Author: Doc Pop

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Today, we’re diving into the critical world of website security with a spotlight on SSL certificates. SSL cert is like a virtual shield that encrypts data and protects your user’s data. Now, if that’s not enough to keep you listening, imagine pouring your heart and soul into making a beautiful website only to have Google slap a big “Not Secure” label on your site when visitors try accessing it through Chrome, simply because you aren’t using HTTPS or SSL.

Here to talk to me today is Rogier Lankhorst, the lead developer of Really Simple Plugins, the makers of the extremely popular WordPress plugin, Really Simple SSL, Rogier, thank you so much for joining us today.

I’d love to hear about your origin story and how you got into WordPress.

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, thanks for having me in the show. Originally, I think in 2016, a customer asked me to get his website onto SSL as quickly as possible. So I installed a plugin that was popular at that time and the whole site went down. So at that moment, I thought I can do this more lightweight and easier, with just one click install.

And I published it on WordPress and it really was a rollercoaster coaster after that.

Doc Pop: Absolutely. And, this was not your first WordPress plugin, right? This was the first one that really took off in such a massive way, but you had some other Really Simple plugins before that.

Rogier Lankhorst: Some really small experiments, things I thought of at the time and published them and they didn’t really take off, as you said. So Really Simple SSL was the first, big hit you could say.

Doc Pop: I always like that analogy about buying lots of lottery tickets. Like you put out a lot of experiments and one of them caught on and you’ve been able to build a business from it. And since we’re talking about SSL, can you tell the listeners what an SSL certificate is? And why is it important for a WordPress site to have one?

Rogier Lankhorst: With SSL certificates, the website encrypts all data before it’s sent to the website visitor and the other way around as well. So it helps secure the web and not only for web shops, but also for any website that otherwise could be impersonated by attackers. And it’s also great for ranking in Google.

And it just looks a lot better in your browser if there’s a lock on your website. SSL is free, so why not install it?

Doc Pop: I mentioned at the beginning of this show, how the first time I ever thought about SSL was when I was using Chrome and came across a site that was not secure and that site was mine. So I was scared by my own site. And had to learn about installing SSL certificates in order to hopefully have a better experience when users come to my site and see it. Once you install SSL and you have an HTTPS address, then Google won’t show that warning anymore on Chrome visits, but does it also affect SEO?

Rogier Lankhorst: Yeah, sure. Google has a lot of powerful tools to get users to do what they want. And the most powerful tool they have is the ranking. So if they want website owners to do something, they just put it in the ranking mechanism and the website will follow.

Doc Pop: And you mentioned that SSL certificates are free these days. I believe when I first signed up for them, that was just beginning to happen, it seemed like it was a painful process and maybe cost some money and then services like Let’s Encrypt came around and really made it easier. On top of that, a lot of web hosts, mine included, started offering free Let’s Encrypt, they started building it into the process to make it as simple as possible, which is really helpful. 

So with these alternatives out there now for being able to install, maybe from my host, is there a reason that someone would still be using Really Simple SSL instead of if their host offers it?

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, Really Simple SSL was not originally built to generate SSL certificates. That’s just something we added two years ago, because I thought, well, if we are Really Simple SSL, we should be able to generate a certificate as well, but it’s not the main reason people install Really Simple SSL.

When users have SSL, they don’t often they often don’t know what to do with it. And in WordPress, you need to do a few things; add redirects, fix mixed content, stuff like that, add security headers to really get all out of the secure SSL you can get out of it. So I think that’s still the main reason, people install Really Simple SSL for just the quickest method to get SSL configured on your website.

Doc Pop: Yeah, and there are some added security features that aren’t, I don’t think of them necessarily as SSL related that are part of Really Simple SSL. Can you tell us about some of the other advanced features that a Really Simple SSL includes?

Rogier Lankhorst: We noticed a lot of people already thought of us as a security plugin. So, that’s when I thought we have to fulfill those expectations. We started with adding some hardening features, like blocking user registration. A lot of website owners are not aware that user registration is opened and things like the debug log location, which can contain important information, like user email addresses or license keys or stuff like that. File editing, feedback on the login screen. 

If you log in and WordPress says, the username is not correct, the attacker knows, I can try again. So all those things are really the start for us to broaden into a full security plugin eventually. And the last feature we added was the vulnerability detection, which is really a great tool to really secure your website as most issues in WordPress websites with security are caused by plugins with a vulnerability, which are not updated. So if users are more aware of that, I think WordPress will become a lot more secure.

Doc Pop: Everything you mentioned, I think, are little pet peeves that people have about WordPress security. And it is really interesting that Really Simple SSL has kind of evolved into this easy way to install an SSL certificate, but also like these things should be patched. Here’s a really easy way to fix that.

I’m kind of curious if bloat is a concern of yours, when you have a plugin called Really Simple SSL. Are you worried sometimes that by adding these extra features, you might be making it a little more difficult. And then I guess on top of that, are you also thinking about changing the name of the plugin as you add more features?

Rogier Lankhorst: Yeah, well, eventually that is the goal that it will become Really Simple Security. I think that will be the beginning of next year. But while talking about bloat, that’s a difficult thing. You want to keep things as simple as possible. So we have worked hard to make it still possible to just do the SSL activation.

And all other things are modular and not loaded when you don’t use it, but at the same time, I think we’re really good at making complex stuff really simple. 

I think that’s where our power is what we can really do for people to make it really simple for non technical users. And for more advanced users, they can dive a bit more into the settings.

Doc Pop: That’s wonderful. I think that’s a good spot for us to take a short break. And when we come back, we’re going to keep talking to Rogier about Google’s push for SSL. And I guess just, we’re going to talk a little bit more about what it’s like having one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress repository.

So stay tuned for that.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Rogier Lankhorst, the lead developer at Really Simple Plugins. And we are talking about SSL because Really Simple plugins makes an extremely popular plugin called Really Simple SSL. Rogier before, before this break I mentioned that a large reason that we’re talking about SSL certificates these days is largely because Google made a push on the web for this to happen. 

I’m also seeing that Google is pushing for maybe shortening the term. So some SSL certificates are for like two years, and Google’s talking about pushing for 90 day SSL certificates. Did you have any thoughts about how Google encouraged people to get SSLs?

Do you think that worked out great for everyone?

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, I think it’s a good thing. At the time that Google started with this, a lot of users still thought SSL isn’t important for me because I have just a small blog. I don’t have any user data on my site, but there are a lot of other ways attackers can use that kind of connection between websites and maybe show wrong information to users, pretending to be there with another website.

So I think it’s very important that all websites will have an SSL connection eventually. So I think although Google always has its own reasons for doing things like this. In this case. It’s a good thing.

Doc Pop: And the 90 day limits, did you have thoughts on that?

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, I’m not very familiar with the reasons behind it, I have to admit, but I know a bit about it and that it’s more secure to have shorter lifetimes of certificates. And I think it won’t make that much difference because the most used SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt are already for 90 days, so it wouldn’t have much impact anyway.

Doc Pop: So let’s go back to talking about Really Simple SSL. There’s a version on the WordPress repository, the plugin repository, the free version with 5 million. I know I keep saying that, but it’s such a shocking number, 5 million active users or more. 

What is the difference between the free version of Really Simple SSL and the pro version that I know that y’all offer?

Rogier Lankhorst: The pro version mainly contains a lot of security headers and I think most users are not really familiar with security headers. But these are some very important headers users can set on their websites, which will also increase security. And not only for their own website, but also for the website visitors, which I think is often forgotten in security.

We make it really easy to configure security headers and we are currently working on vulnerability detection for example. We have a feature which automatically handles the updates or current time, if a vulnerability is detected. We also have some cool new features coming up, which will prevent creation of admin users by any other methods than the WordPress user profile update or creation.

So if you look at recent vulnerabilities, you will see a big problem is when admin users are created. So if you lock that, you prevent a lot of vulnerabilities.

Doc Pop: We had talked about the ranking of this plugin and the WordPress repository. I’m on the popular page on wordpress.org/plugins right now, and I don’t know if these are ranked in terms of order, but these are all plugins with 5 million active installs or higher. I see that just on this list, Really Simple SSL is the ninth down. I think that might actually be meaning that it’s the ninth most popular plugin at the moment in terms of active installs. 

Rogier Lankhorst: Absolutely. Yeah.

Doc Pop: Wow. That’s incredible. It’s not a big surprise to see Yoast and WooCommerce and Akismet here. I don’t get to talk to people who created such popular plugins.

I don’t get a chance to talk to them too often. I’m just kind of curious while you’re here, what is that like? I mean, I guess here’s my first question is when you have such a crazy popular free plugin, I imagine it makes it really difficult to, you probably get a lot of requests, a lot of comments, a lot of questions and help requests.

How do you handle that for a free plugin?

Rogier Lankhorst: I think it’s not as many support requests as people often think. During the development of the plugin and the past like seven, eight years, I’ve always tried to either create an article on the website when there was a question or create a solution in the plugin itself, or make it more clear in the plugin.

So that approach has really kept support down. And we are now with a company of 10 and with just two support reps. We also have two other plugins, with I think in total, over six and a half million installs. So I think the support load is not as big as many people think looking at the numbers of the installs.

Doc Pop: Can you talk about the business model of a free plugin like this? How does a company like yours enable 5 million active installs on Really Simple SSL and still be a company?

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, of course, for every 100 free users, there’s someone who buys the premium plugin. That’s where we can build a company from the upgrades. Sometimes free users complain about the upgrades. And we want to tell users what we offer.

And they always say, well, I think it’s a great deal because the premium plugin allows us to develop for free for 5 million users. 

Doc Pop: And in terms of balancing what goes in the free and what goes in the pro versions, do you have thoughts on how you sometimes determine how things get charged or how things stay free to help promote the larger product. Is it tough to decide when new features get added if they’re pro only, or if they’re free?

Rogier Lankhorst: Yeah. That’s always a difficult discussion to think about, what should be in the free and what should be in premium. And we usually give away a lot, I think. Our main approach is like with the vulnerabilities, the detection is free and everybody can see if they have a vulnerable plugin, but the automatic solutions for that are premium.

So that’s how it’s divided. And with the last of the coming updates, I think we will add more in the premium plugin like login protection, two factor authentication, and limit login attempts, stuff like that. That’s also because we think there’s already so much in the free plugin that we want to keep the balance right. We want to start putting more in a premium right now.

Doc Pop: And I think that’s a good spot for us to take our free episode of the podcast into commercial break, which helps keep it free. That’s a nice segue. 

Stay tuned for after this short break, we are going to come back and wrap up our conversation with Rogier from Really Simple Plugins about some of the other plugins that Really Simple are offering right now.

So stay tuned for more.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Rogier Lankhorst, the lead developer of Really Simple plugins. We’ve been talking about SSL certificates and Really Simple SSL. We also talked about the fact that Rogier, you have several other plugins out there.

What are some of the other plugins that you’re currently focusing on at Really Simple plugins?

Rogier Lankhorst: We have Complianz, which is a privacy solution. And it’s the fastest growing plugin apart from Really Simple SSL. And, it offers a cookie banner, and also blocks services that require consent, according to local privacy laws like the GDPR in Europe. Canada is creating an opt in privacy law as well. So a lot of things are changing in privacy legislation. So the plugin offers a way to handle that automatically. 

And we also have a statistics plugin, which is pretty new. It recently hit 100,000 installs, and the goal there is to provide a privacy friendly statistics solution, so you don’t have to use Google Analytics, which requires consent in most countries, so you lose data there.

Doc Pop: It’s really interesting you’re talking about this because I have been thinking a lot lately about Google and the web’s relationship with Google. And I’m thinking, I don’t really need to have Google analytics on my site anymore. I don’t need to have people opting out of the cookies if the only thing really there is Google analytics.

So I’m like, you’re talking about burst statistics and you’re talking about it being an alternative to that. I’m all ears. I’m definitely interested in that.

Rogier Lankhorst: Yeah. It’s pretty cool because I think most users only know Google Analytics and they don’t know there are more solutions. And most users are also not aware of the privacy issues that Google Analytics raises, especially in more strict privacy legislations.

