going out. What do I need to know before and after I upgrade WordPress and he talks about how there needs to be a multi-pronged approach in terms of spreading the word, getting that word amplified, creating an official source for impact impactful developments and educating users and the quest to reach those users. And I think he makes a lot of valid points. And this is something that WordPress has struggled with from the beginning is all of the things that are going out in core and getting that information kind of filtered down to the point where it reaches the users and the users can understand what’s going on. You know, if we look at the situation today, I mean, WordPress has an official podcast, they’ve got all the different make blogs. They’ve got the wordpress.org blog, which was CA, which is actually used for like releases and kind of the, the big overhead approach type of, uh, uh, information sharing place.
Speaker 1 00:40:09 But mostly you got your dev notes in the specific features related to WordPress that are published on the make blogs. And then you have to rely on sites like WP Tavern, WP, mainline, and others, and podcasts to sort of digest that information and put it into a way that’s, uh, or you’re able to soak it in as a user, even understand it, or even, you know, figure out what it is that’s important. And I think, I think it’s just a struggle that we’re pressed is still dealing with today. And it may even, I mean, if you, if you wanted someone to, uh, to do this were take the information and create a place where, uh, for all users to go to, to learn about what’s new and what you should be paying attention to. One person can’t do that. It’s too much, there’s too much going on WordPress these days to, to do that, to cram all that in, and you have your change logs and all that stuff.
Speaker 1 00:41:06 But I, I don’t know what the answer is to this particular problem. I know that it is kind of still an issue. Um, I think all of the websites and whatnot, do a good job on sort of highlighting what’s new or what’s the big, important things coming in the next release and what you should pay attention to. But again, all I, then all the information is spread amongst all the little islands in the WordPress community. And I think what, uh, Eric wants is sort of all of that stuff in one place. And he would kind of like to see it maybe on wordpress.org or something of that nature. And I think that’d be nice. That’d be fun to point all users to a, to a central source. But, um, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:41:46 It sounds like it would be a great job for someone, um, or someone’s. Uh, and I, I mean, if some companies sponsor Jeff to do it, I’m sure he would take up the mantle with other people, maybe not alone, but, uh, yeah, I could see,
Speaker 1 00:41:59 Oh, I sit on my butt all day and write about it just what’s on the next and just, just simplify things, right. Try to simplify things from an end-user perspective, not all this gobbly gook filter, boon add action book.
Speaker 2 00:42:15 Yeah. The stuff that no one understands, right?
Speaker 1 00:42:17 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I understand it enough to where I can not understand it. Right. Yup. All right. So other than that, uh, anything you want to bring up or mention before we get outta here? No, I think I’m good. All right. So, uh, it’s Friday happy Friday, everybody. And, um, if you could, you know, uh, stop by WP mainline.com, I’ve added the link now in the, in the menu, it says ways to support me. And under that menu, you’ll see links to the donation page, the subscriber page, where you can get order a custom bikes car design, or if you’re interested in, and having me read a script about something you’re selling, or you would like to have advertised, or maybe, uh, maybe I could get you on the show. You can put, you can pay me and I’ll bring you on the show and you can read your own script, or we can do, we can talk about it. I don’t know. You can also find information for podcast advertising on the site as well. And, uh, just, those are just great ways to financially support me, to help me continue writing and publishing content on WP mainline.com. And it keeps me doing the show. So
Speaker 2 00:43:33 I love that you added the box cards to the individual single posts, as well
Speaker 1 00:43:37 As your idea. That was your idea. So
Speaker 2 00:43:39 Happy to see it because every now every time I go, and there’s like a, uh, one of the three that you currently have, but I, as an expanding group, like, it’s just so fun to see. And it just makes me smile every time
Speaker 1 00:43:49 One will you see next that’s exactly. Um, and, uh, in November, starting November 1st, there will be a new boxcar added and I’m very excited by the Bob Dunn of, uh, do the woo. We’re going to have a dealer will, and it will feature his rebrand. So I’m very excited about that. His, his, his box car is pretty cool. Nice. I’ll just, I’ll just say that. Uh, so that’s going to do it for this episode of the WP mainline podcast. You can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes@wpmainline.com, just click on the podcast link and you can follow me on Twitter at Jeffery J E F F R zero in Malcolm.
Speaker 2 00:44:26 Uh, you can find me on Twitter at, to find purpose. And I am, as Jeff
Speaker 1 00:44:31 Said@thetopoftheshowoveratpress.com and Canberra capital T dang. So that’s going to do everybody have a safe and enjoyable weekend. I know for many of us out there, there’s no such thing as a weekend, but try and find some way to, to take an hour or two to, for me, time for you time, uh, or listen to me time. I don’t whatever you want to do, but we’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long everybody

Speaker 1 00:00:20 Welcome everybody to episode 15 of the WP mainline podcast for Friday, October 15th, 2021. I’m your host, Jeff Chandler joined by my fresh off of Thanksgiving weekend, Canadian front of Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm. How are you doing sir?
Speaker 2 00:00:34 Well, uh, oh, you better have been sufficiently Turkey fied on Monday. And uh, now here we are on Friday and I think we just finished all of the Turkey, like all the banks doing related food. So, uh, there was a lot of leftovers.
Speaker 1 00:00:48 Did you, uh, encounter one of those posts, Turkey naps?
Speaker 2 00:00:52 I did not have been far too busy for that.
Speaker 1 00:00:55 Unfortunately Jesus. And that the life of all of us too busy, you can’t even enjoy it. Turkey fighting nap. Nope. Unbelievable. What, what, what’s your, um, so what was your spread up there? Is it, I wonder if it’s the same down here? Is it, uh, Turkey stuffing, cranberry sauce, all that stuff.
Speaker 2 00:01:10 Yeah. It’s, it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect it to be in my family. Yeah. We also had ham for people that don’t like Turkey and the peas and corn mashed potatoes. Uh, yeah, just a huge spread. And then like pumpkin pie, apple pie, uh, ice cream, whipped cream, the whole nine yards.
Speaker 1 00:01:28 Nah, man. Thanksgiving is my favorite time of year. It’s my favorite holiday during the whole year, because you’re pretty much guaranteed a great meal. And, and if you do it right, you have great meals the rest of the week until you’re like, you don’t want to deal with Turkey or ham anymore.
Speaker 2 00:01:43 Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty crazy for sure.
Speaker 1 00:01:46 All right. So, uh, for those listening, Hey, my apologies about last week there wasn’t an episode last week, last week was a bad week. Things kind of went to hell in a hand basket over the weekend and just wasn’t feeling it, but that’s all in the past. Here we are Friday evening, that kind of feels like old times doing a show recording at night here. It says, this is pretty cool. Let’s get into the news of the week. Cause there is a lot of it. And we’ll start off with the big news. Uh, today people were kind of waiting to see today was the deadline for features and WordPress 5.9, whether there would be a go or no-go. And we found out earlier today that everything that’s slated to work with 5.9 as they go, which is great news, especially for those out there who are looking forward to full site editing, uh, the 20, 22 theme black themes site editor, styling patterns, all that stuff, navigation blocks. So, uh, it looks like everything’s kind of on track to be released with WordPress 5.9 and speaking of full site adding, I wanted to get your ticket. How have you dabbled with full site editing? Have you, have you messed around with themes in this area yet? I mean, do you even have any idea what it is? Do you understand it? Uh,
Speaker 2 00:02:59 I have some understanding of it, but I have not used it myself. No.
Speaker 1 00:03:03 Okay. Yeah. I mean either, you know, I should, I should be like one of those people who, uh, who knows a full site editing until a lot, but I don’t, but apparently it is from my understanding and I could be wrong. I often am. But full site editing is the idea of being able to edit all the things. So apparently everything on your website would be able to be edited via the black editor. It’d be black of five, uh, some way somehow. So, uh, 2022 is actually going to be a black base full site editing theme. It’s going to be the new default theme. Um, I like it. Uh, I’ve already, I already liked the design of it. Cause if he just birds and I’m a bird, I’m a bird guy, bird, brain. I like watching birds. And uh, this, this theme, um, highlights, uh, birds pretty well.
Speaker 1 00:03:52 But, uh, speaking of 2022, the goal of this default theme is to create a strong foundation for features such as theme that Jason and there’s going to be very little CSS that the goal is to use as little CSS as possible. It’s going to be built for full site editing. First on the styles will be configured through, like I said, the theme that Jason file and edit editable through global styles and the theme development team will continue to work closely with Gutenberg poetry readers to build design tools in the black editor that enable that goal. Now based on the features that are coming to WordPress 5.9 and how this theme is going to depend on those, it looks like a you’re only going to be able to use 2022 with 5.9 or above. So don’t expect this is kind of a departure from default teams of old,
Speaker 2 00:04:50 But I mean, that’s what the default theme should be in my opinion is kind of pushing that boundary of what you can do with WordPress. I mean, otherwise it’s kind of, what’s the point, right? I, I love the idea that they are thinking about integrating new features or developing new features specifically to kind of push that barrier. Um, forward, when I looked at the go-no-go link that you posted, I laughed because I mean, it felt like every second word was blocked, right? Block the themes and the block, the new 2022 block theme and the myriad of design tools, including block gap and a navigation block and an improved block interactions. And I was just like, holy smokes, everything is just all about the blocks. And I think some of that has to do with making sure that 20, 22, um, as a theme works really well and works really, uh, in, in that kind of slick way that we would hope it would work.
Speaker 2 00:05:37 Um, I was talking to my co-founder of press Titan, uh, David Krug, and he’s not super excited about this theme, uh, at all. Uh, he didn’t see anything in there that that made him go like, this is the theme for me. Um, we’ve been using Blocksi a lot and really enjoying what it provides. And I think, you know, we’ve kind of holding that on the pedestal kind of, and saying like, if anything, like if, if this team doesn’t have those kinds of abilities to kind of quickly change things in the customizer, like Blocksi does, uh, I think it’ll be kind of a loss, uh, in, in my, in my mind, um, because that’s kind of, you know, the new kind of baseline expectation of, of what these teams can do out of the box.
