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.

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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, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

On each episode of Press This, we pick a WordPress topic, but sometimes it’s nice to take a step back and look at some of the broader topics in our community. We call this our Word Around the Campfire editions of Press This. And I have two special guests joining me today to help cover WordPress News.

Emily Schiola, the Editor of Torque Magazine, and Mike Davey, the Senior Editor of Delicious Brains. Emily, I wanna start off real quick, as we’re recording this episode it’s just a few days after the Super Bowl, but there’s another big sports event that is happening in the WordPress community.

Can you tell us about that?

Emily Schiola: Sure. I would say much bigger than the Super Bowl. Our annual bracket style competition, Plugin Madness is underway, currently. We take 64 of the community’s best plugins nominated by you and pit them against each other. As of recording, we are finishing up nominations this week and we will start voting on the 27th of February.

So come to PluginMadness.com and you can vote for your favorites. It takes about six weeks. We crown a winner. It’s very fun. Sometimes we get a little friendly smack talk on Twitter, but if you submitted or if you just love plugins, come vote every week so that you can make sure your favorites make it through.

DP: Trash talking is always fun on Twitter. And that is a reminder for me to nominate Contextly and Post Duplicator, which I think there’s a few of them now. I need to make sure that some of my favorite plugins at least get nominated once, but after nominations, like you said, voting will go live on PluginMadness.com on what date?

ES: February 27th.

DP: And that runs for five weeks.

ES: Yeah, like five weeks and then we announced the winner on the sixth week. So every Monday, the playing field will be cut in half. So just make sure you come back and continue to support your faves.

DP: Yeah, and Mike, do you have any plugins that you would nominate, as your favorite free WordPress plugin that you hope makes it into PluginMadness.com.

Mike Davey: Well, when it comes to free plugins, I would probably have to say, WP Migrate Lite. The free version of Advanced Custom Fields. The free version of WP Offload SES, and of course, the free version of WP Offload Media.

DP: Good suggestions. I like that. I think one of my favorite things about this contest is it’s a good way to kind of discover plugins that I might not have heard of, and it’s definitely introduced me to plugins in the past before. So thanks for those suggestions, Mike. 

In other news, the WP Community Collective which is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting WordPress contributors and events, they’ve recently announced their first fellow, Mike, can you tell us about that?

MD: Yeah, they’ve announced that longtime WordPress Contributor, Alex Stine is their inaugural fellow. Basically he was selected because of his extensive experience as a WordPress Contributor and his particular expertise in accessibility. He’s been an active Contributor since about 2016.

And his personal, to quote from the WP Community Collective site right now, “His personal experience as a fully blind individual gives him a unique perspective on the challenges that people with disabilities face using and working in WordPress. He aims to help everyone have the same access to information no matter what capabilities they’re working with.” 

Now, I mean, to me that’s great.

That’s really what the entire point I think of accessibility is in a lot of ways. And I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been in media one way or another for about 25 years now. And it’s only really in the last decade that I’ve come to understand just how important accessibility is, even in terms of content.

Like very, very early on in my career, writing and editing for the web, I very often would skip over alt-text completely.

DP: Mm-hmm.

MD: I figured, you know what, if the image is broken, it’s just broken. They just don’t get to see a picture without ever once thinking, of course, people with visual impairments will be totally unable to see anything at all, right?

They don’t get anything if they can’t see the photo and there’s no alt text. It seems to me that there’s two reasons for accessibility and both of them I think are very important. One of them is the issue of justice. I dunno about you, but I don’t wanna live in a society where people can’t access what they want to, to do what they want to do.

If you see what I mean. I don’t want to live in a world where people are kept out of a profession, they’re kept out of some sort of activity solely on the basis that they, for example, have a mobility issue or a visual impairment. 

The secondary reason is just one of practicality. If we don’t make things accessible, we are wasting talent. Right? Some of the potential talent pool can’t access what we need them to, to work in that area. So even if they want to, even if they would be very talented, they simply cannot. Now, I think both of those reasons are quite important.