Doc Pop: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking about the work that y’all are doing and about SSL in general. It’s been very interesting chatting with you. If people want to find out more about what you’re working on, what’s a good way to keep track of Really Simple plugins and maybe what you’re working on.

Rogier Lankhorst: Follow me on Twitter. Or sign up for our newsletter on ReallySimpleSSL.com we’ll be sending newsletters on our latest news every few weeks.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s great. I really appreciate having you on the show. Uh, thanks to everyone for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast from WMR. We’ve had a lot of great episodes lately, and soon we will be going to WordCamp US, which hopefully we’ll come back from there with a lot more interesting stories and interviews with folks.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Really Simple SSL with Rogier Lankhorst appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Each month on Press This, we invite a few special guests to come and catch us up on all the news that’s been happening in the WordPress community in the past month.

We call this our Word Around The Campfire edition. And this month we’ve got some great news about WordPress 6.3, WordCamp US, and a lot more. We’re going to see how much we can fit into this episode. And to help me out, we’ve got a couple of special guests. First up is Damon Cook, a Developer Advocate at WP Engine.

Hello, Damon. How are you?

Damon Cook: Great. 

Doc Pop: Thanks for joining us today. And also joining us is Mike Davey, the Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. Howdy Mike. How are you?

Mike Davey: Hi, Doc. I’m doing well. Thanks for having me.

Doc Pop: Well, we’re going to kick things off. As you can tell, I’m in a rush to get into this news because there’s so much to talk about. And I think one of the biggest things is WordPress 6.3, which is coming out on August 8th. And as we’re recording this, we have release candidate 2.

And I’ve been playing around a little bit with it and I actually love it. Matt Medeiros from the WP minute recently asked if WordPress 6.3 is quote, big air quotes here, “the best version of WordPress so far,” which I love that click baity title. And so here to tell us more about WordPress 6.3, Damon, why don’t you kind of start us off with what you’re excited about?

Damon Cook: Yeah, I think it is shaping up to be a great release. They’re always such vast, huge improvements and so much contribution time put into each of these releases. Some of my favorite features that are coming out, everybody’s talking about the command palette. I mean, that’s pretty neat functionality that is available in the post and site editor, and there is already some APIs available for plugin authors to extend and add their own commands. And actually, this afternoon I was tweeting about how it would be neat, a possible idea for a plugin author to maybe bring back the sidebar templates in the block editor and have maybe a command palette that you can switch left and right from.

That’s a really neat feature and the APIs for that should be fun to extend.

Doc Pop: Just to kind of visualize this for listeners, if you don’t know what the command palette is, if you’re a Mac user, it’s called the spotlight tool, and I’m guessing there’s probably something similar for PC and other users. Basically when you are in a post or you are on a page or you’re editing the site, if you’re anywhere where the block editor is present, you can hit command K.

And a little white kind of search bar pops up. And from there you can basically access anything else that also has the block editor. So you could type in “new post” or you could type in “new block”. And instead of having to search around for stuff or navigate stuff, you can very quickly surf your site through this command palette.

And as Damon’s saying, there’s a lot of potential for APIs there. Like some people are talking about integrating AI to maybe be able to do things where you could say, create a new post that has a picture of a cat or something. And so instead of just opening a new post, in theory, the command palette might have some functionality that could do multiple things at once, right, Damon?

Damon Cook: Definitely. Yeah. The possibilities are endless.

Doc Pop: And what about for developers kind of focusing more in there? Is there any new features that they should be aware of?

Damon Cook: In relation just to the command palette or in general with a 6.3 release?

Doc Pop: With 6. 3?

Damon Cook: Yeah, I mean, there’s tons of new features there’s performance improvements that allow for the scripts API, there’s async and defer, which should help with front end performance and with images, there’s a fetch priority attribute that has been included.

So, those can be utilized to get front end performance impact and make your sites faster for sure.

Doc Pop: Yeah, the performance team has really added a bunch of new features to this version. And I think one of the other notable things about this version, this isn’t exactly developer related, but this marks the end of Gutenberg Phase Two, right?

Damon Cook: Yeah, it’s already kicked off the collaboration and a lot of planning and discussion around what those projects are going to involve. So yeah, it’s exciting times.

Doc Pop: So the release candidate is out now. Some of us are playing around with it and sharing our feedback and August 8th is when this should hit the world. With a book ending of Gutenberg Phase Two, this really is a good chance if you tried the block editor and didn’t really like it years ago, this is a good chance to come back and try it out because things are easier to find, they’re more consistently placed. A lot of the issues have been really worked out.

This is the best version of the block editor so far. And I think it’s a really big step for WordPress as well. So August 8th is when that’s going to hit the shelves. And another big update is coming out, ACF 6.2 will be coming out real soon. Right, Mike?

Mike Davey: That’s right, actually. The beta for ACF 6.2, I think we’ll probably be out by the time this episode is live. I’m almost certain, but we don’t really like to be held to exact dates all the time like that, but I’m almost certain it will be out before this episode goes live.

Doc Pop: And let’s assume ACF 6.2 does go out and beta by the time this was live, how much longer before the full release hits everybody.

Mike Davey: That I cannot say. I think again, fairly soon, but they do need time to people using it, get enough feedback to really make sure that they handle everything for the full release, see how everything’s working because they’re introducing some really big new features.

Doc Pop: Like what?

Mike Davey: It’s always been possible to set up bidirectional relationships in ACF in code. But with 6.2 and 6.2 Pro, you can now do that right in the UI with certain fields with the relational fields, which is, post, object, relationship, user, and taxonomy fields.

They display a new advanced tab when you go into their settings that has a bidirectional toggle, right? And you can just kind of flip that on and then you can select one or more target fields, which will be updated on each selected value for that field and it’s back to the item being updated, right? It’s a fairly powerful and complicated feature.

It’s really the sort of thing that you do have to see an action, I think to really understand. Iain Polson did a demo of it on a session of ACF Fridays, our open office hours, and we can link to that. And that really shows exactly what you can do a little bit better.

We’re also introducing admin UI registration for option pages in ACF Pro 6.2 and Damon Cook actually can speak more to that because he just did a workshop on how that’s going to work just the other day. 

Damon Cook: Yeah, yesterday I did a workshop on that and I just posted the video to the WP Engine Builders channel for the recording of that, but it really makes registering these option pages so fast because while. Power users were definitely doing it with code before now you could just do it right in the UI and you can even do it while you’re creating field groups.

You can associate those right on the fly with the little built in modal, so it’s really a great enhancement.

Doc Pop: When we’re talking about options pages, and the changes here, are these options on the backend or are these new advanced options that can be shown for the users?

Damon Cook: Yeah, these are option pages, so typically a builder might create an option page to allow a client to set their Google analytics ID or add some social links and just give them a centralized place to change some settings and toggle things on and off.

Doc Pop: That’s cool. Anything else we should talk about with the ACF, Mike?

Mike Davey: Yeah, one last thing, actually. We’ve had multiple requests over the years to support saving JSON to multiple different paths, and ACF 6.2 is finally going to bring support for that to the core plugin. I don’t want to get into all the technical details, in part because I can’t explain them, and in part because it’s, again, another thing that’s easier to see rather than hear about.

But starting in 6.2, you will be able to have multiple JSON save locations.

Doc Pop: Speaking of save locations, everybody stick around. I’m trying my best to make this into a segue, where we’re going to save this thought and we’ll be right back after these messages with more WordPress news, including WordCamp US news and some conversation about WordPress and AI. So stick around after the short commercial break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to the Word Around The Campfire Edition of Press This today. We’ve got Damon Cook, a Developer Advocate at WP Engine and Mike Davey, the Senior Editor at Delicious Brains here to catch us up on WordPress news. And so far we’ve been “caughted” up on Advanced Custom Fields, 6.2 ACF, 6, 2, and WordPress 6.3. 

And we have a lot more to get into. I think one of the things I wanted to talk about is yesterday. I guess I’m just going to brag. Yesterday I had my site linked from Hacker News and first off, man, Hacker News. I wasn’t even like the top of the page and Hacker News sent me 12,000 views, which is more than I get from like Boing Boing these days or Reddit or whatever.

So they still have some serious traffic. And while I was there, I found out that a couple of weeks ago, the WordPress playground or the WP Playground was up there. That’s a WordPress instance that runs entirely in your browser. And that was up on the top of Hacker News. They were excited about that.

Damon, can you tell us about WP Playground?

Damon Cook: Yeah, that’s a really neat and interesting tool. It’s built on WebAssembly and allows you to spin up a WordPress site right in your browser and everything is installed, including the PHP, and you can log in and it’s really got an extensive API. So it’s really setting up the possibilities for even plugin authors and theme authors to pass along some query parameters and spin up a demo site of their theme or their plugin, and you can just embed it in your site anywhere.

So it’s a really neat feature. I think there is also an API, so you can spin up pull requests. So I think there is functionality with the Gutenberg plugin. So if there is a new pull request submitted, you can do per branch sites that are spun up. So somebody could test a feature that’s in the Gutenberg project, but that also has the potential of being pulled into personal projects and client projects. 

So it’s a really neat tool and you can even do sandboxes. So if you need to spin up a quick WordPress site and test something, just go to WP Playground and spin it up and take it for a spin and install some plugins and see if you can break things. but yeah, it’s a great, great tool and I think it’s going to get even better as it goes along for sure.

Doc Pop: I think that URL is playgroundWordPress.net. You can also just find it from searching WP Playground. Damon, who do you think is the target? Who is this meant for? What is this tool meant for?

Damon Cook: I think it’s got a few different use cases, but it certainly, I think, will be useful for the WordPress project in regards to documentation and testing. The thought that you could possibly have an up to date, up to the minute project, a WordPress site embedded alongside documentation, so you could actually, be reading documentation in line, take something and test it out and run some code that is super useful.

So I think the possibilities there are really interesting. And then also just for everyday builders, as a training resource, you can spin up a sandbox site and install some themes and plugins and just kind of test things out and learn as you go. As a training mechanism as well, I think that’s another useful feature, but I think a lot of use cases are yet to even be explored or come to, come to enlightenment, I guess.

Doc Pop: Yeah, mostly right now, it’s just like, that’s cool. There’s an instance of WordPress in my browser. And I think that’s where a lot of us are, but I was kind of thinking when I first heard about this is maybe a good way to show potential new WordPress users who may be nervous about going through the whole process of installing WordPress, maybe just kind of showing them like what it’s like.

Just giving them a chance to browse around and see how the block editor works and editing a post works and things like that. So that’s kind of what I was thinking when I first heard about it, but I hear more from developers and I’m like, man, this is a lot more powerful than just some sort of example tool for new WordPress users.

On the subject of new WordPress users, I want to pivot over a little bit to talking about one of the things I’ve heard in the WordPress and artificial intelligence space. Some companies like Bluehost and Hostinger are using AI to reduce the friction of creating new sites for new users.

So they’re trying to use AI to help ease people into the space. We’ll talk particularly about Bluehost’s new tool, which is called Wondersuite, and there might be some more out there that I don’t know about, but Wondersuite was the one that I was taking a look at. And this basically starts users off with a series of questions, a series of like kind of check boxes.

One of the very first ones is like, “Hey, have you, have you used WordPress before and are you kind of beginner or advanced or intermediate?” And if they are a beginner or maybe intermediate, then the rest of the flow kind of walks them through. What sort of site are you looking to build?

Are you looking to build something like a site that sells things or a personal blog? It kind of goes through that stuff, but then afterwards it uses AI to walk them through adding plugins and messing with blocks and changing themes. It sounds pretty neat. It sounds like the sort of thing we might’ve done in the past.

Where if we had more of a rails-y approach where we force people to like, okay, now go to plugins and do this, which is a little stiff, but this is maybe a more flexible way if it works as good as it sounds, where people can on their own, play around in a site and these little messages might pop up saying, “here’s what this thing is. And here’s how you should use it.” 

I just thought it was kind of a neat use of AI. I haven’t personally played with it yet, but it sounds pretty cool. Damon, have you heard of any new like WordPress and AI stuff that you’re excited about? 