Speaker 1 00:06:17 Do you remember back in the day when the idea of creating a default? I mean, this is way back, what’s the earliest default thing we have. Is it 28 years? 2010? I think it’s 2010 was the first default theme in WordPress. And I remember the conversations back in the day, even before then, like the idea was why, why isn’t there a theme that theme developers can use it. It’s like a, uh, it’s like theme school, you build the theme and it’s, it, it, it uses everything that WordPress has to offer, or you can use it to showcase what WordPress is capable of. And then other theme authors can look into that theme and develop on top of it or take things away from that or learn from it, you know, with default themes over the years. Do you, do you look at them and is that kind of how they’ve been designed or how they’ve turned out? I don’t think, I don’t think they’re, I don’t think they’re as much as a, uh, an educational footprint as it is. And I also don’t think some of them take full advantage of everything we’re presented to offer, but then again, it’s a default theme. It’s a baseline. Uh, I probably have, I’ve probably set too high of expectations
Speaker 1 00:07:29 Mean, plus they’re getting this done within a, you know, a few months timeframe, this theme. So it’s not like they’ve had all year to build a 20, uh, 20, 22, but this new default theme actually relies on features that are going to be in 5.9 and were not available beforehand. So it was kind of impossible to build a 20, 22 the way they want to do it and take advantage of full site. I didn’t because what they needed wasn’t there. So
Speaker 2 00:07:57 Now there, there were themes that were shipped with WordPress before there were these like default themes. I remember, um,
Speaker 1 00:08:06 There’s Cooper, Cooper,
Speaker 2 00:08:08 Classic, and Kubrick is the theme that I always in my head always like,
Speaker 1 00:08:14 Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:08:15 Man, that brings me back. Wow. Um, we’ve come a long way from there. And I think, I think that, you know, a lot of people, you know, her new to WordPress might look at this theme and kind of wonder if it’s for them. And I think we, you know, every time they do a default theme for those that haven’t been around for as long as we have every time they do a default theme, I think the first question everyone asks is who’s this made for? Um, you know, and I think we’ve had that since default themes were in existence. And I think this time who this is for are people that are interested in kind of pushing the boundaries of blocks and WordPress and how blocks can kind of, um, you know, create this full site editing to kind of not necessarily replace page builders, but, uh, to show that we almost don’t necessarily need them for every kind of implementation of WordPress at this point.
Speaker 1 00:09:06 I, I think that at FSE full site editing has become a buzzword buzzwords. I think that out in the outer ring of the WordPress community or users, I think the people that are following the news they’ve heard or through the grapevine, I think a lot of them have heard about full site at any, but maybe don’t quite know what that means and what that entails. So I think it’s great that the default theme 2022 will ship with WordPress. So it gives users an opportunity to play around with it and experiment and see for themselves what full site editing means. And then maybe take some of those lessons and transcend those into what the future of themes is going to be for WordPress, because everything developer that, that I’ve, I’ve talked to where I’ve seen on Twitter, or has looked into what the full site editing is and the future of blocks, they’re all super, super excited about this, these global styles team dot Jason and the complete reimagination of building themes. It almost seems like around the precipice of a, of another one of those milestone events where the post editor was replaced with Gutenberg, the black editor, you know, I, I, I know that to me, it was one of those monumental shifts. You know, if you’re looking at a timeline of, of, of the history of WordPress, that to me was a milestone marker. I think full site editing and WordPress is another one of those will be, uh, one of those milestones.
Speaker 2 00:10:29 Yeah. I, I think I agree with you. I, I think though every time we hit those milestones, one of the things that people need to remember too, though, is it usually means that we filter out a group of people who were more able or willing to be involved in the project before those milestones existed. Um, I think that this full site editing stuff will kind of, again, filter out some people who are maybe not as strong at, you know, um, PHP and JavaScript and development and react and all this stuff. So, you know, I’d be super interested to kind of get more time with people who are developing with this new mindset in place. Um, maybe get Brian back to kind of walk through what this will mean for something like frost to going forward, or, um, yeah, I dunno. I just, I’d be super interested to get their take on it because again, wherever my head, what they do,
Speaker 1 00:11:16 And at the end, then at the end of the announcement post, we, they, they mentioned that, uh, we’ve, we’ve come to look forward to, and the new default theme arriving every year, every December, that major version of WordPress, those three months, that time period was usually the time when we would expect to see a new, uh, default theme. But they mentioned that theme during a transition period today. And they said that it seems like this may be a reasonable time to step back and to reevaluate the annual cadence with which we build default themes. I’m reading from the announcement post to your quote innovations, like theme that Jason Black templates and black patterns of making deem development far simpler and are providing new ways for users to customize their sites. There’s reason to believe that the community can leverage all of this to build more frequent and diverse theme and customization solutions for our users in the coming years and quilt. So that could mean, uh, maybe more than one default theme during the year. Maybe they could happen every major release. I don’t know. I mean,
Speaker 2 00:12:20 I took it the exact opposite direction. I assumed that that meant that maybe we’d see a default theme, you know, every two years or every three years. Um, because there, the expectation in that text makes me think that there’s, there’s so much variety and options that will and do exist already that the WordPress team that are developing this stuff doesn’t necessarily need to take time, you know, and resources to kind of continue to do these default themes. Um,
Speaker 1 00:12:46 All right. Yeah. So, so basically instead of doing it once every year, maybe once every two years really showcase what, you know, the advancements that did or what’s new in WordPress, and because of all these things that they’re building in, you know, themes being far far simpler to develop that yeah, there, there’s going to be a wide variety of innovations taking place without the need to have, I guess, without the need to have a default team every year. I didn’t see it that way. That’s a good perspective. Now I kind of wonder, I kind of wonder if they’re going to come up with a plan to phase away these default themes, if you, if you, you know, and WordPress, one of the, you read security or articles and all these things, and it says anything you’re not using, whether it’s plugins or themes delete from your site. Well, every time if you delete all the themes you’re not using, as soon as you update to a major version of WordPress here comes all those default themes back into your back in your install. So I wonder if they’re just going to get, I wonder how they’re going to phase them out if they ever plan to phase them out.
Speaker 2 00:13:51 I really think they should. I mean, uh, the, you know, the zip file that you get when you install WordPress is just getting bigger and bigger and maintaining all of these themes has to be kind of a development burden. Um, and I mean, 2010 was released, you know, over 10 years ago now. I mean, how many, how many things on the web, can you say that about it’s still included? Like what, so, uh, yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s time to get rid of some of these older default themes and just kind of maybe do the last two or something like that.
Speaker 1 00:14:25 Well, like they said, with WordPress 5.9 and the way 20, 22 is going to be built, and it’s going to be a black full site editing first theme that I don’t think you’re going to be able to, you’re not going to be able to do things in 2022 that you have all my training. You won’t be able to, the things that you’re going to be able to do and accomplish in 2022, you’re not going to able to do in the, in the default thing prior to that, because it’s not going to be built for full site editing. So I, I think it makes a good time to just here’s the line we’re going to start fresh from 2022 moving forward and all these other themes. If you want them, you can find them in the word pressing directory, but they’re no longer going to be bundled with the core product.
Speaker 2 00:15:09 You know, if you really want to prove that these new themes that are coming out, like if you really want to prove how amazing 2022 is, um, someone, you know, take some time and, uh, make 20, 22 with like 2010 and 20 11, 12. Like, I mean, if, if it’s so easy to be able to adjust the, how the look and feel of it and, uh, and roll out these other kinds of like designs, um, using 20, 22 as a base, like prove it, um, replace these using the new software
Speaker 1 00:15:38 And the last thing on 2022, if you don’t want to download core or trunk or whatever, but you still want to check it out, give it a test, or I’d see it, at least from the front end, you can keep track of its progress by visiting 20, 22 odd numbers that wordpress.net. And we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. And if you visit that, you’ll be able to see what the theme looks like in use right now. And as it’s being developed, a new features are created for it. There’ll be a patched into this version and people will be able to interact with the theme live. So that’s, uh, that’s pretty cool. I don’t know if they’ve ever done that for any other default theme that I know of. Uh, so there has been a proposal for a new team this week, the performance
Speaker 2 00:16:30 Team, so
Speaker 1 00:16:31 Excited. And what does proposal basically, basically this proposal was undersigned by, uh, people who are employed by Yoast and by Google and or some other, uh, community folks involved with this. But they, they say that, uh, the problems that they’re trying to solve is that well, research shows that fast websites can provide a better user experience, increase engagement, benefit, SEO, increase conversions, and be more economically and ecologically friendly. And they’ve posted some performance graphs and WordPress, and especially will commerce do not fare well against other platforms, such as Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, and Duda. And I’ve kind of some dude I mentioned here or there on, uh, on Twitter. I’m not familiar with it, but, uh, I, I am, it’s not completely foreign to me, but if you look at, uh, the performance graph numbers for CMS is on mobile clients, WordPress and WooCommerce has a lot of shortcomings there as well.
Speaker 1 00:17:38 And now, first of all, someone said that it’s kind of awkward to make these comparisons because Shopify or Squarespace, Wix, those are software as a service. They have more of an ability to tighten down and control the infrastructure and the code and the hardware and things of that nature versus WordPress has to be able to run on a myriad of different, uh, software and hardware setups. But with that said, uh, it’s just, uh, they’re looking to create a team to focus on the performance of WordPress because a WordPress could actually become a solution that is not preferred. Uh, if people, if those types of users care about their search engine, rank placement, uh, slow websites, just don’t rank as well as fast websites. That’s, that’s what the research has shown. And, uh, this proposal will allow the team to get together. There is power in numbers, and I’m kind of surprised that there hasn’t been a performance team created like 10 years ago, but you know, that,
Speaker 2 00:18:44 Hey, that would’ve meant admitting that word press out a performance problem. And that’s been something that a lot of the leadership in WordPress has had a really hard time with. I remember WordPress between WordPress two and three. Anyways, there was a lot of talk about how performant WordPress was. And, you know, if you had any kind of performance issues like Matt Monet himself would come on down, down from on high and like help you solve them because wordpress.com proves that WordPress performance can be amazing, no matter the scale of traffic and no matter what you do with it and what you need to install it on it, or what kind of functionality you need. And so it’s, it’s very refreshing for them to finally say, look like we could do better in terms of performance.