DP: The analogy that often comes up with the #a11y community, a website that isn’t accessible, if it doesn’t have alt descriptions on images or just various accessibility concerns. It’s like a building with stairs and no ramp, right? Like you’re not really thinking about letting everybody in or how everyone can access it.

That analogy has always been good and I think I’m kind of in a similar way as you, where I just didn’t think about accessibility that much. And I think about four or five years ago, through the work that we do at Torque and just kind of interviewing folks, it came onto my mind. 

But it’s weird, it came into my mind as like making sure that I was using the header tags instead of just like bold texts, you know. Good practices in general that also were kind of accessibility focused in terms of screen readers. And it wasn’t until actually I started using Mastodon of all places, that I started thinking about alt-text, and now it’s just like I go to Twitter and I see people sharing images without alt text, or I go to a blog without alt text or you know, some email newsletter that I really like for my favorite band, and they send out an image and it doesn’t have alt text. And it’s basically the image is the entire email, that drives me nuts now.

And this is a slow awakening that I think a lot of us are kind of, once we start practicing, we start noticing how are these people not doing that? This really should be done by everybody.

MD: Well, and one of the other things that I’ve heard from accessibility advocates and have always found to be true when I’ve rubbed up against it, is that when you improve accessibility for one group, it typically makes it better for everyone. Either it doesn’t hurt them in any way, or it literally improves the experience for everyone.

And the other point to note, of course, is that sooner or later, just about everybody suffers some kind of impairment, right? Eyes fade as we get older. Sooner or later, everybody needs a screen reader or large text or what have you.

DP: Absolutely. Yeah. And think just one more note again, kind of coming back to Mastodon, but I’ve noticed since I’ve learned about alt-text and since Mastodon has a strong practice about everyone encouraging people to use alt text. I’ve actually been using it a lot. People like sharing screenshots on Twitter and Mastodon, and sometimes I’m just like, I can’t read this.

This is frustrating. But now that I have the alt text there, oftentimes, they’ll share the screenshot and that gives me a little more context. Like this is from Instagram, or this is a screenshot of Twitter or a blog post. But I’ll actually read the text in the alt text if it’s made available. 

So that’s one of those examples of you’re sort of doing it to make the web more accessible, but it has these benefits to other people who aren’t. I mean, I don’t have great vision, but I’m not visually impaired per se. So like, it just kind of makes the web a better place for everyone.

MD: Mm-hmm. 

DP: So on thewpcommunitycollective.com that’s thewpcommunitycollective.com, individuals and organizations can make tax deductible contributions to help fund these. As Mike was saying, Alex is the first fellow that they’ve selected and they definitely want to be able to support more events and contributors. And at this point I think they’re kind of getting things set up and it’s just a matter of now getting those deductions from larger companies and from individuals. I myself pledged, I think 50 bucks last year to the WP Community Collective. I highly recommend people check out that site. Drop the link one more time. thewpcommunitycollective.com, and we are gonna take a quick break. 

When we come back, we’re gonna talk about more WordPress news, in particular we’re gonna focus our radar vision, I’m kinda imagining the Terminator. We’re gonna focus on AI and WordPress, so stay tuned for that.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. This is our Word Around the Campfire edition for February, 2023, where I have some special guests, Emily Schiola, the Editor of Torque Magazine, and Mike Davey, the Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. We are talking about interesting stuff in the WordPress community, and I think this year, 2023, the absolute tech story and it’s becoming the biggest thing in WordPress, it seems right now, at least in terms of all the new launches, it’s AI. There’s been a lot of stuff happening.

I think Jetpack, the Automattic plugin that has so much functionality. Jetpack quietly launched two new AI blocks within their Jetpack. One is basically a Stable Diffusion tool that allows you to create a WordPress block and enter in some text and it’ll generate an image as a block in your WordPress post.

The other is a large language model block that takes a look at everything you’ve written thus far in that post, and then it writes the next paragraph for you. So it kind of like analyzes the topic that you’re writing about and your writing style, and it tries to kind of predict what you’re doing there.

And I think both of these are interesting. Mike, have you had a chance to play with any AI tools within WordPress yet?