Damon Cook: Yeah, it’s a really neat time. Some of these tools are coming out. I haven’t had a chance to test out the Bluehost, but I did read up on it. The whole onboarding idea is always being explored. I know there’s been other attempts, but I think pulling in AI is definitely a space that’s worth exploring and that’s a neat tool that they have developed.

One thing I saw recently was StaffUp.AI, which was a neat service. So it offers a series of about a dozen bots and I thought it was clever because they give the bots names and personalities and pictures. And there’s one that’s actually a WordPress developer and you can utilize it to write documentation or help flesh out some of the features that might be in a plugin that you’re not sure how they’re working or even write posts for you. So it’s a really interesting service and I was just exploring that the other day. I think they have a few other bots that are related to developer centric personas, but it’s a neat service and I think we’re going to see a lot more of it.

Doc Pop: I just remembered that Jetpack has really gone into the AI space as well. I think three months ago on a Word Around The Campfire, I talked about how I played around with some of their generative AI blocks. One of them was, you know, type in a description of an image and it would create an image using stable diffusion.

One of the others was, you could have it analyze your post so far and it would write the next paragraph or something like that. And those are pretty basic experiments in AI. I think they are still experimenting more now. Jetpack AI assistant is kind of out and it seems like Jetpack is really leaning into the AI space, but I haven’t had a chance to test this yet. 

One of the things I keep waiting for is I’m not really looking for something to generate the content for me, but I am interested in having tools help me with the mundane task of filling out the SEO fields and maybe even, and I know there’s some tools that do this, but maybe even AB testing headlines or something. I have a small site, other than my 12,000 visits I got in one day yesterday, it’s usually under a hundred.

And so I guess I don’t really need to be worrying about AB testing on my site, but it is a sort of thing that I’m like, Oh, this would be a cool use of AI.

Damon Cook: Definitely.

Mike Davey: I could really use a fact checker bot.

Doc Pop: Yeah?

Mike Davey: If I had an AI system that just checked facts I fed it. Just fed it like an article that say I had generated through AI, please fact check this for me. And then I could at least, see its report and see if the fact checking was any good.

Doc Pop: Yeah.

Mike Davey: Cause that’s probably the slowest part of using AI tools in a lot of cases is checking its work.

Doc Pop: And it sneaks in stuff. It just sounds so smart that when you’re generating texts with it everything seems kind of confident and good, and it lulls you in. And the idea of using AI to fact check AI, that’s very fun to me.

Mike Davey: Yeah. It doesn’t actually have a very good track record of doing that. I believe Chat GPT 4 does have an AI detector.

Doc Pop: Mm hmm.

Mike Davey: They tried using Chat GPT 4 as an AI detector and it did okay at first and then apparently has gotten worse over time. I seem to recall.

Doc Pop: Yeah.

Mike Davey: Don’t quote me on that.

Unfortunately, I’m saying it on a recording, but I seem to recall seeing that.

Doc Pop: Well, all of this reminds me of one more feature in 6.3 that we didn’t get into. It’s a small one, but they added a footnote block into WordPress 6.3, which allows you to basically add footnotes, right? So you can have paragraphs of text and you can highlight one specific sentence or word as if you were going to hyperlink it, and instead you can associate it to a footnote lower on. 

And so that footnote is like its own block. It’s got this cool functionality where if you click on the thing, it takes you down to the footnote block and it keeps you on the page. And of course, the very first thing I tried was to create footnotes of footnotes. And also to see if I could get a footnote to link to itself. Get a little regressive footnotes going ’cause that’s what I do. I break things and I use tools incorrectly. And I get very excited about stupid stuff like that. 

Damon Cook: Yeah, there’s another actual block, the details block, which looks really interesting coming out in 6.3 as well. It toggles open and closed.

Doc Pop: Yeah, the details block, I think also known as the spoiler block. Is that the same one?

Damon Cook: Yes.

Doc Pop: Yeah. Well, this is the cool stuff coming in WordPress 6.3. We are going to take one more quick break. And when you come back, we are going to finish up our conversation by talking a little bit about WordCamp US and some upcoming WordCamps.

So stay tuned for more Word Around The Campfire edition of Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress community podcast. This episode, we’re talking to Damon Cook and Mike Davey for our Word Around The Campfire, where we recap all the news that’s been happening. And we’ve talked a lot about AI and WP Playground. A couple of new features coming in, ACF 6.2 and WordPress 6.3. 

And just at the end, I just wanted to give people a little bit of a heads up about some upcoming events in the WordPress space. We’re going to have WordCamp US happening August 24th through the 26th. Emily, the Editor of Torque and myself are both going to be there. I’ll be recording videos and interviews.

Emily will be live tweeting some of the conversations. I’m curious. Matt’s State of the Word used to happen at WordCamp. Do either of y’all happen to know if Matt is going to be doing his state of the word at WordCamp US this year, or is it going to be its own standalone event again?

Damon Cook: I’m not sure to be honest.

Doc Pop: Well, I guess we’ll find out. but this is going to be happening. WordCamp US is happening August 24th through 26 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Damon, you said that you’re planning on going, and this is a big WordCamp for you, right?

Damon Cook: Yeah, that’s my first WordCamp US and I’m really excited. I’ve been to WordCamps in the past, but not the big one. I think I’ll be there actually. Yeah, I signed up for one of the Contributor Days as well. So, I’m excited for that. Cause that’ll be a first time for me as well.

Doc Pop: Oh, right on your, your first Contributor Day on August 23rd. No, that’s on the 24th, right?

Damon Cook: Yeah. 24th. Yep.

Doc Pop: All right. And also coming up is WordCamp Niagara Falls. We don’t know much about it. But Mike, I know that you said you’re planning on being there. Can you tell us what you do know about it so far?

Mike Davey: WordCamp Niagara Falls is scheduled for September 16th, 2023, and that takes place in Niagara Falls, Ontario. I am planning to attend. It’s going to be my first one. And as you said, we don’t really know much about it yet, but I’m really looking forward to it.

Canada does not seem to get a lot of WordCamps. And having said that, maybe I’ve now put myself on the hook for organizing more.

Doc Pop: If you do, I’ll come, I promise. All right. Oh, and there’s another WordCamp coming up Damon, can you tell us about that one?

Damon Cook: Yeah, I just saw that WordCamp Rochester just announced. I think that’s September 30th I’m going to have to try to get tickets for that because that’s out here in my region and probably get a few speaker proposals in. I think that’s rochester.wordcamp.org and that’s September 30th.

Doc Pop: And I think really quickly, some of the other WordCamp just kind of in our area, North America, WordCamp Atlanta is going to be October 14th and I do see that there’s a WordCamp Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, September 23rd. So that’s the only Canadian one I see so far, but Mike, you got your wish.

Mike Davey: To be honest I’m actually looking up directions to Rochester, New York as we speak, cause that’s a lot closer. It’s in a completely different country, but it is much closer to where I live in Canada than Vancouver is.

Doc Pop: Well, on that note, I’m going to wrap up this episode and I do want to give both of y’all a chance to kind of shout out how people can follow you online. Mike, what’s a good spot for people to keep up with what you’re working on?

Mike Davey: I would swing by ACF advancedcustomfields.com on a regular basis. Same with Delicious Brains.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at, @MediumMikeDavey

Doc Pop: Right on. Damon, what’s a good place for people to follow along with your projects. 

Damon Cook: I’m on Twitter. And also, I would check out wpengine.com/builders, for all the latest posts coming from DevRel at WP Engine.

Doc Pop: Well, thanks both of you for joining us today. And thanks to everyone who’s listened so far. I want to say our next episode is a really fun conversation with Roger Longhurst from Really Simple Plugins about Really Simple SSL, which is the ninth most popular plugin in the WordPress repository. So we talked to Roger about why WordPressers need to know about SSL and some of the other alternatives out there, even beyond Really Simple SSL for installing SSL. 

And we just also talk about what it’s like having such a popular plugin and what his, what his time is like spent, like how bad are the tickets and stuff coming from there.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Word Around the Campfire August appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Gutenberg was introduced in WordPress 5.0, which was released I believe, late 2018. And in 2021 and 2022, the team began work on Phase Two of Gutenberg. Phase One was just the block editor. Phase Two was site editor and Phase Three is going to be collaborative editing, and collaborative editing is going to be happening soon.

But what’s really exciting is we are wrapping up. We’re coming up to the end of Phase Two. And when I say end of Phase Two, we’re not talking about no more work will be done on the site editor. We’re just talking about the  project itself focusing on this stuff. So as that happens, we are starting to see a ton of new features that are going to be coming out in WordPress 6. 3, which the release candidate was just released yesterday and August 8th, I believe is when the official date is, there’s going to be a lot of new stuff coming out to WordPress to kind of wrap up Phase Two of Gutenberg and to help talk about all of these new features that are coming is Justin Tadlock, a WordPress Developer Advocate sponsored by Automattic. Justin is really deep in the woods, and I know he’s excited about talking about some of the new developer features coming to WordPress 6. 3. Before we get into that, Justin, thank you so much for joining us.

Can you just quickly tell us what, what is your history in WordPress again? 

Justin Tadlock: All right, so right now, I’m working for Automattic as a Developer Relations Advocate. That means the team goes around and writes documentation. We talk to other developers in the community and just find pain points mostly. So it’s a little bit educational, a little bit outreach, a little bit public relations.

Before that, I was working for WordPress Tavern as a journalist in the space for about two and a half years and long before that I ran my own WordPress plugin and theme shop

Doc Pop: I was a big fan of your writing over on WP Tavern, and I’m super excited to always have you on the show to talk to you about this stuff cuz you’re very passionate about this. And like I said, we’re gonna dive into some of the things you’re really excited about, which is some of the stuff developers should know about 6.3 and the end of Phase Two, I guess, or the wrapping up of Phase Two.

Did I kind of describe the milestones here and kind of what’s happening with 6.3?

Justin Tadlock: I think you got it just right and just to reiterate what you said is that Phase Two is the end of the site customization phase, but it’s not the end of the work. We’re not going to stop and then move to the next phase. And so the work’s going to continue. 

Doc Pop: And on a high level, we have lot of polish being added and stuff like that. Is there anything you can tell us on a high level about site improvements that users should know about with 6.3?

Justin Tadlock: Yes, pretty much the entire site editor interface has gotten a bit of an overhaul. You’ll be able to edit your styles, templates, patterns, navigation even from like the site editor sidebar. Pages to, I forget there’s so much that’s added.

Justin Tadlock: I’m really excited about being able to play around with a visual interface. I feel like we’ve kind of reached that point that we’ve been waiting for, for like, 5 years or so. And there’s still a lot more work to do, but it should be really nice for especially non coders to make changes to their site in any way they want.

Doc Pop: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff coming into the site editor, a lot of it is very visual and in many ways, things are easier to find. I have a feeling there’s going to be a learning curve though. It seems like there’s a lot of changes.

So I think it’s from my experience with 6. 3 so far, just the release candidate, everything’s really nice and it took me a while to find it, but once I found something I could find it right away, the style books, which are always, I thought, pretty hidden, deep. Style books, you can access just from the theme editor page, which is really awesome. And style book is a feature I think a lot of people don’t know about. 

I think they don’t. Maybe they do, but it’s a feature that just kind of shows you, here’s how all of your paragraphs are going to look as an overall setting on your site. And here’s how all the sentences and how all the italics and how all your lists and here’s how images look.

It’s just kind of this nice style book is a perfect way to describe it. A nice way to scroll through and kind of get an idea of just in general, how things are going to look, and you can make changes there that will sync up with the rest of your site instead of like going to a post and creating quote block and then making changes.

You can just kind of in the style book, find the quote block and make changes to it there. I’m already deep in the woods and in a bit of minutiae, but now they’ve made this where you can just get to the style book right away from the site editor. So there’s a lot of things like that that I’m excited about.

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, I do want to say, be a little patient when you first install WordPress 6.3 and you are using a block theme. It is a little bit of a learning curve, but I think overall it’s a better experience. It’s just going to be relearning things you already thought you knew. 

In terms of style book, it’s easier access to that. I want users to be customizing their styles from a global level and having that exposed, or easier to find will be generally better. I’d rather them not be customizing blocks within a page like changing colors and stuff.