Speaker 1 00:19:26 I think they’re coming out and saying, we have to do better or else, you know, this, this, it almost comes across that way because of the search engine placement and what have you. And then, you know, that the last time I remember performance being a big talking point was when Matt mulloway came on on stage, it was, uh, it was during a state of the word. He basically said, look at these performance gains, you can get by switching from PHP five to, I think it was PHP seven at the time. And he says, oh, you got to do a switch and boom, you immediately get these performance gains. I actually did that one time and I got to experience the performance gains myself immediately. I, I saw an improvement in speed, uh, on my website, just switching from PHP five to seven. But what was interesting in reading this proposal and reading the tons of great comments on here, and by the way, the proposal, I think it’s got the green light.
Speaker 1 00:20:20 So it’s going to become a real thing. The real deal, um, is that performance is, is a very wide net. I mean, it encompasses multiple layers, multiple factors efficiencies. Uh, the way code is compiled, the way code isn’t queued, you know, uh, code that’s that’s run or code that’s loading, even though you’re not using it, but it’s still there. I mean, there’s like I was reading through this and I’m like, man, this is, and it was even mentioned by people that, that the, that the change, the performance of WordPress and then make it performance is a monstrous ship. That’s going to take a lot of time to solve, to get right, to turn and get it facing in the right direction. But no, it’s what better time than now to, to get a bunch of people who are interested in, in doing it to get involved.
Speaker 1 00:21:17 And hopefully there are people from different web hosting companies that get involved become part of this, because I think what most companies probably have the most to gain and have the most vested interest in having any performance WordPress, because the more performance WordPress is the less of a resource hog, the less resources it uses on their hardware and their software, and all users benefit from a more performance WordPress. So I’m all for it. And I’m probably going to be one of those people who, uh, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll try to contribute to the team or within the feedback, but I’m not gonna complain if I install WordPress update and boom, everything’s just suddenly faster.
Speaker 2 00:22:02 No, I, I mean, for me, it’s, it’s, there’s a business aspect of this too, right? If I can have a website run better, faster, and a more performant way or use less serve resources, then that’s, that’s a really good thing for me. And then secondarily, um, you know, some of the stuff that I’m working on, we’re working with in terms of clients, stuff for, for camera creative, um, you know, the, the, the amount of caching and cash priming and all these things that we’re trying to do to kind of make sure that we create the best performance for users possible is, you know, kind of doing work arounds to make WordPress better. And I would love it just to be kind of better out of the box. I mean, I remember at one point having an issue with how, uh, indexes in the WordPress database were set up, um, and it was like a default issue, but it only exists if you had over like a hundred thousand posts on your site.
Speaker 2 00:22:56 And of course I was running a website with like nearly half a million articles on it and running into this indexing issue. So, um, you know, there are some low hanging fruit, but this is, this is not an easy thing. And especially if we want to continue to kind of have that backwards compatibility, um, if we want to kind of retain a lot of the expectations on how things function and, and look, um, there might be some major structural changes that need to happen to really kind of have these performance solutions be put in place
Speaker 1 00:23:26 And mark Jake with who’s a very smart individual and who’s going to be part of this performance team made a lot of great points in his comments. And he says that the biggest performance issues that he has with WordPress these days are related to front end performance and the asset pipeline, so that you can always just throw a page cache around WordPress to get delivery down below 150 milliseconds. But he says many web, many WordPress hosts have this built in, but your performance problems are far from being solved by merely delivering HTML quickly. So then he goes on to describe that WordPress has no direct support for differing style loading. It has no system for critical theme styles for JavaScript. It has no support for differ async or type equals module or no module. He says the default is to load Allscripts in the header, WordPress itself, shoves this extra code for emoji and the black library into the header.
Speaker 1 00:24:17 WordPress also injects JavaScript code in styles that skew the asset pipeline altogether and directly attached to WP head NWP footer. And then he mentioned that the big Achilles heel plugins and all this plugins just directly bar file bespoke script tags that are difficult to alter. And by the time that you’ve added 10 plugins to your site, your odds of having jQuery loaded in the header on every single page load are extremely eye. He says that no one is incentivized to be a good citizen, including WordPress itself, because there’s always someone else who is polluting worse than you. And he says in quotes of jQuery is already in queued by something else. So I guess I better use it somewhat developers. So he ends his comment by saying it’s a huge problem. And fixing it is going to take a lot of effort, willpower and time it’s worth doing. If WordPress front end performance continues to decline, the project is going to cease to be a viable option for any site that cares about it SERPs. And when you have to read his comment, and you mentioned about plugins and performance teams, and you start to realize, boy, this is, this is going to be a tough nut to crack.
Speaker 1 00:25:28 It’s going to be, it’s going to be everyone on board. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:25:31 Um, I, I it’s, it’s not going to be easy and there’s so many aspects to it, right. I don’t know about you, but like WordPress search both in the front end for users and in the backend, um, when you’re searching through posts or looking through the media library, that there’s so many areas of performance improvement that just needs to happen. Um, I just, I don’t even know how they’re going to start to tackle this. It’s going to be very interesting to see how they prioritize things like do they do kind of focus more on that front end user experience? Um, when do they focus on the administrative experience? I don’t know. It’s going to be interesting.
Speaker 1 00:26:07 I was just thinking back, you remember those days of, of the dig effect and you’d visit the site and it’d be a white screen of death. And everyone said, well, that’s I trusted
Speaker 2 00:26:16 Hug of death.
Speaker 1 00:26:18 I know how to fix it. Just stick a caching plugin in there. That’ll fix it.
Speaker 2 00:26:22 That fixes everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:26:24 Yeah. Cash boy. I did. So there was actually, I know the performance team had mentioned this. They said in their proposal that they believe that CDN should actually stay as like plugging territory. And that actually something with core. And I think anything that ties into a service, it’s probably best to be laughed as either a plugin or some kind of option to tie into. And I haven’t a CDN as, as part of a press core.
Speaker 2 00:26:54 I I’d be interested. I’d be interested in them having like a core plugin that I would enable if I wanted to, to be able to kind of, you know, make JavaScript decisions or,
Speaker 1 00:27:04 Uh, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Um, I I’m glad you brought that up because there were, there were quite a few comments that said that the foundation is kind of already in place to educate users and developers with the site health check, you know, WordPress now has the built in if he has a site health check and it tells you things about plugins that are disabled or things you need to turn on, on your host. And some developers are saying, well, what if we could use site health check to tell you, uh, uh, queries that are taking too long to load or JavaScript that is too big and size or too, or JavaScript it’s being called from here or there, like, like psychic health check would actually be a nice place to begin in terms of educating users and developers, uh, to get more people on board with the whole, um, to get smarter with performance, uh, performance WordPress.
Speaker 1 00:27:57 So there you go. I’m glad you brought that up. Uh, do you remember video press, uh, whose whatsits oh, let’s see. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you, but it’s actually a service at automatic launch back in 2009, it’s their video hosting service. And if you’ve ever watched a video on WordPress that TV, then you have interacted with and seeing the video press player where they’ve just announced it, video press has undergone a facelift. So now it’s fully integrated with the post editor. Uh, there was drag and drop options. Now users can customize a player’s colors to match the design of their site. There’s also support for private video options, which opens up the possibilities of exclusive content. Uh, collaboration is easier now because multiple users can access an account. And because it’s a paid service, there are no intrusive ads or branding.
Speaker 1 00:28:51 Now video press is included in the premium business in e-commerce plans on wordpress.com. You get up to one terabyte of space, which I seems like a lot of space to me. Um, and if you run a self hosted WordPress site, you can video press is now available as a standalone product. And this is where things got a little dicey in terms of what does that mean? Because I think you, uh, you know, you need Jetpack in order to use a video press well, in this instance, the marketing team to a standalone product, as you no longer have to purchase the larger jet pack bundles, I E the old premium plan or the current Jetpack complete plan to access a feature, you can simply pay for the single feature you will like. So you still have to use jet pack to use video press, but you can purchase a plan to where it’s video press and, you know, know that’s the only feature you’re paying for.
Speaker 1 00:29:44 And I’ve noticed this trend now over the years. And I think it’s, it may be based on user or customer demand, or it might just be based on it’s a lot easier to develop for and maintain, but they’re, they’re taking these things out of Jetpack, which used to be a behemoth plugging in all these different modules. They’re taking those things out and you’re creating these different bundled and packages and services. And I think they’re going to get to a point where you can kind of do Ella cart, where you could just select different features you want, and boom, it gets into your hosted Jetpack service, which I think is a good idea. You know, the, the days of, of loading Jetpack and getting everything all in one, or, uh, I’m glad those are going into the past.
Speaker 2 00:30:27 Yeah. I think, I think most people would be happy to see Jetpack split up into its requisite pieces. Right. Depending on the functionality you want. Um, I still don’t know what the value proposition here is. There are so many other services to do this with, I mean, Vimeo or even just YouTube or, um, I mean, yeah, you, you name it.
Speaker 1 00:30:51 So now outside of WordPress, that TV and I’m, I’m, I’m, I’d be curious to know how many people, how many customers they have on video press, how many videos they’re hosting. And I’d kinda like to know the reach. I mean, it’s been out, it’s been out there for since 2009 and over the years there’s been revamps and improvements, but you know, it hasn’t been one of those heavily marketed services, at least not in my opinion. Um, so I’m just curious as to, I wonder, wonder what kind of reach it has. It obviously has enough reach to where it’s still a viable service for them to continue offering and to continue work on. So yeah, I guess, well, I guess you couldn’t just access video press. Cause if you act video, press by, by word, press that TV, you don’t want to do that. Right. So there you go.
Speaker 1 00:31:40 Oh, and by the way, if you, um, if anybody actually goes through the video press checkout, at least I did a few days ago, they’ve had a really nice coupon deal going on. So it’s a pretty affordable, uh, it’s a pretty affordable price for a year. If you decide to purchase a plan with video press. So next up was a tweet by Josepha Haden, executive director of the WordPress project. She, uh, tweeted out what I consider a fun and interesting question because I always enjoyed things. I made me go back and WordPress time, cause that’s kind of, uh, that’s, that’s where I’ve been. That’s where I was. That’s what I know. And she says, think back to your first WordPress site, do you remember which task first made you head to a search engine for learning? And she says that hers was creating a menus.