MD: I have actually, I took a few minutes and actually used the Jetpack tools.

I’ve done a little work with ChatGPT as well, but I did take a look at specifically the Jetpack ones. And I actually started a blog post titled “Spiderman, A Huge Loser,” and put down a couple of paragraphs and then had the AI write a bit.

DP: Mm-hmm. 

MD: The writing itself isn’t great, but it’s also just wrong. Like every paragraph is significantly wrong in some factual way, which isn’t necessarily obvious if you don’t know anything about Spiderman. But it’s very confidently wrong about various things. So I actually decided to give it a bit of a more serious test and asked it to write a blog post about WP security fundamentals.

Like I just put in the title WordPress Security Fundamentals and saw what it spit out paragraph after paragraph. It does a vaguely crappy job of it. It’s very verbose and repetitive. And it doesn’t really give a lot of information, and that probably would’ve improved if I’d given anything but the title

DP: Mm-hmm.

MD: So I actually decided to give it a real test and I went and got a Delicious Brains article by Iain Poulson. It’s an article about syncing your changes when you’re merging your database, right? First I gave it just the first few paragraphs and let it do the rest. And that’s actually kind of interesting because the first section that it wrote included a reference to WP Migrate, which is mentioned in the article after that point, like Iain himself brings it up.

DP: Mm-hmm.

MD: However, that’s really the only similarity between it and what follows in the original article. Whereas Iain does mention WP Migrate, but it’s really only an analysis of why the data WordPress uses, specifically Custom Posts Types, makes it really tough to perform those selective migrations. Right? 

And then he digs into exactly why that is, breaks it down from different angles. In comparison, the AI generator version is very repetitive, immediately turns into a commercial for WP Migrate of all things. I don’t know why, because again, the text I fed it did not have anything about WP Migrate in it yet. Whereas in Iain’s version, he then gives instructions for dealing with the issue with either SQL scripts or PHP scripts, he gives a look at the process Delicious Brains was actually using to manage the issue at the time, and there’s no way on earth the AI generator would ever get to it from what I gave it.

So I did another test. I gave it some more, I copied and pasted the entirety of the post into WordPress. Ending with the subhead “SQL Scripts.” Now that’s where Ian’s original article really gets into the instructions on exactly how to solve the problem, right? His instructions are, they’re concise, they’re complete. They will actually teach you how to do that. 

What this spit out though is, “Create Custom SQL scripts based on the database’s version and state. This can be used to date. Update the database file at the latest version. In this case of database migrations, SQL Scripts can be used to update an older version of a database to the current version.” 

And that’s pretty much it. Like it gives you no actionable information at all. You’d have to go, there’s maybe a few hints in there on what you would have to go Google.

DP: Mm-hmm.

MD: But that’s it. It won’t give you any actual information.

DP: These were all done in the Jetpack plugin? 

MD: They were. Yeah. That’s the thing is it kind of highlights what I see as one of the biggest problems that large language models have right now is they’re often very, very wrong, very, very confident and very repetitive.

DP: Mm-hmm.

MD: With that said, I mean, I suspect I could do thorough edits on what it produces and turn that into a quality post much faster than if I simply tried to write it myself.

If you give it the right prompts,

DP: I’m going to be talking to Aaron Edwards today. He has done a couple AI plugins, Imajinn which is basically MidJourney for WordPress Block, kind of similar to the image block and Jetpack. But his newest project is ChatWP, and that one is, you can train it on your documentation and it should be able to give you really good results because it’s getting ’em from your doc so you can kind of train it more. You’re talking about posting a blog post in there. Well, this is like, here’s how to write the code and here’s examples of code into documentation. So the AI should be a little more knowledgeable.

And on top of that, ChatWP is also going to provide you a link. So if it gives you advice that it generates, then it should also provide you a link to the source. But that being said, we’re still hearing mixed results from people who are trying to use it. So I’m kind of interested to see where we are on this kind of tech curve and if a year from now this stuff will be radically fixed or if we’ll still be kind of struggling in particular with code documentation and getting examples from these types of ChatGPT models. 