That can be a long term bad thing for your site, being stuck with that red in the middle of a post and at a global level, you should have a blue. So I think exposing more people to the site editor and the global styles interface should kind of help them do things, what you might call the correct way.

Doc Pop: I’m going to talk about one of my favorite features, and then I think after this break, we’ll get in and dive into things you think developers should know about. But I just want to talk about something. I think this is a universal thing that everyone’s going to love.

There’s a new tool called the Command Palette. And if you’re a Mac user, this is very similar to Spotlight. On a Mac, you hit command, space bar, and you open up this kind of search terminal. It’s just text and you can open anything. You can do pretty much anything from within there. It’s just this universal, super easy to use tool.

And something like that is coming to WordPress 6. 3 is called the Command Palette, and from within a post or anywhere where Gutenberg is open, so like the site editor or post editor. If you hit command K, you are opening up a new, search isn’t quite the right term, but a new search window.

And from there you can type in “New Post” and hit enter and it’ll open a new post or you can find out about some UI, there’s little tutorials and things in there to help you understand UI. So it is a really cool way to quickly navigate through your site. And it’s a huge change.

Just like when I learned Spotlight for using Mac, I think I’m going to be hitting Command K all the time when I’m in the post editor or in the site editor, is this a thing you’ve played around with yet? 

Justin Tadlock: Yeah I’ve played around with, of course, I’m just not sure about it yet, but I see a lot of potential for the future with this. I see potential for plugin developers to extend this. So, for me, it’s just going to be about waiting and seeing what the feedback is, and I think it has potential.

Doc Pop: Well, it took me some getting used to because the first thing I wanted to do was like, add a new plugin, but you really have to think about it as a spotlight tool for Gutenberg. If you can’t do it in Gutenberg, which the plugin page and a plugin downloads, that’s not Gutenberg, that’s just kind of like another, old school WordPress site, so you can’t quite access those features yet.

But once you can kind of think about what is something where blocks are visible, if you can think about it that way, then you can access those things. And then there are parts like I might want to hit Command K and then try to make a change to WooCommerce. But you can’t Command K that that’s a different thing, but maybe in the future that could be something that comes out.

We are already at our first break, we’re going to take a quick commercial break. And when we come back, we’re going to keep talking with Justin Tadlock.I’ve talked too much at the beginning about what I’m excited about. We’re going to give Justin a chance to talk about what he thinks developers need to know about WordPress 6.3. So stay tuned for more Press This.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc, and I’m talking to Justin Tadlock, a WordPress Developer Advocate Sponsored by Automattic. He’s here to tell us about WordPress 6. 3. And we talked about the big changes that a lot of users are going to see and the site editor. Justin, tell us about some things that you’re excited about that aren’t going to be something that a user like me is going to encounter, but you think is going to make a huge difference in 6. 3.

Justin Tadlock: I think all features eventually are user features, even if they allow developers to build awesome things for users. One of my favorite things I’ve been playing around with, are the changes to the post template block, which is wrapped by the query loop block.

We have layout support. It has like true grid support, CSS grid. So that opens up a world of possibilities for theme authors to add custom styles that were not as easily done with the previous CSS Flexbox model and there’s a gap support. Which are just like the spacing between posts and those were kind of hard to do.

They’re such simple things that we wonder why we didn’t have them a year ago? But these things are also available in the user interface, so users can more easily change how their query loops or output, when they want to show a list of posts or a grid of posts. As a theme author, primarily that is one of my favorite features.

Doc Pop: I heard about something. I don’t know if that’s coming in 6.3. So maybe this is off. I heard that theme developers might be able to ship a site with plugins not viewable to people who get the page. So like if I’m an agency designing a site for someone, and maybe I don’t want them to have access to the really high level stuff that could break the site, that I could hide those plugins from them, is that something coming in 6.3, is that something discussing now that that’ll be coming in a future version?

Justin Tadlock: I know there’s a new plugin list filter hook. ‘m assuming you may be able to hide things with that. I would not recommend hiding things there. That sounds like bad business. If you have a client that shouldn’t access plugins, then I would recommend doing that through the permissions system, rather than trying to filter out and hide things.

Doc Pop: Mm

Justin Tadlock: There are different ways to go about that. That may have been what you’ve seen, the new filter hook available there. Otherwise, I don’t know.

Doc Pop: There are performance improvements coming to WordPress 6.3. There’s 170 plus performance updates, including defer and async support for the scripts API and fetch priority support for images. 

Now, the fetch priority, I know about that one. That’s basically, if you’re trying to appease the Google gods and get that premium Core Web Vitals, you want to be able to have some images load faster than others. And you want to be able to sometimes say, “Hey, this is the image that’s going to be at the top of the page. Please load it first.” Because Google punishes you if images load kind of out of order, if your page kind of changes, size or moves a lot, was there a performance boost that you’re excited about in 6.3?

Justin Tadlock: The fetch priority attribute, which is the thing you were just talking about is probably the most prominent, at least from a user-facing standpoint. Mostly I could rant about how we’re making our web pages so large and untenable with the image sizes and video sizes and stuff. And that’s why we need all these features. But I’ll refrain from going on a rant about that. 

But there are other improvements around the cache API, file system API. I think there were 178 there. There’s so many just minor improvements to performance, and they really don’t get highlighted enough compared to some of the bigger features that are in your face. And I think the metadata API had some improvements too. 

Doc Pop: What about image lazy loading? Is that part of the fetch request?

Justin Tadlock: That will work alongside the lazy loading process. So you might lazy load all your images on your page, but that first hero image, you want it to load early. But like we’ve had lazy loading for a while. The code under the hood I believe has changed for how a lot of that’s handled. I’d have to dig into that a bit more to uh to know for sure

Doc Pop: I also see emoji loader listed as a performance enhancer. Do you know anything about this? I’m assuming it’s maybe you can turn off emoji if you’re not using them, but maybe it’s something different. 

Justin Tadlock: This one I don’t know about, I always disable emoji script for all of my websites because everybody has emoji on their phone and computers nowadays.

Doc Pop: So those are some of the things that are coming in 6.3. I think that there are some things that we can go back and talk about like some of the smaller things happening. Style revisions is one that might be a big deal for users. Is that one that you can explain?

Justin Tadlock: I don’t know much more than that. It’s just going to save your revisions like a post or page.

Doc Pop: Yeah, it seems I didn’t get a chance to play with it too much because I just installed the beta today and it kind of only works after you’ve installed the beta, so I don’t have much history. But from what I could gather, style revisions is going to give you the ability to see a timeline of your site’s theme, for instance, and you can go back to how your site used to look in March, if you had 6.3 or higher or whatever enabled. 

And you could go and apparently not just revert, not just like go back to a saved version, which I could do with my host, but this is actually go back and just take that background and not all the other changes.

So kind of go back in time and select certain things you like and make those changes again without having to worry about, well, if I go back two weeks, I’ll lose all this post history or something. It’s not working like that. So that’s a pretty cool system.

Justin Tadlock: Oh yeah, that sounds cool. It’s one thing I just haven’t played around with much on my own but I could see it really being super useful for people working within the site editor. I’m making code changes on my site, so it’s so hard for me to test those things from just a user standpoint sometimes.

Doc Pop: What is the biggest improvement you’ve seen? Well, and you’ve also said because you’re bleeding edge, you have a hard time knowing sometimes what version you’re playing around in, but what would you say is the single biggest new feature in 6.3?

Justin Tadlock: The single biggest feature to me is just the change to the opening up of the site editor, the interface there, and just having easier access. But within the scope of that, I’m really enjoying, editing navigation from the sidebar instead of the content canvas of the editor. 

Doc Pop: Mmm-hmm. 

Justin Tadlock: It feels a little bit more like it did before the site editor, when we had a menu screen. That has been one of my personal pet peeves, is navigation management. The fact that I’m actually enjoying it a little bit is great because it means the core contributors are doing a great job with it.

Doc Pop: Yeah. And so as a note, it sounds like one of the things that’s been tweaked, in the site editor in terms of the navigation is that sometimes to access the Style Book, for instance, you had to go down a certain path, but to access another feature, you had to be in a different area.

And now you can probably more cohesively get to the Style Book from the same place that you could get to the other things. You don’t have to switch around as much. You can access everything from the navigation menu. Does that sound accurate?

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, and then plus you have the Command Palette also thrown in the mix. So once everybody learns that you should be able to navigate any way you want, and get the places really fast. Kind of touching on the Command Palette thing again, I think I will be a lot more excited about that when the entire WordPress administration interface is run off the WordPress blocker component system.

We still have a long way to go, but hopefully in Phase Three, we’ll get there.

Doc Pop: And you’re talking about kind of going back to what I was saying, where plugins don’t use that system, but you’re saying eventually everything should be consistently using the same system.

Justin Tadlock: Eventually that’s the plan, I hope.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well, we’re going to take another fast break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Justin Tedlock about WordPress 6.3 and the book ending of Gutenberg Phase Two. So stay tuned for more.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. I’m talking to Justin Tadlock today. And right before that last break, I talked about book ending Gutenberg Phase Two, because this is a thing we don’t want people to think that Phase Two is done. It can always change and grow.

So rather than coming to an end, I tend to think of it as like little bookends that you can kind of move even though we’re going to start working on Phase Three soon, there’s still room for us to move those bookends if we do add stuff into Phase Two, I hope that makes sense.

And with Phase Three coming really soon, we’re going to be having some big changes. Collaborative editing is going to be the overall thing. Justin, they just started, I think a week ago, publicly talking about how they’re going to think about Phase Three. Is there anything you can tell people who are listening, who are very excited about collaboratively editing a site or collaboratively editing a post

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, so I almost don’t like the name of the phase because it encompasses so much more than just saying two people can edit a post at the same time. Hopefully, we’ll get things like the post list tables overhauled, where you edit posts, and bring them up to use the WordPress component system  that might mean things like faster loading, finding documents you need to edit faster.

There’ll be an overhaul on the media library, which is long overdue and I always think about it in terms of news editing, where you’ll have an editor and a writer together working on a post at the same time. But there’s also a huge potential for client work. Imagine you’re an agency and you get on a call with the client, you both log in to your demo sites and you could sit there with a client and walk them through the design live and maybe even make edits together, you can collaboratively edit with clients and  I think there’s a lot of excitement about that. 

Doc Pop: With that example, I can totally imagine the client previewing a site that’s still in construction, the client can go and make some tweaks to the copy in real time and maybe upload a current image of the storefront and the developer can make sure that if there’s any changes visually, they needs to happen, like color palettes, or width of blocks, or whatever that those can happen.

That just sounds super cool for agencies working with a shop owner in the future.

Justin Tadlock: I feel like you might get rid of some of the back and forth. Send me what you think and then you send it back and that kind of back and forth can, depending on like how you work, that can be kind of draining, demotivating during the process and it just wastes time. But anything where you can collaborate at the same time, it just speeds up what you’re doing and you can go out and make more money the faster you can work.

Doc Pop: I guess on that note, let’s bring this conversation to a close, just as a reminder WordPress 6.3, which will be the book ending of Phase Two, is coming August 8, which will give you plenty of time, a couple of weeks before WordCamp US to dig around and play with it. And if you have any questions, I’m sure there’s going to be some awesome talks at WordCamp US about some of the new features and also lots of people to ask questions.

And speaking of Justin, are you going to be at WordCamp us this year?

Justin Tadlock: Unfortunately, not this year. I’m hoping for next year.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well if people do want to follow the projects you’re working on, what’s a good place to send people to do that?

Justin Tadlock: You can always follow me, Justin Tadlock on Twitter. But if I can, I would just like to plug the WordPress developer blog. That’s where I do a lot of my writing and several of my teammates, but we’re always looking for contributors.

Doc Pop: Yeah, absolutely. Is there any topic that you hope someone will volunteer to write about?

Justin Tadlock: Anything around design development and it could be as simple building something in the site editor to extremely complex development topics field is wide open.

Doc Pop: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Justin. I’m super excited about the work the team is doing on 6.3. Everything I played with so far has been excellent. So kudos to everyone working on that and a great job on the developer blog too. So thanks for volunteering and working on that.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Big Changes Coming to WordPress 6.3 with Justin Tadlock appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Now in the realm of marketing and web development, I think we might sometimes fall victim to superstitions. I’m sure I do. For example, when designing a contact form on a site, we might feel that certain decisions might cost us thousands of customers, but we might not always have the data to back up those decisions.