Speaker 1 00:32:30 So I started thinking about it and I was thinking about the days of using WordPress when I was creating my web 2.0 review site. And I was using a free WordPress theme. I find in that directory and I was hacking and slashing trying to add this and trying to add that. And I remember using the plugin and I had to Google how to change the plugins parameters in order to achieve the desired effect. You know, nowadays you go in the back end and plugins have knobs and buttons and things you turn and there’s all these different options. Well, back in the day, there were no a lot of plugins didn’t have any UI. You had to actually go into the plugin files, look at the parameters and change some numbers around or change the order of the numbers and that control maybe display order or the type of thing that was actually being displayed.
Speaker 1 00:33:19 So it was actually kind of modifying the parameters of plugging in, uh, that, uh, had me go to Google to figure out, to learn how that, how that process worked. And I got to tell ya, um, I never could figure out how to add sidebars to themes that always tripped me up at the register, this and registered that and naming this and naming that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve I I’ve edited functions that PHB found ended up with a white screen of death over the, over the years. Um, so before I want to go over some of these other responses I think is cool, but thinking back what’s, what did you encounter? What issue do you encounter first where you had to Google the solution to WordPress?
Speaker 2 00:34:02 I mean, I, I know you even remember.
Speaker 2 00:34:06 So I was using a custom written PHP, um, not quite CMS system that I had built. Um, and my blog on that website was being powered by blogger. And the first thing that I looked up when I got WordPress up and running was how to migrate from blogger to WordPress. And I, it was back before there were like import tools or, or export like those kinds of things for WordPress. And I, I remember creating a PHP script to be able to like pull my content from blogger. And then I just like manually copy and pasted it into the WordPress editor in the HTML view. And it was good to go kind of, um, but I remember looking it up on how, like trying to figure it out and see if anyone else had already done it.
Speaker 1 00:34:55 Uh, Justin tailback responded to the thread. He said that, uh, 16 years ago, he actually, um, you visited the WordPress support forums and he was looking up how to fix or how to put a sidebar on a separate page. And nowadays you just click a page template or assign a template to Nate and there you have it. Um, Eric said that it likely had something to do with creating the database. He was terrified of them back in the day. I’m still terrified of them. I’m still terrified of PHP. My admin. I try to avoid that area at all costs, even though nowadays, I kind of know what I’m doing and what I’m looking for, but it’s still page P my admin. It’s like walking on, walking on coals and Jake Sperlock and this one kind of made me laugh. He says how to make list items, be stars instead of bullets.
Speaker 1 00:35:47 And the reason I laugh is because I absolutely remember various tutorials being published on blogs throughout the WordPress community and how to change the bullet types. And I believe it was a change in CSS, like your CSS, um, deems related to list items. And I believe I followed one of those tutorials one time and switched the bullets to an image I had. So a custom image of something to be able to tie into the, uh, WP Tavern website. It was probably a little beer mugs or something. I changed that I had a set of bullets, had a little beer mugs, which I thought was pretty cool. And then something that I clearly remember was a pain for so many people or drop down menus. Um, I know Brett Brett bum meter says that he was stuck on that for about nine months and how to create drop down menus.
Speaker 1 00:36:39 And then he says, I finally figured it out for pages as well as automatically putting some categories under a category. And he says, a week later someone came out with some theme builder software, and it was only a five minute process, which is funny. And then that kind of reminded me about the wound naps and Bouneff was specifically created by WooThemes cause they had so many customers that had so many issues of creating menus drop down menus and just a menu management system itself. And a wound have actually became the foundation of the menu management system and WordPress 3.0, so just a little WordPress history there, but I thought it was a nice, a nice fun question there. And shout out to Bob WP front of the show. He made me laugh because he’s, he said he was impressed at so many repeats. So many people remembered what they for school would about it. And Bob, Bob replied that it’s just been a blur to him.
Speaker 1 00:37:35 Could that be an age thing? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just, just messing with your Bible of your Bob GoDaddy meets the big news this week. Uh, they’ve created, uh, well, back in September, they created a, uh, POS system was called GoDaddy payments. And what they’ve done now is, uh, their GoDaddy payments point of sale system is now fully integrated with WooCommerce online stores, which will make in-person payments quick and simple. So they talk about, uh, people being able to make in-person payments and it will affect things in the backend of WooCommerce immediately. You you’ll be able to see things take place immediately in addition to your online ordering. So they say that businesses will be able to securely accept securely except payments anywhere their customers are, where the that’s at their storefront or on the go at events, farmer’s markets or food trucks.
Speaker 1 00:38:35 They say that the dashboard provides business owners, the state of their business, and one snapshot. Uh, now if you’re thinking about fees, go, daddy payments offers transaction fees with 2.3% per in-person transaction, and 2.3% plus 30 cents per online transaction. But they say that this saves businesses on average, 20% off of their credit card transaction fees and go to any payments does accept major credit cards and debit cards and businesses are paid as soon as the next business day. So this was a, this was making the rounds. And, uh, if you, uh, get, um, hosting WooCommerce hosting, which, uh, GoDaddy pro does offer you get this as, as part of the, as part of the planet, just right there in your dashboard. So pretty big deal. If you’re, uh, if you’re over there, you’re using GoDaddy and you have a WooCommerce site, um, go to any, now you could do in-person. So I believe that would be mean, you get to, you could use like, uh, a mobile device and have people pay on the spot and then boom, it goes right into your excesses as your store, which I, which is cool. Yes.
Speaker 2 00:39:47 They have like the little card reader with documentation and that’s like 49 us dollars. And then they have their smart terminal, which is like more like the dual screen kind of thing, where there’s a screen for the, the cashier or the person check, checking your you out, and then a screen for the customer to see kind of what they’re getting. And that’s only 249 us dollars. So, um, like they’re all in on this and it’s pretty cool.
Speaker 1 00:40:10 Yeah. I enjoy the low, uh, transaction fees. That’s pretty cool. I mean, be able to, to walk around and get people to give you money, buy your products and then boom. It goes right into yours to your store. It’s uh, that’s pretty nice. Um, speaking of GoDaddy, I want to give a huge shout out to GoDaddy because they are the first company to financially support the show and the work that I do on WP mainline. Thank you very much, Phil daddy for helping me pay the bills. AI. Yes. A round of applause, sir. Thank you very much. Um, and are you looking to increase your productivity? One tool that helps thousands of what developers and designers do more everyday is GoDaddy pro combining site client and project management. GoDaddy pro is an all-in-one solution made by and for web professionals, whether you’re new to web design or looking to grow your business, you’ll find free tools, products, guidance, and support to help you deliver results for clients.
Speaker 1 00:41:10 And at the heart of GoDaddy pro is the hub. You may have seen the hub mentioned. There’s a lot of things going on over there at go daddy with the hub. The hub is a very cold place, but the hub is an intuitive dashboard in a hub. Seamlessly brings your sites, clients, and projects all together. You can monitor, manage and monitor all of your client’s WordPress sites from a single place, no matter where they’re hosted with a single click, you can perform bulk updates, backup security checks, and more to save time and free up your day. And for more information, you can visit godaddy.com forward slash pro forward slash hub dashboard. But easiest thing to do is just visit the site, visit the show notes, say thank you to bill daddy on Twitter for helping to support me in this show. Very much, appreciate it here at press.
Speaker 1 00:41:55 Hey, how about the hero press a network boy, husband and wife do over their toe from cake to Rosa. They’re a little busy bees. And, uh, they’ve announced that the, the launch of the hero press network, which is a collection of content from various sites that they are working on putting in a centralized location. Now, according to Kate pierogis, he says that its overarching goal is to be a hub and it will display the newest items from around the hero press and network, as well as news from the community, uh, that they’re currently adding into the site. Uh, they can also post information that they think is helpful or educational. So right now the hub incorporates or the hero press network incorporates here, a press hallway chance, WP podcast, find it WP. They also have a slack group which I’ve recently joined and they have two additional projects in production.
Speaker 1 00:42:44 I got to imagine that, oh, well it’s already listed WP podcasts. That’s a pretty cool place. So they’re, they’re putting a lot of resources that are available in the WordPress community. And this is, this happens from time to time. We go through these spurts of, um, websites, gathering things and putting them kind of organizing them to be in one location. And those are always beneficial, uh, for the WordPress community. And, uh, the WP podcast thing seems to be going pretty well. And I’m kind of interested to see what find it WordPress turns into, uh, so congrats to Kate and Tofor for the, uh, the launch of their hero press network and looking forward to seeing what that turns into and something that recently came up in the WordPress community. Uh, back in September, a gentleman by the name of mark Zuhair, uh, published a tweet mentioning that he had been contacted by someone in the WordPress community who was working on a post that would list some of the best plugins to use. But what set this email apart was that the author told them that in order to be included in the post, you got to pay up buddy.
Speaker 1 00:43:52 That’s funny to me. Um, the folks over at WP scan received a similar email in August and they policy exchange, which shows how much each position costs. If you wanted to be in position zero with a featured plug-in position, you paid $199 for position one. It was $149 positions, two, three and four, $119 positions, five and six $99. A WP scan actually showed, um, showed in the email that they received. And based on, uh, another tweet by Sahara who shared a link to an article that was published on WP hive, we now know which website was contacting these individuals and asking them, or kind of much negotiating with them saying, Hey, you know, we’re going to do a best plugins list if you want to be on it, you know, give us some money. And that’s just, that just rubbed me the wrong way. I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Cause if you go and visit WP Hyman, you look at the article, you have no idea. You think it’s their opinion as to what the best are assessed, feed plugins are for WordPress. And if you, if you knew ahead of time as a reader, that based on those positions, the order that you’re reading those in that those developers or those authors paid money to be in that spot, I think it completely changes your perception and your outlook in the way that you, that you consume that information.
Speaker 2 00:45:18 Yeah. I mean, we should all probably be looking at all of these things with a, with a little bit of, uh, like a questioning eye, but could you imagine if either of us had done that in our career? I mean, we wouldn’t be here today to be able to have this podcast and you wouldn’t be running WP main line, like,
Speaker 1 00:45:34 Uh, trust would be gone or, you know, I think people, people might end up forgiving me over time, but I already know at a time look and this is in the, and that’s why the name of the article is being honest to readers is free. And, but losing trust is very, very expensive.
Speaker 2 00:45:54 And not only that, but now it puts into question every other article or comparison.
Speaker 1 00:46:00 So
Speaker 2 00:46:00 It’s, it’s, it’s not a one and done thing. Like you can’t do this and then go back and be like, oh man, I Copa, like we only did it that one time. We’ll never do it again. And you have to go, did you though, did you,
Speaker 1 00:46:11 I tell you what, because of this, you know, I actually recently was looking for an ad management plugin for WordPress. So you type, what do I type into Google ad management plugin forward presser, or maybe best ad management plugin. And I get these posts from WP beginner and some of these other posts, and it’s always the best ad management plugins and this, that, and the other. And that was viewing those articles. And because of what I read here from now, what would just mention NWB hive? I started wondering, I said, well, why is this plugin first? What, you know, was there anything going on here? Is this really the honest opinion of the, of the author? Do they really think, you know, this way about this plugin does it, where they paid for this position where they paid the right this. Now I’m asking myself all these questions and, uh, uh, what a bomber, what a bummer and this crap, like, this is not good for the WordPress community, because it’s just, if you’re going to do it, just be honest with the users to me, look, it’s not a bad way to, I’m not complaining about this as a way to monetize your content.
Speaker 1 00:47:17 It’s, it’s not, I have no problem with the monetization. The problem is in the transparency. Yep.
Speaker 2 00:47:24 A hundred percent.
Speaker 1 00:47:26 So, and it’s kind of funny. Uh, Zara saved himself from cash. He commented on the post and they actually published a comment. And then his comment, he had mentioned the plugin that, uh, that he’s a part of called WP RSS aggregator, which is a fairly popular plugin, which wasn’t included in the list. And, uh, uh, Sahara did not hire, did not pay the author to publish his comment. So he ended up getting linked to his product on that post. But in the comments, it’s kind of funny, funny how that all worked out. And uh, so last but not least something really cool happened this week. Um, WP mainline. Um, I got in touch with Joshua Daley, who is a designer, he’s part of the team, the web three WP team. Uh, that’s doing the wahoo NFT project. And I gave him an idea and I said, Hey, what if, uh, we created a box car, you know, on the railway buys, cars are already branded with the company name and all kinds of other information.
Speaker 1 00:48:36 So it just makes perfect sense. This is what if we could create a box car and then have companies be able to bring them or put their logos on them. And each one would be custom design and whatnot. And I said, do you think you could do it? He says, yeah, well, let me, let me try and whip something up just for fun. I’ll give you a concept and let’s try it out. And man, this guy, he hit a home run. I was blown away by the concept. He even added little details like the, the red lug nuts on the axles, the Springs, there’s a little ladder. There’s a little handle on the door, on the box car. It looks to me,
Speaker 2 00:49:10 It’s worth saying like, if you haven’t gone to the WP mainline website recently, and you’re just like downloading this on your favorite podcasting app, go check out the website. You got to see this it’s really, really,
Speaker 1 00:49:21 So the plan is I’ve hooked up with him. I partnered up with him. If you, you can go to WP mainline that calm. And at the top of the website, I’ve got, uh, there’s two bikes, cars that you’ll see that show up. It’s pretty much my take on a banner ad display banner advertising, except these are ads you want to see, you know, these are, these ads are cool and they’ll randomly show up there on the front page for 60 days for $500, you get to keep the box car and you could do whatever you want with it. But the box car will also go onto a, I have a box card gallery page. So whatever design you get, I will put that boxcar onto that page. I will leave the link intact or whatever it is you want to link to, and it will live there.
Speaker 1 00:50:08 So these, these things are so cool that I felt like it’d be a disservice to have them just disappear. So they’re going to live on, on the gallery page. So if you’re interested in having a really cool, um, train theme, banner advertisement, and be part of this train via a boxcar, um, definitely go to the website, check it out, you’ll find it under, uh, there’s a link at the top of the website says ways to support me. It’s the first one says custom box car, banner design very much appreciate it in the turnaround times within the week. And I’ve got, uh, speaking of Bob Dunn, Bob WP, he’s actually going through a complete rebranding right now for do the womb. And we got him a box car made and it looks awesome. People are gonna love it. And I wish I could show it to everybody, but, uh, I gotta wait till November because that’s yeah, because that’s when his branding that’s when it’s burning, it comes up, but I showed it to him and he absolutely loves it. He loved the first concept, which is awesome. So it’s my take on display banner advertising. And I’m stoked that so many people in the WordPress community have, um, have, uh, pretty much showed your appreciation. I just say it’s a really cool concept and design and that blends in with the website. You don’t have to block it now. I just need to get, uh, some more bass cars made. So well you also,
Speaker 2 00:51:32 And engine, you need to do like mainline engine at some point too, right? Because then that just completes the whole lot.
Speaker 1 00:51:38 Yeah. I need an engine, but you, you, you know what else I need? I need the caboose. I gotta have, I gotta have a caboose because,
Speaker 2 00:51:46 Uh, uh, J uh, triple J J and I am the caboose. That’d be hilarious.
Speaker 1 00:51:52 Ah, you know, all right. You may be on to something. I may see something within the next week or two. All right. Um, other than that, there was a lot of news to cover during the week. There were other things that took place, but, you know, I can’t cover it all, I guess I could, but I just, there’s only one Jeff row. Right. I’m trying to do the best I can. Other than that, Malcolm, anything to add,
Speaker 2 00:52:22 Uh, I mean, if, if you’re not interested in the box car design, they can also support you through, uh, the $49 per year rail fan. Um, so Jeff, Jeff has these yearly ways to support, uh, makes the podcast continue to happen. If you want more of these episodes, please go over there and check it out. Um, he also has podcasts advertising. Um, so if you want to kind of get your ad, read on air, check that out as well. And, uh, of course I’m gonna plug myself, uh, and then Jeff can tell you where to find him. And it’s the reverse of normal cause I started talking so you can find me on Twitter at find purpose. And, uh, I work at Canberra creative and Prestatyn so check me out there. If you need any kind of help with, um, getting a cool website developed or any kind of project developed. And, uh, if you need web hosting, check us out at press Titan,
Speaker 1 00:53:09 Capital T, dang it.
Speaker 2 00:53:12 Where can they find
Speaker 1 00:53:12 As you Jeff? Uh, you can find me, uh, at Jeff Rowe, J a F F R zero or at WP mainline on Twitter, Twitter. That’s like my water cooler. That’s where I hang out. You can also find me on the various slack channels on the WordPress slack, uh, hero, press slack, post status, slack, a big orange heart slack. Um, I’ve actually recently joined the Matt Madeiros by the way, happy ninth birthday. Uh, the Matt report turned nine years old. He celebrated his ninth anniversary is a very cool kudos to you, man, for, for sticking it out this long. He’s got this cool, uh, project he’s working on Cod WP minute, uh, news, uh, news and views from, from different people throughout the community. I just recently joined his discord. He’s got a discord community. So I dunno, I meant Jeff was being stretched a little thin here, but, uh, but we’ll make it work. We’ll make it work. So that’s going to do it for this episode of the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes, WP mainline.com, just click the podcast link. And there you go. And that’s going to do it. Uh, so everybody enjoy your weekend and we’ll talk to you again next Friday afternoon. So long everybody

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 14 of the WP mainline podcast for Thursday, September 30th, 2021. I am your host. Jeff Chandler joined, uh, my, my favorite Canadian Mountie friend, Malcolm. Pearlstein welcome. How you doing, sir? I’m doing well and yourself. Yeah, I’m tired today. I I’m, uh, I’ve actually had a very good week, both, uh, mental health anxiety wise and production wise. In fact, uh, if I can publish something tomorrow, it will be the first week. First of all, week that I’ve been able to publish something on your site. So anything, I don’t think you’re going to have anything to publish about tomorrow. I think it’s going to be a really boring news day. Uh, I highly doubt that, but I am. I am, I am sleepy, but we do have some things to talk about. It’s about 9:00 PM. We’re doing the show on a Thursday, uh, Thursday evening, because tomorrow is WordCamp us.
Speaker 1 00:01:15 If you don’t have your tickets, they are still available. It’s a free virtual event. It begins at noon, 12 Eastern, I believe. And it goes all the way to about eight o’clock. So it’s going to, it’s going to be an all day thing. They’re actually doing this kind of neat thing where I think it’s during lunch, all these different WordPress contributors who play an instrument are going to get on a video call. There’s going to be, they’re going to either be playing music or they’re going to be together as a band. I don’t know what’s happening, but during lunch, there’s going to be some cool things going on with contributors and music. So definitely keep an eye out for that. And, uh, I’m not really one for virtual events, but for this one, I’ll make an exception. I’d like to just go there, hang out. And now I kind of made a joke today on Twitter that I was on my way to the hotel. And, uh, you know, if anybody wanted to catch an Uber with me at five 30 to grab some dinner, I think I made some people laugh. I made some people cry. I actually had somebody believe me and said, where’s the information on the website? And it’s set up. I’m sorry. I was just role-playing.
Speaker 1 00:02:23 I kind of fold some people, but a WordPress RPG, man. I don’t know. Has anyone thought about that yet? If you haven’t built that an RPG for WordPress, I dunno. I’d be super curious about what that would look like. Um, yeah, I looked over the list and I mean, I would love to kind of go through all of this, but I have a full day I’ve worked for, are there any sessions that really stand out to you as like, oh, I gotta be there for that? Uh, the learn WordPress, uh, one is something I’m looking forward to. I I’d like to learn more information about that. In fact, uh, next Monday I have a scheduled round table discussion with the folks involved with the learned dot WordPress project. So we’re going to learn more about that and I’ll publish that conversation next week. I would like to listen in on the conversation with, uh, Josepha Haden.