Instead, sometimes we might rely on previous experiences in pushing those superstitions forward, or just hunches, or even things that we heard someone said once that we just took to heart. Today I’m going to talk to Viola Gruner, the head of marketing at Inpsyde, the biggest WordPress agency in Europe.

Viola recently gave a talk at WordCamp Europe 2023 about “Testing Instead of Guessing: Generate More Leads Through Growth Hacking.” We are going to talk today about how to do that, how to test and confirm things and not just rely on our hunches. Viola, welcome to the show. I want to start off by just asking, what is your WordPress origin story? How did you join our community? 

Viola Gruner: Hello. Thank you very much for the invitation. So for my story of coming to WordPress, I haven’t been in the WordPress community very long. It’s now just a year. I worked for a startup and we scaled up and we were building a website that used WordPress. One day this website crashed because we didn’t update it.

I wasn’t involved in this whole topic, but I was there when it broke. So, I met with Inpsyde at this moment. They tried to help me fix the website. And when we were growing with the startup, the founder said, “Hey, we need to relaunch.” So we decided to relaunch. And then the founder said to me, we will now use Type3 instead of WordPress. And that was the day when I quit. And then I came to Inpsyde and they showed me the WordPress community. So yeah, it was amazing seeing this community and being there. And at my first WordCamp US, that was my first big experience with it.

Doc Pop: What year was that? 

Viola Gruner: It was last year. 

Doc Pop: San Diego?

Viola Gruner: Yes, San Diego, it was amazing. Great people, a great community, amazing spirit. Before I worked for a logistics company and it was always a little bit about competition and when I came to WordPress, I saw, wow, it’s one big community. And we are one big team and we want to make WordPress bigger. It’s amazing with amazing people. 

Doc Pop: So congratulations on your talk at WordCamp Europe 2023. You gave a talk, titled “Testing Instead of Guessing.” And you were talking, I believe to marketers, was sort of your audience, about the importance of testing ideas rather than running on assumptions. What inspired that talk?

Viola Gruner: When I started working in marketing, I was very inexperienced and young. I still studied, and I was working for the startup and they told me, “Hey, you are now making the whole decisions for this company.” And I was like how do I make decisions? And so instead of saying, “My gut feeling is saying something,” I started to test. I started to test everything or every bigger decision. And through this process, I saw, very often, all books are saying this kind of thing, but if you test it for your target audience, there are other results sometimes. I tested a lot and I tested a lot with my team and we scaled everything up and it was amazing seeing this and it was amazing to learn.

To see that the target group is always a little bit different. And sometimes we expected that this test will be a success, and sometimes it was, and sometimes it wasn’t. We tried to test significantly. And it was also great for my team because often I heard marketers with a team saying “Hey, you need to do this and that, because of my gut feeling and I’m experienced.” 

But during my experience, I saw if someone says this, there is a risk. My experience showed me, you need to test often to really say that will work or not. 

Doc Pop: I mentioned marketers being superstitious. I think I definitely come from that school. I was in print before WordPress and in print and marketing, we always had these beliefs, like the customer has to see something three times before they actually act on it. This rule of three. 

And that was partially because we didn’t have the ability really to test from doing a weekly newspaper. It was kind of hard to quantify how many people saw something and how many times it took them to act on it. But then I also think beyond the fact that was before this technology allowed us to test, I think even now there’s still some things in marketing. Like we should sponsor this event, but maybe it’s hard to quantify it. You have to rely on it should do well. It felt like it did well and it feels like something we need to do. 

So I feel like marketers are kind of balancing that. But you were talking specifically in your talk about maybe somebody wants to add on a contact form, one of the most important parts of your site. Getting people to convert, to sign up for what you need or sign up for the newsletter. And somebody on the team might want to add an extra dropdown bar for some reason. And it’s very important to them.

And it feels to you, maybe that this is a terrible thing. We’ve optimized this flow. And so you’ve got these two people who are working on the same team, but they have these different priorities and different hunches. How would you solve that conflict? What would be the first thing that your team would do to figure out what the right decision is? 

Viola Gruner: That’s funny that you say that because we had exactly this kind of small conflict. It was not really a conflict but the sales team told us, “Hey, we really need one more form field.” And as you said, for a marketer adding one more form field means, our conversion rate will drop. If you research it, they always say, take care of your form field because the conversion rate will drop. So the first thing I did was ask the sales team, “Why do you want us to add one more form field and what form field do you need?” And they told us, “Because of quality, we want to save time. We need one more form field about volume so we can qualify them better and we can save time.”

So for me, the process was writing their ideas and goals down in a one pager. And what do I think happened? I created a hypothesis, always numbers based, what does it mean adding one more form field? If you research this kind of question, you’ll find a lot of data and the data normally says, by adding one more form field, the conversion rate will drop. And so we added numbers based information that said, the conversion rate will drop from 7% to 6%. 

I added the experiment design, what will it look like, required duration, how long we need to run this to get a significant result. I presented it to my team and after pitching an idea, the team decided to go with the ICE model, which means Impact, Confidence, and Ease. 

We rated this idea on how big is the impact for our conversion rate? If it drops, for example, from 0 to 10, oh my god that’s a big impact. We rated on confidence, how much do we think this test will work or will fail? And my whole team said, yeah the conversion rate will drop. And how easy is it to implement this test? And out of these results, we decided on the best test to start with. So we often collected a lot of different tests.

Every other week we had a growth hacking meeting, and everyone came up with an idea, always in the same structure. We rated it and decided afterwards where we were going to start. So the higher the number was at the end, out of the three numbers from the ICE model, the sooner we ran that test.

And for example, with the contact form, we agreed the conversion rate would drop, so we knew we needed to start with that test. And we started this test and we got the results and we were very surprised about it.

Doc Pop: Let’s take a quick break here. And when we come back, you can tell us about what surprised you and what the results were and get into a little bit about some of the tools that you use for testing. So stay tuned for just a quick commercial break. And when we come back, we’re going to keep talking to Viola Gruner, Head of Marketing at Inpsyde about testing instead of guessing.

Doc Pop: And welcome back to Press This a WordPress community podcast on WMR. I’m your host Doc Pop talking today to Viola Gruner, Head of Marketing at Inpsyde and Viola was just telling us a story about adding a modification to a contact form. And there was a hypothesis that this would maybe result in fewer signups, which is, I think, what a lot of marketers feel.

Instead of just going on that hunch, Viola, you and your team did a whole bunch of testing on this. And right before the break, you said you were surprised. What surprised you about the results here?

Viola Gruner: We were all surprised, the whole team, because we thought, if we added one more form field, our conversion rate will drop from 7% to nearly 6%. And the results were that it didn’t drop. So, we were so surprised that the conversion rate didn’t change significantly. We were running this A/B test for 12 weeks and around 45,000 people visited the two different pages. And we saw there was no difference between the conversion rates. This means we can implement the form field on the new form. That was a big surprise for us. 

Doc Pop: And I think that’s a good example of exactly what you’re trying to say, nobody should be just relying on their hunches. Doing testing is easy these days, much easier than back when I was working in weekly newspapers.

Kind of specific to WordPress, what are some of the tools that your team uses for testing or, what do you recommend for people who want to do, A/B testing would be the main form of testing these days.

Viola Gruner: So I personally was using two different A/B testing tools. So there is one free tool called Google Optimize. And there’s another tool from HubSpot and it’s already included but you pay for it. So with these two tools we were testing. But I also created our own workflow with different sheets and I structured everything. It’s simple to have this kind of workflow where you collect everything, and then you have your pitch card where you talk to your team and you write everything down there.

It’s also important that you document which tests were successful and which aren’t running like you expected. So you should celebrate the test if you finished it and document it well.

Also if it fails for example, you can check it out again in a year and you can think about how you can make this test better for the next time? And could we test this again? And of course, for mathematics, there are different online tools, for example, an A/B test guide that helps you to see how many visitors do I have? How many unique visitors do I have? And it’s calculating for you, how long do you need to run a test to get a significant result?

Doc Pop: I’m kind of wondering, are there some mistakes marketers might be making, is it possible to over test? Or are there any other kind of common mistakes that you’ve kind of come across that you just maybe wanted to talk about here?

Viola Gruner: I’m a big fan of testing [laughs] but I think you also need to be careful to not over test. Sometimes it’s okay listening also to the gut feeling like you said before, if you are going to a big event, and it’s harder to test here and to get significant data. That’s one thing I want to say. 

The other thing I want to say is also, that it’s very important that if you run a test, for example, if you run a test on your contact form, it’s going to influence your conversion rate. So if you are going to test something else at the same time, it can also influence conversion rate. So you need to be always looking at your key metric. 

For example, if my key metric is the conversion rate, I cannot say spontaneously, I’m running two different tests because they can influence each other. It can influence your conversion rate. So you could say, I will run a social test on social media, and I will run a test on my website. That’s a possibility you can do but be careful that you’re not running two different tests for the same key metric. 

Doc Pop: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Definitely don’t cross the streams, and mess up your data. Prioritize one test at a time, or at least have different groups that aren’t being tested on at the same time. 

Well one thing that you mentioned earlier in the show is you have a growth hacking meeting at Inpsyde, like a kind of weekly growth hacking meeting. What is growth hacking? How do you describe that?

Viola Gruner: So there are a lot of different descriptions for it and many people are using it already. They’re growth hacking this and that. But for me and my team, making number based decisions and changing things without investing a lot of money.

So it means to come up with new ideas with clever ideas without really having that much money for it and test it. In the previous company I worked for, we were growth hacking a lot. And we had very successful tests with some landing pages and we could improve the conversion rate a lot without really paying a lot. It was our time and that’s it. And we were growing a lot. 

Doc Pop: I think that’s a great spot for us to take our final break. And when we come back, we are going to talk to Viola Gruner about the one final message I got from the talk that you gave, don’t be afraid to fail test. I want to hear more about that. So stay tuned after this short commercial break for more Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This. I’m your host Doc Pop talking to Viola Gruner today about testing instead of guessing, and we’ve talked about what is growth hacking. We’ve talked about how and why you should be testing your ideas rather than just sticking to the hunches or the previous experiences you’ve had. And I guess it should also be mentioned, and you mentioned this at the end of your WordCamp Europe talk, you said every target group is different. And I feel like that’s also maybe a reminder that just because you ran this test once at a different company or once even at the same company, but two years ago, that doesn’t mean never test again.

Like this is probably a chance to reevaluate things because you’re not always going to have the same results each time you test it. Also at the end of your talk, you said, don’t be afraid to fail test. And I thought that was really interesting. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

Viola Gruner: There is no failing for me if you test. Every finished test, like I said is a success because you get to know your target group better. And if you have a team, the nice side effect also is that you made something new with them. You gave them the chance that their voice gets heard and it’s indescribable motivation for them to see if this test works or not. And you learn a lot. 

You should see every test you did as a learning opportunity and it brings you further. It makes you understand your target group better, step by step. And like you said, if you change to a different company, it doesn’t mean that this test will work or not. So many people came to me asking me, what would be the perfect test for my company? And I said, there is no perfect test for your company, or perfect growth hack. You need to test.

Doc Pop: Well, I really enjoyed your WordCamp Europe talk. Congratulations again. You mentioned in the talk that you have a workflow that people could download. People can follow along with that. 

I didn’t make it to WordCamp Europe this year. Did you have a good time there?

Viola Gruner: Wow, yes, it was amazing. It was great. It’s a great community and people are so kind and open. And it was also very well organized. And I feel so thankful that I was allowed to be a part of this, and that I had the chance to speak about this very important topic for me. 

Doc Pop: That’s great. Thank you so much for joining us today, Viola. If people want to follow you, what’s a good way to keep track of what you’re working on.
Viola Gruner: Viola Gruner that’s my name on LinkedIn. Or Twitter at GrunerViola that’s it. 

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Test, Don’t Guess with Viola Gruner appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

According to the World Health Organization, around 285 million people worldwide have moderate to severe vision impairment that can make it difficult for these users to access all of the content across the web. 