Speaker 1 00:03:09 Um, I like to hear what she’s got to say at the, at the end of the day. And let’s see, there’s probably one or two involving Gutenberg full site editing that I wouldn’t mind, uh, more than mine watching. I mean, I don’t know. I can’t see myself sitting in front of a screen the whole day. That’s just not going to happen. In fact, I I’m actually going have plans tomorrow to go watch some trains with my wife and smokey and that’ll be awesome cause we haven’t done that forever. Right. But I’m hoping with some VPN I’ll be able to, to, uh, actually tune into work camp U S all of the sessions, as far as I know are prerecorded. So everything is not live. People can hang out and even the present, the speakers can hang out in the live chat and actually answer questions and things that are popping up there.
Speaker 1 00:03:55 So that’s pretty nice. Um, but, uh, but yeah, and also, I, I haven’t, I haven’t attended, I haven’t attended a WordPress where camp us, or I haven’t seen any videos from it for two or three years, so I I’m due, I’m due to get back into it for sure. Yeah. You’ll have to let us know what your favorite things were and keep us in the loop on that and hopefully post something tomorrow about your experience. Yes, absolutely. And speaking of doing the podcast today, do you know what day it is? Malcolm? I didn’t even know this day existed until like everybody started talking about it today. Yeah. I mean, I, I work with tofa so I kind of couldn’t avoid it, uh, something about some podcast day, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So today is international podcast day, which, uh, I guess where everybody is celebrates and listens to and searches out new podcasts.
Speaker 1 00:04:49 Uh, everybody celebrates the, uh, the podcast medium, I suppose. And on this day, speaking of tau for Daraja, he, uh, the, him and his wife who operate the hero press network of sites, uh, they launched a new site today called WP podcasts. So it’s WP podcasts that com and it’s essentially a directory of WordPress podcasts, active WordPress podcasts that are, that are going out throughout the community. So if you visited that site, you can search for your favorite show, uh, via text, or you can search for it via tags. There’s an actual, and the right hand sidebar. There’s a list of shows. Uh, and there’s a little number that actually says how many episodes, uh, that, uh, that show in particular has. And, um, my favorite way to browse the site is just to visit the podcast page, because it just lists the shows from newest to oldest, with an excerpt, from the show notes posts.
Speaker 1 00:05:47 And if you click on the listen to the episode link, it takes you right to that website where the show notes post is listed. And that’s where you can subscribe to the show, read the show notes, click on links, things that you’re talking about. Um, it’s pretty cool. I, I don’t know, you know, over the years, and we’re pressed, we’ve had websites like this come and go that kind of aggregate things together, whether it’s news or themes or plugins, but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen a, a podcast one, and there are a number of WordPress podcasts out there. So I, I liked the design of the site. It’s snappy, it’s fast. Um, in fact, uh, he added a couple that weren’t there. So there’s, I think there’s only like 3000 episodes. It’s three, three, that 3000 episodes of WordPress audio content you can listen to if you choose to do so all available right there. So, uh, that’s pretty cool resource.
Speaker 2 00:06:38 Yeah. One of my favorite parts is when you go to that all podcast episodes page, and you go to archive by month, you can actually kind of like scrub back in time to like 2012 and see how more and more podcasts have been kind of, um, adding episodes per month as we go along, um, September 20, 21, um, they’ve already found 107 episodes this month. Um, which I mean, amongst all the podcasts that they know about, which is a pretty impressive amount of episodes. If I, if I might say
Speaker 1 00:07:12 Indeed, indeed. Uh, in fact, I just, I thought, and I said this on the show. I thought that WP watercooler was the longest running WordPress podcast out there, but it’s actually the, uh, engineer we’re press engineer podcast by Dustin harlot, sir, he’s a, an he’s got over, he’s got over 400 episodes. It might be 500, but he’s been doing it for even longer than WP watercolor. So I was pretty impressed by that. And he just recently had his podcast. Where is it? Let me look. It’s the a w P engineer it’s in here somewhere. Uh, but it’s definitely one of the, one of the podcasts that’s been added, lot of episodes. Oh, there’s the kitchen sink WordPress podcast. That, one’s pretty cool that one’s with Adam silver, listen to that. But I got to say, um, and speaking of podcasts, do I listen to them?
Speaker 1 00:08:12 No. And the reason for that is because I don’t, I don’t do things. I don’t do things where I, my, when I listen to a podcast, I want my full attention to be on whatever it is they’re talking about. And when I worked at the grocery store at night stacking shelves, I could do that mindlessly that was mind numbing work, and I could concentrate and whatever the show it was I was listening to. But everyone says ever since leaving third shift at the store, I used to burn through hours and hours of podcasts. No problem. I just haven’t gotten into it. So, you know, what I need is like AirPods or those. So I have an iPhone 12 or iPhone 11. I have one of those. I have an iPhone and I think it have a headphone Jack. So I think what I ended up having to do, I think those air pods, I think your Bluetooth, you connect via Bluetooth. So if I get me a pair of AirPods, maybe I’ll have to wait until around black Friday, see if any were on sale. If I ended up getting me some of those, and I’m going to vow and make an effort to go outside, to walk more, walk around my neighborhood and listen to some more podcasts, get back into that. Cause I kinda, I kinda miss, I miss listening to all those podcasts.
Speaker 2 00:09:26 Yeah. That’s a good
Speaker 1 00:09:27 Way to be of WordPress content in audio form out there.
Speaker 2 00:09:31 I have to admit I’m bad about that as well. Um, yeah, I, in talking with,
Speaker 1 00:09:36 I mean, I mean, come on D do you see yourself saying, well, I got some free time here. I’m just going to sit here and listen to this show or this podcast.
Speaker 2 00:09:44 I mean, one of the advantages about podcasts and video, um, is that you can speed it up, right? So if you’re worried about memorizing the information, you can listen to it at 1.25, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5
Speaker 1 00:09:58 W w which quite a few people have already mentioned that they do with this show. And they said, I sound pretty good as a chipmunk,
Speaker 2 00:10:05 But I mean, like, it’s a great way to kind of compress the amount of time it takes to kind of get through some of this content. And I know a lot of people that do that and do it quite well. I just haven’t necessarily taken the time to do that. I think for me, I spend most of my time at my desk and I’m on a lot of meetings or I’m like, you know, checking out a YouTube video or a Twitch stream. I don’t necessarily think of podcasts as a desktop type activity. And I guess that’s kind of another barrier that I need to kind of work on. I don’t know. It’s interesting.
Speaker 1 00:10:36 I would, I would, I think if I got those AirPods, I listened to a lot more podcasts. In fact, it would probably get me to go outside more. I hope I hope it would. I don’t know. Maybe I’m stuck inside. I miss going to the park. I really do. Um, so next up is a website for the small fries out there in the WordPress space. It’s called WP hunts and it, its founder is Ben Townsend. And what this site think about, it’s a product hunt, but for WordPress stuff. So there’s, there’s kind of two different flavors of the site. There’s one for like WordPress business owners, developers, and there’s one for, for users. And the reason why Ben created this site is he said that, um, out of all the acquisitions that have happened as of late, he re he’s, he said this idea of WB hunts for a while.
Speaker 1 00:11:31 He says his issue is that developers have no real outlet. And as a user I’m missing out, she said, sure, you could put something onto the WordPress plugin and theme directories, but the chances of him finding it when it’s flooded with plugins and themes, they have a huge user base are slim to none. He says, what if there’s a particular maker’s product that’s perfect for my needs. He’s never going to know about it because the words, WordPress landscape favors the bigger, more established products, which in his opinion is inherently wrong. He says WordPress to him. It was always about enabling individuals, the freedom to create, to choose plugins and themes. And then when the boom time happened in the, the affiliate affiliate, spam blogs flooded the gates and kind of all hell broke loose. So WP haunts actually won’t have any affiliate links and registered users will be able to redeem coupons from those who have Lister creations and all the towns, and also made the decision to not allow products from Koch, canning our theme for us to be listed as they already have a large budget for marketing.
Speaker 1 00:12:35 Uh, one of the ways he plans on generating revenue for the site is to allow developers to come up with a fair price, how that’s going to happen. I’m not sure what what’s going to be involved in the negotiations there, but he did say that 5% of any revenue that the website generates will be donated to a big orange heart foundation. I think something like WP haunts could be beneficial, uh, to the WordPress scene, especially for people who want to support indie developer. You know, and it’s kind of funny that I mentioned indie developers because it makes me think that things have gotten so big now and with all these acquisitions and parent companies and satellite companies that now that, you know, there’s, there’s probably going to be some demand out there for indie developers. Maybe they want to use a product or something that’s not owned by a particular company or conglomerate that’s out there.
Speaker 1 00:13:25 Um, so I can definitely see something like WP hunts being beneficial to the community. Uh, you know, the first is for WP hunts to be successful. It’s going to have to gain a bunch of traction on its own to benefit the people who are listing their products there. And I thought it was kind of interesting where users, like when I do a review, they’re actually going to have to provide a screenshot of them using the product before the review can actually be, uh, published out of the site. I think it created, we’ll be able to have that power to publish a review. So, and the other thing about WP haunts is that, uh, as someone who’s been in the WordPress media space and has written thousands of posts about products and things that I’ve discovered, I’ve also received tons of emails through contact forms and kind of cold calls and things of that nature of different products and different services that people are working on.
Speaker 1 00:14:21 And by and large, I just skip over them because they either not interesting to me or the, I don’t think my audience, uh, has any as, as any need or use for them. So what WP hunts does is it kind of fills that void and allows the creator to kind of have more control over trying to gain that traction, that media traction, where they don’t have to rely on a hope and a prayer that somebody like Jeff Chandler over at WP mainline writes about their product, or it gets mentioned on WP Tavern. They can list it here. And at least being on this website and being listed, uh, gives you a chance, increases the chances of discoverability.
Speaker 2 00:14:59 Well, okay. Everyone. I know, I know Jeff is like making it seem like it’s this big deal and everything, but I think it has more to do with the fact that it makes his job easier.
Speaker 1 00:15:09 Oh, well, there’s that too. I’m I’m not going to lie. I would, I would definitely bookmark it and check it out every day. And if I see something that catches my eye, boom, I’m on it.
Speaker 2 00:15:18 Right. Exactly. And I think that is the advantage of any site like this. Um, you know, for me, when I look at product hunt, I’m looking for things that tickle my fancy and I go, oh, this is cool. And then I like share it with my co-founder at Preston, or I like share it with people at Canberra. And, uh,
Speaker 1 00:15:38 Okay. So when you, when you find those things that tickle your fancy yep. Would you have found them otherwise or was that for sure? And that is the beauty of product.
Speaker 2 00:15:48 Yep. Yeah. I don’t know that they could have ever gotten to me any other way. I would’ve, if they had had an advertisement somewhere, I probably would have been ignored it because, because of how it’s structured and because I’ve opted in to receiving this information, I don’t necessarily pay attention to it, like as detailed as I should, but I definitely scan through it when I received the emails or when I go onto the site. And, uh, I hope that this will do the same for WordPress stuff.
Speaker 1 00:16:13 Exactly. Me too. I, I, I want to be able to, to find out something I’d like to new plugin, a new theme, something that’s hosted on GitHub. And I kind of liked the idea of not having code canyon and, uh, being forced stuff on here. And it was a good choice. And I also think that all of the big shots, like I wonder what the criteria is going to be, that, that Ben will figure out for plugins. I wonder if, if a plugin is already hosted on the WordPress theme or plugin directory is, I wonder if they can’t be listed on WP hunts. I wonder if that’s going to be, be the case or if there’s some criteria like active install counts or something that you already have were being listened on WP hunts, wouldn’t be maybe as beneficial. Like for instance, you’re not going to see Jetpack on WP hunts. That just my sense. I think, I think, I think that completely destroys the purpose of what w WP Hans is all about. But, um, yeah, I would like to bookmark it, check it out and be able to write about new products and themes and services and different things that I found. Uh you’re right. Anything that makes my job easier. I’m all for man. No doubt.
Speaker 1 00:17:24 Uh, so let’s see. So, but it’s not actually launched it. You can actually sign up and, uh, and do anything. And he’s in the process. He’s in the very beginning stages of, uh, building the site and he’s got a newsletter sign, uh, that you could subscribe to if you visit WP hans.com and he’s already got a hundred people signed up, he’s already got people interested in this idea. Uh, so I’m, I’m happy for him. And I’ve got a, I’ve got to talk with him scheduled next week and, uh, who knows depending on that talk, I might maybe I’ll partner up with him on this. I don’t know. We’ll see.
Speaker 1 00:17:58 We’ll see. Let’s see. Uh, oh, I came across this interesting resource. It’s actually been around a long time, but for some reason I never knew about it probably because I wasn’t looking for it, but I happened to see Scott Kinsley Clark for another show. He shared a link on Twitter to a comprehensive spreadsheet that compares the various types of content type and custom fields plugins. Now it’s a, it’s a spreadsheet and it’s, up-to-date, it’s maintained frequently by Clark and Matt Gibbs. Um, and Clark recently improved the spreadsheet by adding plug-in icons and active installs. And now the plugins are actually listed by active installs now. And if there’s over like 93 different row rows of data that are compared between the various plugins, I mean, there’s 1, 2, 3, 4. I mean, there’s, I think there’s like a dozen or more plugins in this spreadsheet and it tells you there’s information.
Speaker 1 00:18:54 Like, is it free? Is that pay as a commercial only there’s an open source, uh, network wide content field and or fields multi-state support. There’s all kinds of good stuff in there. And, uh, Scott was telling me that the plugin authors have actually, uh, participated in making sure that this is up to date when it comes to their specific plugin in the, in the data that’s being compared. So very cool, uh, spreadsheet on a core resource. Um, in fact, it’s been there for years, but like I said, you know, it’s, I think it’s just one of those things that, uh, if you know, you know, and, uh, hopefully by writing the bat and sharing it, uh, more people will know about it. Cause it’s very cool to see this, uh, comparison tool. And Scott has been wanting to build a full blown website and create different filtering components and, and additional ways to search. But he just has a head of time. It’s not bad, uh, browse through the spreadsheet is a lot of data there
Speaker 2 00:19:53 Too much. Holy smokes. I look at this and my heart like speeds up. It’s like, wow, it’s a lot to parse. I almost wish that someone would come along and maybe use like gravity forms or something. And give me like a, choose my own adventure to get me to that, to the end result. Right? Like, cause you can see that there’s a whole bunch of options here that are like, exclusatory where it’s like, if you pick guests here or no, here, then you’re not going down this path anymore. And I’d love to have like a recommender tool based on this data. So someone build that, um, because it’d be, I think it would be super useful for people because there are a lot of options to do custom content types and custom field types and custom meta and custom whatever. So, uh, yeah, I, I it’s too much to parse in this form, in my opinion, like if I was just an end user and I came across a spreadsheet, I would just scroll down and really quickly and say like, wait, there’s no count of how many yeses there were like, like what is my quick one piece of data
Speaker 1 00:20:47 To kind of understand what I should pick. And they certainly do not do that in this spreadsheet. Yeah. I hear you. I mean, if you’re, I’m not the spreadsheet kind of kind of guy or person. So I mean maybe something I think had Scott been able to put this information together in a, in a website to use maybe actual custom fields to provide different ways of filtering and searching. I think that probably they could have created something like what, what’s your, what you’re wanting, but as, as exists now everything’s just in that spreadsheet and it’s either all or nothing. Yeah. Wow. So Helen, who Sandy shared an interesting article on Twitter that, and this article looks at the, uh, it was actually on a, on the verge and it looks at the generational knowledge gap between students who grew up using Google drive versus professors who use directory structures for storing and accessing files.
Speaker 1 00:21:42 Um, apparently saving files to folders and understanding how a directory structure works. It’s not a skill that much of the younger generation has and it’s giving professors, it’s making them go nuts because they’re having to teach what they probably consider basic computer skills to people who have no idea what it is they’re talking about. And one of the biggest differences that the article notes is that the, the mental model and, uh, while professors are used to storing things in directories and subdirectories, the younger generation is storing the files and to just one large bucket or into a, maybe two or three different buckets. And all they have to do is search or start typing a couple of keywords into the thing you’re looking for. And now whether it’s ILS or, or Google or some other type of software, usually the thing that you’re looking for shows up versus the method of clicking this directory, go into here, go into this subdirectory, having to remember all that.
Speaker 1 00:22:46 And then hopefully you get to the file that you’re looking for. And I thought not only was this generational gap interesting, but I kind of reflected into how I store files nowadays. And, um, I’ve, I’ve gradually moved to the, uh, the phase of, of buckets, you know, just put everything into a bucket. I’ve got documents, that’s a bucket, I’ve got a, the downloads folder, that’s a bucket, I’ve got a desktop folder where everything I want all the trash I want on my desktop, I put into a folder. So I keep the desktop neat. It’s kind of like sweeping the trash underneath the bed, you know, nobody’s going to see it. Um, but I, I thought it was, uh, I thought all of that was interesting. And then Helen kind of brings it back and says, it says that it would be really good for WordPress developers to really read and absorb the article and think about how things are currently approached in the UI of WordPress and explaining what WordPress is and how we can actually be effective in a mental model of apps and no file system.
Speaker 1 00:23:51 And no, and one of the things that has been requested both on this show and other shows regarding the media library is file structures, folders, directories. They, a lot of people who want that for the WordPress media library. And now after reading this article and look at how people are accessing files. Now, I wonder if the it’s just kind of funny to me, or kind of ironic that maybe the WordPress media library is now at a point where, because it doesn’t have files and directory structures that maybe it’s poised to, uh, kind of leap ahead in terms of how people access files and search form and whatnot. Uh, now if you look at the WordPress media library, you’ve got alternative text fields, you’ve got the title, caption description. Those are things that you can use to search for images in the media library. And I think that, uh, search is about as effective as you have fields and metadata that you can attach to a file, right? So if you take some of those things away, your search is not going to be as effective, at least that’s, that’s my understanding of it. Um, but what, I don’t know, what’s your, what’s your take on this?
Speaker 2 00:25:10 So one of the things I thought was kind of funny about this is that, I mean, a lot of us and maybe by default as well, WordPress actually does store things by year and month in terms of image uploads or file uploads. Right. But it’s an abstraction that we don’t really present to users all that often, and it doesn’t even need to necessarily exist on the computer file system. Like you have the option in WordPress to switch it to just be like one directory and all your stuff goes in there. Um, but the, I think the, the idea of being able to like call out or make something more important, even if we don’t talk about it in a hierarchy structure, but just kind of being able to kind of say like, this is something that I use often. And so I want to kind of keep that where I can see it is a missed opportunity in the WordPress media library.
Speaker 2 00:26:00 And I think that’s where a lot of that folder and file structure comes from is that that need to be able to kind of find certain assets in an easy and quick way. I don’t necessarily think that we want to like organize everything, but I personally feel like my brain is much more of like a, you know, tax file, uh, like cabinet than a like scattering of random stuff all over my room. So, uh, I, I need that sense of organization. I need that sense of structure to keep my sense of organization going, because without that sense of structure, I mean, I look at my downloads folder and I just want to cry. Um, so then I, you know what I mean, like I move it into like folder compartments, like this is what I downloaded and why and what for kind of thing. And, uh, it helps me be able to refine those, those assets again, where my downloads folder is just this like stressful anxiety ridden list of files that, you know, who knows what like random dot text actually is or something.
Speaker 2 00:26:59 Right. So, or why I downloaded it. So I don’t know. I think that, I don’t know necessarily that it’s as much as a generational gap. I think that it has, like, if you did the same test with Android users versus iOS users, I’d be interested to see if like, you know, or, or windows versus Mac. I think you’d see that like windows users kind of tend towards the, the folder structure because windows as an operating system tries to push you in that direction. And Mac probably tends towards that, like single directory structure, because Mac tends to push you towards that direction.
Speaker 1 00:27:31 Well, all I know is that on the bottom left-hand corner of my screen, it says type here to search the window search bar. And that’s where I go first, unless it’s on the desktop or it’s, it’s a subdirectory deep. I almost never because having a search, for example, maybe a certain game I have installed through steam, right. It’s very difficult to find. So I have to type it in there and it takes me right to where I need to go and look at that it’s like six, seven directories deep that I would’ve gotten lost, trying to find, I, I searched for everything, my downloads folder. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying that I’m lazy and I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna clean up and I don’t want to store stuff and things that, you know, I get it, but Hey, it works for me. And until, until that time, I look at my downloads folder and I’m scrolling and scrolling, I’m scrolling. I’m like, man, I should have named that file better.