They can access parts of it and large parts of it, but there might still be parts that are difficult for some users to reach. I feel like web designers are thinking more critically about building more accessible websites these days, and it’s been a hot topic in the WordPress community. I believe more accessible websites make the web more inclusive, but they also make the web a better experience for all users, even those that don’t identify as visually impaired.

Today we’re gonna talk to Bud Kraus, the Chief Education Officer at Joy of WP. He’s also been a Contributor at TorqueMag.io. Bud recently gave a talk at WordCamp Europe titled “Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress.” And in his talk, Bud demonstrated the tools, methods he uses to surf the web, but he also talks about how his experience has made him a better WordPress educator.

So I’m excited to talk with Bud about this, Bud. Why did, why don’t you kick us off by just telling us how you got into WordPress?

Bud Kraus: Well, thanks Doc, and thank you for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate it. It all started back in 2009 when I was having lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central New York City where a client said to me, you know, Bud, you ought to learn WordPress. And I said, no, I’m a rage against the machine kind of guy.

And he looked at me seriously and he said, no, you’ve got to learn WordPress. Here’s my username and password from my website. Go in there, fiddle around with it, see what plugins do. And I did, and I set up my own WordPress site. And once I realized, oh, maybe a year later that you could do something called a child theme and make WordPress your own, I was hooked.

And little did I know what would happen years later too. So that’s how I got started with it.

Doc Pop: You were already teaching web design at the time, or did you get into web design through that?

Bud Kraus: Yes, I was. I was teaching at Pratt Institute in New York City. I was really teaching HTML and CSS and a little bit of JavaScript, and so I just didn’t see any place for WordPress, but eventually I did, and I started teaching WordPress at the Fashion Institute of Technology and teaching it online and doing all kinds of things.

And back then, this was the early, you know, 2011, 2012, there was a huge market. Everybody wanted to learn WordPress, so that was great.

Doc Pop: You recently gave a talk, and you also based it on a Smashing Magazine post that you did back in 2018, which is a great article. The talk is called Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress. And I’m curious, you mentioned in the talk that you have moderate vision impairment through macular degeneration.

I’m curious about the tools that you use to surf the web, can you tell us a little bit about the tools that you use and how not all visually impaired users use the same tools and settings?

Bud Kraus: Well, that is absolutely correct because vision loss or any disability for that matter is very idiosyncratic, so not everybody uses the same solutions. And I always believe don’t use technology for something that you don’t really need. So I don’t really need a whole lot, but I do need things that, let’s say a normally sighted person doesn’t use.

For example, I do a lot of zooming in and zooming out so I can see things. I use a lot of voice overs so I can hear things, and really that’s about it. People who are more severely impacted use JAWS and other technologies like that, which are much more complicated to learn than what I use. 

Doc Pop: Yeah. I don’t have great vision myself, so I definitely use a lot of these accessibility tools myself, but for some reason, even though I’m using some of these tools, I still think of designing accessible web pages as being alt tags and making sure you’re marking headers instead of just doing like bold headers, you’re actually marking your things properly and kind of these sort of things. And so your talk was just a reminder that not everyone’s using a screen reader.

They all have different ways of using the web.

Bud Kraus: But if you use markup correctly regardless of your interest or lack thereof and accessibility, you’re doing things the right way and it’ll benefit so many things at Search Engine Optimization to mention one. So I’ve always taught people web design standards before there was really a term called web design standards.

It’s just the right way of doing things. So the best way to go. 

Doc Pop: So how has your experience helped you communicate and teach WordPress to others?

Bud Kraus: Well, there’s a couple things. One is I can’t go into a classroom and just wing it. I have to be super prepared. I have to know exactly what I’m gonna be doing that day and especially if it’s new material, I have to really rehearse. Because I can’t go into class and read stuff, I have to sort of memorize it, and that’s okay.

It makes you a better teacher actually. You’re really prepared. And that’s really something that I learned from just having a vision loss is no winging it. You’ve gotta be prepared. You’ve gotta have a good lesson plan going in and so there is a disadvantage if students say, well, we wanna do something totally different.

Or you say, no, we have to sort of stick to the plan here. And usually they do. So that’s not a problem. I mean, that’s just one. There’s other things too, like for example, there’s a principle in accessible design, grouping. We like to group things, making it easier for technology, for people to understand.

And so I group things too. Like I’ll teach things in groups, maybe we’ll do everything about pages, maybe we’ll do everything about posts, maybe we’ll do everything about themes. Sort of like to keep these things together. And I think it’s sometimes a little more understandable if you use grouping as an idea and that’s something I definitely learned from accessible design.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. So when you’re talking about grouping that’s a thing that you do for practicality, as a teacher. But that benefits students because it kind of helps keep things packed together

Bud Kraus: Yes. I think it’s more, instead of being all over the place that students understand where we’re gonna be, and if they have a syllabus, they can see today we’re gonna be talking all about pages, or we’re gonna be talking about posts, or we’re gonna be talking about images.

Now you can’t, from a practical standpoint, you just can’t put all these things in nice, neat little silos. We know that. But if you can, to a certain extent, keep that idea of grouping things like that, I think it’s gonna be helpful for the students.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. I was kind of curious about this as you were talking, we’re talking about your experience as an educator. I’m curious for students, have you ever had a group of students that themselves were maybe visually impaired, and how did that change how you taught them?

Bud Kraus: I’m going to change your question a little bit because I don’t think I’ve had anybody who was visually impaired, but I had a deaf student.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Bud Kraus: And I thought that was really interesting because what I learned from that experience was, when you’re deaf, you can’t just read the words in your mind.

Because that’s audio. So they don’t have the ability to do that. That’s what American Sign Language is all about. And that’s when I started learning, oh, now I get it. And in fact, this student who was very bright, who was a really good designer too, he brought a signer to class.

So, every time he came to class, somebody would sign whatever I was teaching, Which was kind of interesting and it worked. I thought that was a really interesting experience. I also tried to teach somebody who was severely impaired from a cognitive standpoint, from a visual and auditory standpoint.

And it was impossible. It was really, really tough. I wanna say there’s only so much you can do, and I’m not a trained person in that field, so maybe that was really on me. But you can see where this can be very difficult in some in a very, very tiny minority segment of the population.

But there are people that are severely impaired who want access to the web. And one thing I’ve learned over time is if you make things accessible for people like me, you’ll make it better for everybody. And that’s really to me, the key to accessibility, which is really, who cares about making websites for me?

Don’t you wanna make it better for everybody else? And the answer is yes. And the way to do that is through accessibility.

Doc Pop: Yeah, absolutely. The analogy I always appreciated was when they built sidewalk ramps for wheelchair users, it ended up benefiting everybody. If I sprained my ankle, now I have an easier way to get down. iIf I had a baby and I had a stroller.

It just sort of makes the experience better for everyone.

Bud Kraus: Absolutely. And it’s the same thing with curb cuts, that kind of thing. I mean, don’t we want curb cuts? It’s just so much easier to step off a curb or ride a bike or whatever. Well, sure. And also to wheel somebody down in a wheelchair, same thing. Again, the concept of making things better for everybody.

Because my vision impairment, I sort of look at it as a gift actually, in that I can see things about accessibility and usability that other people can’t see. And so, I don’t look at myself as poor me. I sort of sometimes think, lucky me because I get to see things in a different way and understand things in a different way, not saying better or whatever.

It’s just different.

Doc Pop: And that’s a great spot for us to take a quick break. We are gonna come back and continue our discussion with Bud Kraus about the conversation that he had at WordCamp Europe about being a presenter and just educating WordPress in general. So stay tuned for more WordPress news after this break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Bud Kraus, the Chief Education Officer at Joy of WP, who’s been teaching web design for many years, and recently gave a talk at WordCamp Europe. Bud, you mentioned at the end of the talk that this was a dream of yours.

Can you tell us about that?

Bud Kraus: Oh, I certainly can. So, in like 2015, 16, 17, I’d be watching the stream of WordCamp Europe and I’m sitting at my computer thinking, God, wouldn’t it really be cool to go to WordCamp Europe? I mean, what an experience that would be. So I don’t know what got into me, but last year I started thinking, well, I’m gonna apply to speak at WordCamp Europe.

What the heck? They’ll never pick me, so I don’t have to worry about anything, you know, just apply. And I did. I chose the one topic I felt like I had one story in me to give. And that was how I using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. And I applied and I waited to hear, and the day I heard was March 31st. I’ll never forget, 6:15 in the morning, I go into my office, I look at the email and the first there words were “We are thrilled.”

And I stopped right there and I knew, and I said to myself, oh, they must have made a mistake. This is sent to the wrong person. And I kept on reading and it really was me and I was very tempted to wake up my wife. And tell her, because she’d been wanting to go to Greece and Santorini forever. She got up and when she saw it, she did a double take. And she said, I guess we’re going to Greece. And of course I had told everybody that I applied, but the chances of me getting picked were like, one in a thousand. And it turned out not that bad of an odds, but pretty slim odds.

So I’m forever grateful to the WordCamp Europe organizers for choosing me.

Doc Pop: Up until this point, you had never even been to WordCamp Europe, which is one of the largest, if not the largest WordCamps in the world ever. And your first time going, you gave a massive presentation. Kudos on that.

Bud Kraus: Well, my wife said I did a really good job and she’s a very tough critic, so if she said I did a good job, I’ll take it. It was really an honor of a lifetime. It was an experience. It’s impossible to forget. And I don’t wanna forget it. And I met so many people that I already know, but more important or as important, I met a whole lot of new people that I sort of met in the weeks leading up to WordCamp Europe. I was reaching out and meeting new people on Twitter and LinkedIn and elsewhere. And it was great. I feel like, geez, I’m so fortunate to have done all this. I mean, I get to go to WordCamp Europe and really just talk about myself.

Now, if I may say, I gave this talk in Boston a couple years earlier, and I was terrible and I would’ve booed myself off the stage. And I said to myself, if you ever give that talk again, you better do a much better job. So really, I rebuilt the whole thing, and I think I did a much better job.

Doc Pop: Awesome. And so now that you’ve got this under your belt, are you getting ready for your pitches next year? Are you gonna try to give a talk at WordCamp Asia?

Bud Kraus: Well, that’s funny you should say. Though I haven’t had the drive to go to WordCamp Asia, but I’m thinking like It would be kind of cool to go to Taiwan. So I am starting to consider, but then I’m thinking like, well, what would you talk about?

Well, I actually have two ideas. I mean, the one I gave at WordCamp, Europe is definitely one of them. But would they cross check to see if I gave that talk already and who knows. What’s the harm in applying? There’s no harm at all.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Bud Kraus: I have to say too, when I applied to speak at WordCamp Europe, I really spent like no time at all putting the topic together because I just felt like why waste a lot of time here?

They’re never gonna pick you. But it happened.

Doc Pop: Well, let’s go back a little bit to your experience as a web designer and someone who’s been using the web for a long time and got into WordPress and really found home here. As a visually impaired user yourself, how do you feel about WordPress as a tool for other users?

And have you heard from other members of the community about their experience?

Bud Kraus: Yeah, fair question. I am not at all plugged really into the WordPress accessibility community. Because I’m a stakeholder, but I’m not really, you can see I’m kind of struggling to articulate this.

I don’t really consider myself impaired. I mean, I know I am. In the year 2000, I was teaching a course at Prat Institute called Accessible Web Design. So it’s not like I’ve never heard of this stuff. Okay. I mean, I was teaching it when browsers didn’t support it.

People didn’t know what the heck I was talking about. What does that mean accessible design? What does, so it’s not like, I don’t know the subject, but I am not an expert. I couldn’t tell you all the ins and outs of the web content accessibility guidelines 2.1 or whatever it is now.

I know it exists and I know the fundamentals of it. I’m a stakeholder and it’s a subject that interests me, and I certainly know when something is not usable or accessible and there is a difference between the two, but it’s not something that interests me, let’s say on a professional level. 

So I made the decision quite a while ago that I wasn’t going to become an expert in accessibility for the web. And I’m not by any means. So can I tell you all about how accessible Gutenberg is? No. I cannot tell you.

I’ve heard lots of things and I have not heard good things, but I’m not an expert at all, so I don’t feel myself qualified. Whenever I see something that I think is just, just terrible, I’ll say something to somebody in the community, but that’s about it. Accessibility is not a specialty of mine, let’s just say that, but I certainly have familiarity with it,

Doc Pop: That’s a good spot for us to take our final break and when we come back, we will talk with Bud a little bit more about some of the other projects he’s working on and some news he might have in the future. So stay tuned for more WordPress news after this quick break.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Bud Kraus. We’ve talked about his experience teaching at WordCamp EU and his experience as a WordPress educator for many years. And now I wanna talk about the things, Bud, that you’re working on now.

What are some of the projects that you have going on this year, now that you got that talk out of the way?

Bud Kraus: Well, one thing I have to say is, I am not a site developer, okay? So I don’t have projects like that. In fact, I call myself a reluctant site developer. What I am doing these days, and this started about six months ago, is providing WordPress content for WordPress businesses.

So a company like Insta WP will say, will you do some videos on something like how to convert an elementary site to Gutenberg? Sure. Or will you create a course for us? Let’s say this is OS Training that has a lot of training on WordPress courses and I just finished something called Elementor 101 for that. or will you write blog posts?

Like right now I’m working on or about to start one for GoDaddy, which is about how to use ChatGPT to spin up a custom post type plugin, which is really cool. I mean, I just love that and it really points the way of how developers will work going forward. Now, I’m not a developer, but what’s so great about it is you really don’t have to be, you just have to know how to use the prompt in ChatGPT and then maybe how to do some edits in the code.

But it’s not very difficult. It’s very cool. So I’m excited about doing that. And other projects. I will be doing a webinar for the Learn WordPress initiative. It’s called “Demystifying the Navigation Block,” which everybody seems to be struggling with, for good reason if you ask me.

So I’m always looking for opportunities to either write, create videos, any kinda WordPress content for WordPress businesses. So, that’s gonna be my thing from now on. And I must say too, it really leverages all the contacts I have in the WordPress community. ‘ve been very fortunate to meet and know a lot of people in the great community.

It’s sort of like by accident. I said, I could work with these people. I would love to work with these people. So that’s really what is really happening now with me. And I’ve sort of turned away from developing websites cuz if you do it long enough, you’re just gonna eventually hate yourself and hate web development.

Doc Pop: And you’re, you’re gonna be at WordCamp US, not giving a presentation, but you said that you were gonna be part of the Community Summit.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. I’m excited to be going to the Community Summit because number one, I really don’t know what it is. I know that it is something that’s been restarted after Covid. I believe it’s basically gonna be two days of talking about how to strengthen the WordPress community.

And I’ve pitched an idea to the organizers about what we could talk about. But we’ll see. It should be great. I mean, I know that I’m gonna be in DC for like five days now because of the community summit. And I won’t be at Contributor Day, but I will be at the two days of WordCamp US.

I’ve been very fortunate this summer because I started out at WordCamp Europe and then two weeks after that I went to WordCamp Montclair, which is a small community in New Jersey. And saw a lot of the WordCamp Europe people there as well, and then onto WordCamp US in August.

So Wow. I really feel like I’ve been at WordCamp all summer, which is great.

Doc Pop: Let’s wrap this up here. What’s a good spot for people to be able to follow the project you’re working on? Reach out to you with any questions they might have.

Bud Kraus: Sure. If you wanna contact me, I have a contact form on my site, which is JoyofWP.com. It’s really easy to remember now. And you can also email me, which is Bud@JoyofWP.com. So I don’t make it hard to get a hold of me. It’s really easy to get a hold of me.

And please do.

Doc Pop: And, and I just wanna reiterate, because you said this too, but I just wanna say anyone listening, if you are looking for some content, you’re looking for videos, you’re looking for articles, Bud is taking orders now, now’s a good time to reach out to you, right?

Bud Kraus: Yes. Thanks, Doc.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Being a WordPress Educator with Bud Kraus appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Today we have a very special guest joining us. We’re thrilled to have Hari Shanker, an open source program manager at Automattic and a key contributor to the WordPress ecosystem. Hari is currently focusing on improving the experience for WordPress contributors and Hari has been instrumental in developing the Contributor Working Group and the Mentorship Program. Today we’ll dive deep into those exciting initiatives and explore how they’re shaping the future of WordPress. Welcome to the show, Hari. I want to just ask you from the start, how did you get into WordPress?

Hari Shanker: Hey Doc, excited to be here. So my WordPress story is pretty interesting. I’ll try to keep it as short as possible. So I was a college student. I was doing some freelance work on the side. This is way back in 2007, and I was helping out a couple of friends doing a startup and we were hand coding websites in html.

That was our side gig while we were in college. So my friend showed me this web application, which allows you to create websites without having to write a line of code. And that was WordPress and I got hooked ever since. I was also blogging on the side. I was on Blogger, so this got me to move to WordPress.com, which eventually got me to self hosted WordPress.

Then I was building websites on the side and I got hooked on the entire ecosystem. It was my first foray to open source as well. And ever since I’ve been on it. Then WordPress has led me to different ways. So even after college, all the jobs that I did were related to WordPress. I was freelancing, I was doing some journalist work on the side, but even though that was my focus, I did try to have WordPress in my life one way or the other.

Then briefly, I switched paths. I was working in a bank. I moved away. So I’ve done a lot of odd jobs, but any opportunity that I had, I always had WordPress. So eventually, somehow that journey brought me to Automattic where I joined as a Happiness Engineer. 

And as of 2020 I moved my role. I’m currently working full-time on WordPress Open Source because I believe the open source software is very close to my heart. That’s what it’s literally given me everything that I have today, and I’m immensely grateful. So I’m excited to be working full-time on WordPress.

I was a community deputy. I still am. And from 2020 through 2022, I was supporting WordPress events helping WordCamps and meetups. So from 2022, I’ve been working on what you mentioned about me before. I’ve been an open source program manager, and I’m trying to improve or support the WordPress Contributor ecosystem.

To help Five for the Future on one side and to help volunteer contributors or selfs sponsored contributors. And one of the initiatives that I’m working with, the Contributor Working Group is to create a mentorship program. So that’s my story in a very capsule type format.

Doc Pop: Yeah. And I wanna say you’ve had a very interesting life. I read your story on the Hero Press post. So if people wanna hear a little bit more in your own words about how WordPress changed your life and made you so passionate about WordPress and Open Source, they can find that on Hero Press.

You mentioned the WordPress Contributor working group, and we both talked about it a little bit. What led to the development of the WordPress Contributor Working Group and what are its main objectives?

Hari Shanker: Ooh, that’s an excellent question. So the Contributor Working Group was formed as a result of some major gaps in the workforce Contributor ecosystem. So since last year, folks working on contributions, they’ve identified some issues with Five for the Future and what was contribution in general?

So these are things that have already always been talked about. So as part of my work, I decided to do research and I spoke to a lot of contributors. I read a lot of posts. I did some of my own experiments and I published a WordPress Contributor journey post in the make project blog, and I asked for feedback.

So the idea is I was trying to showcase how the contribution flow currently works in WordPress in that post. And the feedback that I got was that there’s currently a problem. So people come into WordPress, they want to contribute. But they get stuck at some point. So what is the blocker? The blocker is that there’s too much information or they’re unable to find guidance.

So that seems to be the biggest problem. And a couple of the recommendations that we got from folks, in fact, that actually stood out from all the feedback that I got, so this post is actually in the Make project blog. So if you look at the comments, the major theme that stood out was there’s a need for mentorship, there’s a need for people, there’s a need for contributors to support other people.

So there’s a bunch of other things that can be done to improve the contributor experience, like improving the tooling and improving the overall UI/UX of contribution. But mentorship seemed to be something that really stood out. So I thought about it a bit, and I discussed it with a couple of community members. So there was a WordPress Contributor working group that was created during the pandemic for the make community team.

So I spoke with the folks who used to organize that and I’m proposing that we relaunch this working group with the idea of creating a mentorship program. So this was a proposal I was not expecting a lot, but I was overwhelmed by the positive response to that proposal.

So following that we set up a working group. We launched a working group. We put out a call for volunteers, which also got an overwhelming response. And in the meantime I thought about this a bit, and created a framework for testing this out. We know that mentorship is important, but we need to see if this works right.

So the working group was formed and in our first chat I shared an example of what this would look like. And again everybody seemed to be interested. And together we started working towards that. We started iterating on it, and we created a pilot. So yeah, but that’s the story of how the working group came into place.

And we are currently focusing exclusively on mentorship. So mentorship as a way to improve the entire contributor experience for WordPress.

Doc Pop: And in the next segment, we’re gonna talk about the Mentorship Program more in depth. But I wanna go back to that proposal and the research you were doing where you found out the blockers for new contributors was just knowing how to contribute and that’s what led to the Mentorship Program.

I’m curious, were you seeing that this was a unique problem to like individual contributors versus contributors that are sponsored by Automattic or sponsored by a company as part of Five for the Future or was it pretty much the same problem across the board?

Hari Shanker: That’s an excellent question, Doc. So I would say that this problem is faced by everybody. Even if you’re a sponsored contributor or a volunteer contributor, you face this issue because I spoke to several sponsored contributors who faced the same problem and they were able to get through it because there was somebody in the company that they were working for to support them, right?

Volunteer contributors did not have that luxury. They would try contributing, but they would get stuck at some point. So for some teams, it’s fairly easy to contribute, for many others it was very difficult. So I would say that both sponsored and volunteer contributors had the same problem.

Sponsored contributors had the advantage of having somebody who is already in that company who also contributes being their mentor. But for volunteer contributors, it’s an entirely different story. They do not have access to this kind of mentorship, which often causes them to drop off.

And there’s a lot of things that we can do to improve the contributor experience. But since workers is an open source project, that takes a lot of time and work. But mentorship seemed like a low hanging fruit for lack of a better metaphor. Because we already have a very active community of contributors, many of them who’ve been contributing for a long time and they know the ins and outs.

So if they could help somebody who knew who was coming in, that will definitely make the process easier for them and help them to stay long term. So that is the idea, which brought us to mentorship. And yes, it is relevant for everybody.

Doc Pop: We are going to take a short break and when we come back, we’re gonna continue talking to Hari Shanker about the mentorship program that is coming for WordPress to help bring people in to contributing and make it easier for them and share what they’ve learned already. So stay tuned after this break for more Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Hari Shanker about the WordPress Contributor Working Group and the new mentorship program. Before the break, we talked about the blockers that new contributors face, and those are largely just learning how to get into WordPress, how to contribute. 

And as part of the research that Hari’s been doing, he has found that the best way to solve this is through a mentorship program. So we talked about that in the beginning of the show. Hari, can you elaborate on the pilot for the mentorship program and what are the expected outcomes?

How does it work? Just give us the rundown.

Hari Shanker: Oh, absolutely. So. Well, we decided to do the pilot as an experiment. So as part of the research that I did and from all the feedback that I got from folks both inside the contributor working group and from the community, we identified the problem and we know a solution which is mentorship, but how do we test this?

What is the best form of mentorship? Mentorship itself is a huge topic, and there’s so many ways that you can mentor folks. We need to do this quickly because I personally believe that WordPress is in a very unique space in history where it needs more new contributors coming in.

And we need to test this out. We cannot wait to build an ideal program. So, which is where the pilot comes in. We discussed this and we identified a test or a pilot or an MVPR, a minimum valuable product. So that’s where we are coming from.

And in this pilot we are attempting two types of mentorship. One is a cohort based mentorship and one is one-on-one mentorship. So we are gonna put 10 people, volunteer contributors and new contributors. We have a mix of  some folks who are slightly experienced. So these are mentees, these are folks who will get mentorship. We’ll be trying to pair them with 10 mentors. So these mentors are ideally veteran contributors who’ve been around for a while. They know their way around the project, and they work together for four weeks in asynchronous way. This happens in the Make WordPress Slack. We will be creating a dedicated channel for this.

So in these four weeks, for the first two weeks, the folks, the mentees, learn about the project. So they find out about how the project works, what are the different Make teams and, and certain skills, like how are decisions made in the WordPress project and like different other aspects of the project.