Speaker 2 00:28:23 Yeah. Or how long ago did I download that a week ago? Or was it
Speaker 1 00:28:28 More than one or did I move it?
Speaker 2 00:28:31 Yeah, I don’t think it’s a generational thing. I’d be interested in seeing more studies, um, to like determine whether or not it actually truly is a generational thing or an experiential thing. And again, all of this kind of wrapping it back into WordPress, right. Is like, um, you know, what users is WordPress trying to serve the best or what type of people, like what persona of user is WordPress trying to serve best and is the software doing that? And I mean, we could dissect every piece of software under that understanding. Um, but the media library is always an area that I think could use more work. I think it’s an area that’s kind of being left behind in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 00:29:10 Absolutely. I agree with you. There was a couple of years ago, there was a presentation, I think at WordCamp us where they actually looked at different media libraries, different UIs across from, I think there’s like flicker was in there and a couple other photo apps in the WordPress media library for all intents and purposes was pretty good compared to what was out there already. It was, it was very surprising actually, but that was a few years ago. Things are changing. Things are evolving. I know why don’t we just turn a media library and a blocks there. You that’s in blocks off everything.
Speaker 1 00:29:46 Uh, so last weekend was pretty fun. The web three WP, Y pu um, NFT collection minting process was open up fee to the general public. And I was on the web three, uh, discord server. And that was pretty fun. There’s a lot of people who are minting various watt poos. Uh, some of them were, were cool looking. Some of them were kind of boring, uh, but you know, it’s all on the, beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, right? Is that how you say it? Um, I wanted to participate in the experiment, but, uh, I attempted to purchase F E T H that’s ether from the cryptocurrency and I hooked it up to Metta mask, which is my wallet. And my bank said, no, no, no, we’re not going to let you do that. Then my bank marked my charges for ETH as fraudulent and actually froze my accounts.
Speaker 1 00:30:43 So I, after cussing at my bank and being upset because I wasn’t able to participate in this experiment, then calmed down and realized that my bank was just doing what I would want my bank to do. Uh, keeping me keeping me safe. So I contacted my bank the next day and they, and they said, well, did you try and do this? Did you train me? And I said, yes, yes, yes. So they said, okay, you’re not going to have any more problems doing this. So immediately I tried to purchase ethic again through wire, which was the service and it still didn’t work like it. I don’t know what the problem was. So, uh, folks have recommended that I go through like Coinbase, which I think is a, is an exchange, but you, it creates a, you give them money, but you got to wait a period of time.
Speaker 2 00:31:26 Yeah. And it’s just more trusted by banks because it’s a, it’s a known and managed company. Um, and it actually is more regulated than a lot of the other companies in terms of buying cryptocurrencies. And so it’s just a, kind of a safer approach, more trusted approach for banks. Um, so that’s why that recommendation price coming up a lot.
Speaker 1 00:31:45 And even though I didn’t get a chance to meet a wide pool, uh, one of the Inc my kale for he donated the white poo to me. So I actually own my first NFT, my first wild pu uh, he’s got like a gray hat and he’s brown. He’s got red shoes with a gray background and I like gray. So it’s kind of the red shoes make them pop. So he’s mine, he’s my wild pool. Um, uh, the special edition WP mainline while poo was minted. So that’s cool. So that’s out there. Somebody owns that. And I got in touch with the person and said, Hey, anytime you want to sell this thing, you put it out in the market. And let me know. I want to get through steps and buying my own poo. Uh, but so with that, I mean the, uh, the event went off pretty well.
Speaker 1 00:32:27 I think they’re up to 400 or five, at least 25% of the collection has been minted. Uh, so there’s an, a doing pretty good there, but I wanted to, uh, the other day I published some of my, I had some observations about these NFT things. And, uh, I I’ve noticed that, you know, there’s this very stark contrast right now where people look at NFT and it stands for no fricking time. Or you look at it as a joke, or they have no idea why people are buying JPEGs, where they can just right. Click, save image and boom. They have the image, you know, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of that. People are like that. And then on the other side, there are the people who understand about the prominence of an item in the blockchain and how that ownership is taken care of and the decentralized nature of everything and the cryptocurrency and whatnot.
Speaker 1 00:33:16 But I’ve now I look at these images and these GPA’s and this artwork, and I’m like, man, you know, I’ve got all this photography and stuff sitting around. It’s collecting dust. How about, I just meant those as NFTs, put it on the NFT markets, such as open sea and see if somebody who can’t can’t buy them. Well, you know, it doesn’t work that way. It’s NFTs. You know, when you start looking into listing them, there is a, you gotta have F Ethereum in your account, uh, to start the process, you need to pay gas fees, listing fees, transaction fees, possible royalty fees. I mean, you could end up going broke before, even get a chance to sell what it is you want to sell on the NFT market. And sometimes, you know, you were talking about like $80 up to a couple of hundreds of dollars.
Speaker 1 00:34:06 And so if you don’t have something, a piece of artwork, digital art and everything is kind of centered around digital artwork right now, it’s probably going to change revolve for time. But right now it’s all about digital art. If you don’t have something that collectors want, or that will sell, you’re just NFTs. It’s very easy to throw waste your money. It’s, it’s, it’s an investment thing. It’s funny money. You gotta have, you gotta have money, or I should say, you gotta ha yeah, you gotta have money, but you got to spend money to make money with this NFT stuff. And, uh, for those out there, like for someone like me who looks at these things and says, man, I, I can make a quick buck, or maybe I could just sell this or the, sell this and make a couple ads and turn it into a couple of thousand dollars. No, that’s not the way it works. So, um, it’s not a get rich quick scheme, uh, at least as far as I can tell. And like I said, it’s dangerous, you know, you could be, you could get into it and you might see something you like or this collection, and you might experience FOMO if you’re missing out. But, um, it, it’s, it’s a quick way to lose a lot of money if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Speaker 2 00:35:07 Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you. One thing though, that I’d be interested in kind of hearing your perspective on is, um, how do you feel like cryptocurrencies or the blockchain or, um, NFTs might play a bigger role in WordPress? I mean, Twitter is talking about allowing people to put the NFTs and the proof of their ownership of the NFT as part of their like user profile image. Um, how until maybe like Gravatar or something allows for something similar.
Speaker 1 00:35:41 I think that would be cool. I, in fact, one of the next experiments that web three, what three, what three WP I found get it right? One of these times, one of the experiments we’re working on is utilizing blockchains and perhaps NMT is maybe not NFTs for WordPress contributions or contributors. So I’ll be very interested to see, uh, what comes to that. There’s also this idea of using the blockchain to create digital swag. You know, maybe if you attend a work camp in person, then you can mention NFT or, or there’s an NMT that’s specifically for that event. And you get access to what you can get it towards your wallet if you pay for a ticket and attend the event. So, and then you’d be able to show that possibly on your WordPress seller profile. So you have all these different badges, but then you could see NFTs or other things through the blockchain that you also own. Um, it’s I mean, when he started talking about ideas like that, where like swag and different pins and different messages and coupons and other things that you can attach to these smart contracts, it gets it’s right for innovation, for
Speaker 2 00:36:53 Sure.
Speaker 1 00:36:55 And I’m very curious to see how, how the WordPress project takes advantage of all this stuff. If it does at all, you know, you’re going to meet people, you’re going to need systems and people in place to, to build and do all this stuff. So that’s one of the problems of open source and there’s never enough people. There’s never enough time. There’s never enough people pointing into a direction that you should go.
Speaker 2 00:37:21 Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 00:37:23 Uh, so let’s see. Other than that, um, that’s about it. Uh, as far as the news go, Hey, nothing got acquire that I know of this week. So, you know, there’s that, um, yeah. That’s is there anything, anything you want to say or get off your chest before we wrap it up?
Speaker 2 00:37:48 No, I, I, uh, you know, I think, uh, as I said last week, I hope to echo this weekend and maybe every week, as long as you’re not saying it, um, if, if you want to support the show, the best way to do that is to go to WP mainline and subscribe for $49 per year. That’s it under 50 bucks for the entire year, 12 months of Jeff Rowe. And I, um, as a rail fan and go ahead and do that right away and, uh, help the show kind of continue to be successful. And I, uh, I look forward to doing many more of these episodes and trying to convince Jeff to do a whole diverse podcast series and interviews and everything, but we can’t do that unless we, uh, keep him fed and keep them hydrated. So, um, subscribe today, everyone.
Speaker 1 00:38:30 Yeah. Special shout out to, uh, I don’t have their off hand, but there’s three Justin Ferriman, uh, uh, news. There’s two others that subscribe to the, uh, to the website today and thanks to their subscriptions, I’m able to send forward a payment for my car. So maybe they’ll stop calling me and asking me where their money is. Yeah. We don’t want
Speaker 2 00:38:55 Jeff’s legs to get broken
Speaker 1 00:38:57 That’s for sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s oh man. So I, I, they help, they, uh, they they’re supporting me and they help Miami a little more time, but, and, um, next week on the, on the show, of course, we’ll have a wrap up and do a review as best we can as to what happened at WordCamp us. But I do want to talk next week about something that came up today in Twitter about news websites who owns them and trying to make money and trying to make a living doing these things called news websites, which I’m sort of trying to change the narrative now that it’s not just about news. It’s more like it’s more like documentation documenting things, being sort of like a historian and being able to do that every day. And boy, I, I, I’m almost going to get into it right now, but it’s the end of the show, but that’s something I want to, I would like to talk about next week in more detail. Cause I have some things I’d like to say about it. Be a hot topic. That’s going to do it for this episode of the WP mainline podcast. You can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes on WP, mainline.com, just click the podcast button and everything will be right there for you. And you can follow me on Twitter at Jeffrey, J E F F R zero in Malcolm.
Speaker 2 00:40:15 You can follow me on Twitter at find purpose. And, uh, I am working at Preston as the co-founder
Speaker 1 00:40:22 Prestige
Speaker 2 00:40:24 And, uh, also at Canberra creative. So you can find me there.
Speaker 1 00:40:29 Awesome. Awesome. So until next week, uh, enjoy with us. If you happen to see it, we’ll talk about it next week and I have a safe weekend. So as long as everybody