Like for instance, WordCamps and meetups. And how to communicate in the project, how decisions are made and essentially the ins and outs of how the project works. So one thing that I wanna state is this is a very low effort program for the mentor and the mentee. And so it doesn’t take more than three to four hours a week because we understand that the folks coming in here are volunteers. Both the mentors and mentees, so we don’t wanna take up a lot of that time. 

So in the first two weeks they get a very good idea about the project. And so there’s two types of mentorship, as I mentioned. There’s cohort based, like a group mentorship, which happens, and each person is connected to a mentor.

So every week the mentee chats to the mentor. The mentor provides them guidance and support, and they help them identify the teams that they wanna contribute to. And by the end of the first two weeks, they will have a good idea of what the project is and they will decide which team or teams that they wanna contribute to.

So for the pilot, we have six teams, so that would be the core team, the test team, the Polyglots team. We’ll have the docs team, the photos team, and am I missing something? Yeah. So yeah, there’s about two more teams, which hasn’t come to my mind real quick, but yeah, we have around six to seven teams in our pilot.

So we have mentors from each team inside the cohort. So all these folks, by the end of the first two weeks, the mentees will have learned a bit, a good idea about what the project is. And in the next two weeks, they actually start contributing to the team of their choice.

So this is where mentors from the specific teams come in. At this point, mentees pick whichever team that they want to contribute to. And the mentors representing those teams, they work with the mentees and help them make their first set of contributions. So they learn the ropes.

As opposed to a typical Contributor who sort of comes to the project and doesn’t know which handbook to look at or which Slack channel to join, there’s a mentor to guide them, to onboard them through the project to help them make their first contributions. So for the next two weeks, they will either make a contribution or a series of contributions to the make team or teams of their choice with the help of this specific mentor.

And by the end of the four weeks, every participant in the program, our hope is that they will get a very good idea of the project and they will have made a first set of initial contributions. And these folks, as they work with the mentors, the mentors will give them a very good idea of how things are, they will have built a very strong bond among themselves and they’ll feel a sense of belonging to the project.

And you asked about metrics. So as of metrics, our hope is that if at least 50 to 60% or even 70 to 80% of these people will decide to stay and contribute long term, I would consider that to be a win, but that is a hope, actually. And we are actually viewing this in a very experimental sense.

This is essentially a huge experiment and I’m hoping to learn from this as much as possible to see how we can iterate this program and build this into something that is more scalable. And I hope for the future where every new contributor coming into WordPress gets access to mentorship.

Doc Pop: Are you familiar with any other open source projects that are doing some sort of mentorship program like this?

Hari Shanker: Oh, absolutely. In fact, many major open source projects have mentorship of some sort. I believe the Linux Foundation definitely has that. Google, not just the open source projects, the Maps program and the local guide program. They have mentorship.

I know they’re not open source, but those are very good programs that I’ve looked at for inspiration. And many other major open source pro programs like Drupal. Several big projects. They have mentorship of some sort built into them. And for this program, we’re trying to build something unique because many of those mentorship programs have one-on-one relationships associated with them. So we are trying a cohort-based approach for now, and my hope is that we have mentorships associated with each Make team. So, yeah, several open source projects have this built in, which is something that WordPress has not had so far.

And that’s the problem that I’m trying to solve with this Contributor Working Group.

Doc Pop: WordPress is a very complex thing. You’ve got the docs team, you’ve got a performance team, core team, people working on Gutenberg. I’m sure I’m leaving out stuff, but you’ve got a lot going on. I am wondering if the fact that we might need mentorships to help people contribute is a sign that it’s too difficult to contribute to WordPress, or do you feel that WordPress is pretty much as optimized as it can be? 

And this is just when you have something so large and so multifaceted, you’re gonna have to have some sort of solutions to help onboard people.

Hari Shanker: So I agree with the part where you said that WordPress, at this point, it’s not very easy to contribute. I mean, the process has become a lot easier over time and there are ways that folks who are very new also can contribute. For instance, there’s a photos team where all you need to is to click a photo and if you speak a different language other than English, you can contribute as a polyglot contributor.

But overall, I would say that if you are new to WordPress, if you want to contribute, the process is not exactly super easy. Which is where mentorship comes into the picture. So, I’m trying mentorship as a way to see if having somebody to walk you through the process of contributing solves that problem.

But there needs to be an overhaul of the system as a whole to make the process a lot easier. I don’t know the exact, the best way to do that. One of the objectives behind this program is to try and find out what we can do to improve. The WordPress Contributor ecosystem as well.

So the feedback that we get from new contributors is very, very important. So, the feedback loop is built into this pilot, and I hope as we do more of these experiments, we will have the feedback built in. So the feedback that we get from these new contributors who come in who say that, Hey, this is not working, this handbook is very difficult to follow, that will help us give the feedback to the Meta Team.

The meta team is a team that helps build WordPress.org to improve the Contributor ecosystem, to make our tools easier, to make our processes easier, and to generally work with other teams to ensure that the process of contribution, the barrier of contribution gets lower. 

Doc Pop: I totally agree that sometimes when you’re going through something, you’re learning how to do something. You may not be taking notes on what’s painful or you may not really have a good idea of what exactly is painful until you kind of talk about it. And I kind of feel like this is a good opportunity for the mentors and the mentees when they’re talking about stuff, and then the mentees to go and talk to the rest of the program about it.

For these ideas to get vocalized more and expressed and described in more detail in a way that maybe will help the project be easier to contribute without mentors. But that’s kind of a nice side effect of this program. 

I wanted to ask you, we’re talking about a pilot program. It sounds like it’s about two weeks of kind of educating the mentees and maybe a four week project kind of overall. I think I’m kind of close on that. What is the goal for next steps once this program is done? Once the pilot’s done, what do you think the next steps are gonna be in what has already happened so far?

Hari Shanker: Cool. We have big plans. So immediately after the pilot is over, which is to clarify two weeks of learning about the project and two weeks of contributing. So a total of four weeks, our hope is that our contributors learn everything about the project and start contributing to a make team.

The first thing that we are gonna do, when I say we, I’m referring to the Contributor Working group. Our goal is to evaluate how the program went because we are really viewing this as an experiment. We want to learn what worked, worked well, what did not work well, where can we improve. So we are gonna try and get this information as much as possible from our mentees through a survey and through conversations with mentors and both mentees. So that feedback will be very critical. 

So that’s exactly the reason why we’re doing this, as I mentioned. So we know that mentorship is a requirement, but we need to test to see what is the best way to mentor folks. So we are actually approaching this from that mindset. So once we have that information, we are gonna try and use it to build our next cohort, which we’ll hopefully have at least one cohort in one more cohort in 2023. 

And to use those learnings to improve the program or to make changes. And to keep iterating on this to see where things go. Another area that is our immediate next step is to see how our contributors are performing. So folks who have graduated from the mentorship program, are they motivated enough to keep contributing? Do they keep contributing or do they stay or do they go away? And of course there’s another important metric, which is whether they complete the program. Cause this is a volunteer program and everybody joining, both our mentors and mentees are volunteers.

We need to see if folks do complete the program, which I hope they will because we are designing it that way. But yeah, essentially this is an experiment and our focus is to make you pick up the learnings from this experiment and use that to build more cohorts and more mentorship programs.

And our hope is to keep on iterating, do more cohorts, and build a system at some point in the next two or three years where any new contributor coming into WordPress gets an opportunity for mentorship. It could be a one-on-one mentorship. They could have an opportunity to be assigned to a mentor or maybe there could be ongoing cohorts, which happen in a certain period so they could join one of those cohorts and get mentored.

Or maybe each team each make workers team has its own mentorship program. So some teams are actually experimenting with this. I believe the training team has just put out a blog post on implementing their own mentorship program. And my hope is maybe all teams have that. Maybe somebody who just wants to contribute to core but doesn’t really wanna learn about the project, they can join the core team’s mentorship program.

So I hope to pick up all the as much learnings as possible from this program and to pass it along to the good folks who maintain all these make teams and to improve the entire contributor ecosystem. So those are the goals of the working group.

Doc Pop: And that’s a great spot for us to take our final break. When we come back, we will continue talking to Hari Shanker about the WordPress Contributor and mentorship programs, as well as Five for the future and what agencies need to know about contributing to WordPress. So stay tuned for more after this break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. I’m talking to Hari Shanker today about the mentorship program and the contributor working group that has been brought back to life as a way to help bring people, in particular new contributors, into contributing for the WordPress Project.

And I mentioned Five for the Future. I think you brought it up a few times as well. This is a kind of program that’s not enforced in any way, but it’s sort of a goal that everybody who’s profiting, everybody who’s benefiting from using WordPress, hopefully will give back 5 percent of their time. And if this is a successful company, that they would have like 5 percent of their workforce or working time, would be contributed to making WordPress better because they’re benefiting from it.

And I think that kind of ties into this because there might be small agencies out there, or web developers who make a living off of designing websites and maybe feel like they should be giving back to WordPress or maybe even feel like they a passion project that’s part of like an open bug or something that they want to get involved in.

They selfishly want to make WordPress better not just out of the kindness of their heart. And I guess what I’m getting at is this sort of program is aimed towards the Five for the Future goals as well as just people who want to kind of get started with WordPress.

Is there anything else that these smaller groups, like individual web developers or agencies, is there anything else that they need to know about contributing at the moment for WordPress? Is there any other good programs to kinda get them started?

Hari Shanker: That’s a great question actually. And just to elaborate a bit on Five for the Future. So the goal is up to 5 percent. So not everybody, and especially when we are talking about small agencies with 10 people. So for a 20 person agency, 5 percent is one full-time employee, and they may not be able to dedicate that kind of resource towards WordPress.

So, I understand that companies work differently, so the goal is up to 5 percent and whatever an agency or a company or even a freelancer feels comfortable with, they can contribute, even if it’s one hour a week. That’s totally fine. That’s very valid. 

So you were asking about programs for agencies or ways agencies can work on this. One of the things that I’m working on, apart from the mentorship program, apart from the contribute work group, is to create a space where agencies get guidance on how to contribute.

So, this was mentioned in the research post that I published back in the day. So even if you’re a company and you pledge to Five for the Future. You go to the website, you sign up, or you’re an individual, you edit your profile and you pledge X number of hours towards contribution.

That’s it. I mean, it shows up in your profile, but you do not get any guidance on how to contribute at this point. The project doesn’t do that, right? 

So this is the problem that I’m trying to solve, and specifically for agencies. I spoke with a lot of folks,but I actually noticed a few agencies, a few companies who had signed up but who were not making a ton of contributions.

I reached out to a couple of them and the feedback that I got was that they did not get any guidance on how to contribute. So our problem is not lack of information. We have too much information. So this information is buried in so many different places.

It’s in the handbooks, it’s in make blogs, it’s in Slack. It’s so hard to find, especially if you’re a new person into this contributing ecosystem, which is where the mentorship program comes into the picture. So, the thing to do as part of my work is to solve this problem. So to create something, to create at least for starters, maybe something like a detailed overview of how an agency can start contributing.

There’s so many ways that you can start contributing. Like for instance, you don’t really need to dedicate a certain number of people who work full-time towards this. Even if you’re an agency, you don’t even need to start contributing code.

So if you take a few pictures and if you put it out on the photo directory, that’s a very valid contribution, right? So to share that kind of information and on how to organize contributions as a company. So many companies do this in different ways. Some folks, they do this on their own time.

They dedicate a certain number of hours. Some folks, make contribution part of their sprints. So my hope is to create something which provides all this information to companies and individuals so that they get an idea of how to contribute.

Doc Pop: And I think that’s a great spot for us to wrap up this episode today. Hari, thank you so much for joining us. If people wanna follow you and learn more about the project you’re working on, what’s a good spot for them to do that?

Hari Shanker: Thank you, Doc. I’m Hari Shanker on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I’m definitely on the make.blog. All the Five for the Future News goes out in the make.WordPress project blog.

And I just wanna take a quick minute to thank you for inviting me to this talk. I really enjoyed this conversation and you’ve asked me some excellent questions. So it was so much fun discussing what is really close to my project with you. So thank you so much.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

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