In other news, search engines are also adding AI results and SEO is a big topic in WordPress, and it seems like over the years Google has already been taking away from search results and kind of adding answers and little snippets and things like that. There’s a lot of concern, I think from online publications about how this could affect web traffic.

Emily, have you heard anything about this?

ES: Yeah, a little bit. You know, SEO, especially with Google, sort of always feels like a moving target. They make great changes. Some things matter very greatly one year and the next year they’re not ranking with those anymore. And so as a site owner, you’re always kind of trying to figure out what they’re zeroing in on.

I think this speaks to exactly what Mike was just saying, with the AI thing, if they’re prioritizing those, they could be very wrong. They could just sound right. So if you write this article that you researched and that you put your time into, and that’s maybe fourth or fifth and there’s an AI answer, that’s first or second people are gonna start looking into that and that could be wrong.

So I think that’s a big issue. As far as site traffic, I don’t know if it’s a big enough pull at the moment, I could see that becoming an issue and I don’t know how human site owners would combat that just with normal SEO, honestly. But like I said, you kind of have to relearn what Google wants from you every so often.

So I think that this would just fall into that. And I do hope that there is a closer eye on how correct these are, how accurate these are. Because I think that’s the biggest issue with AI in general still.

DP: Yeah, it’s possible that accuracy could get fixed. You know, it’s hard to say a year from now what this will look like. It could look exactly the same as it does now. I am thinking Googling is less effective these days than it used to be.

I feel like they’ve removed dates from posts, so sometimes when I’m looking for how to do something in Photoshop, I don’t know if they’re talking about 2012 Photoshop or 2023. It’s hard for me to get relevant stuff already. And I don’t think for me, that this sort of chat answers are gonna make me feel like going to Google that much anymore.

And I can see where Bing took the step to like, they’re already kind of the underdog, right? So they might as well announce AI and people are using Bing now, right? So it’s kind of worked out well for them. And of course Google that same day, Google kind of rushed out Bard their AI chat answers.

I think, personally, this would be a really good time for some new company to come in and start a new search engine or for Duck, Duck, Go, and just really make themselves different than the competitors by going not against AI, but by just saying, we’re not trying to answer questions, we’re trying to show you the most relevant links.

Reinvent or go back to the old school days of search engines. I think now would be a really good time. Cause I think there’s gonna be a lot of people who don’t want to see some machine guess an answer that may or may not be correct. I think they want to be sent to the best source.

I guess we’ll have to see how this affects web traffic. 

ES: With a site like Torque, 50 or so percent of our traffic is coming from Google. Because it’s people just researching, how do I download a plugin? It’s those beginners and they don’t know about Torque, so they wouldn’t know how to find us otherwise. So that part of it would be a concern for any site that’s informative like that.

DP: And this is a good spot for us to take another short break. When we come back, we are gonna talk to Emily and Mike about WordPress’s 20th anniversary and what their plans are. So stay tuned for more Press This Word Around the Campfire edition.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and joining me today for the Word Around the Campfire February, 2023 edition is Emily Schiola the Editor of Torque Magazine, and Mike Davey, the Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. So far, we’ve talked about all sorts of WordPress news, the WordPress Community Collective, AI and WordPress, and I think talking about WordPress itself, WordPress is turning 20 this year.

Mike, do you have any plans for the 20th anniversary of WordPress?

MD: Not particularly. I was just going to go along for the ride, sort of.

DP: Yeah.

MD: I might make it a priority to attend my first WordCamp this year. Cause I’ve actually never been to one.

DP: Do you have a WordCamp picked out? Do you have one in mind?

MD: If I can get my employer to spring for it, I might go to the big one in the U.S. but if not, I’ll probably go to a local one here in Canada.

DP: Well, if WordCamp Montclair is close to you, I don’t know if it is, but if it is, I’d recommend that one, that that’s gonna be a fun one this year. 

So WordPress’s 20th anniversary is May 27th, and they have announced a website where you can go and get all of your 20th anniversary downloadable files, including a new Wapuu. Emily, have you seen this new Wapuu?

ES: Yeah, it’s cute! They got him on a balloon with a party hat, and then the little 20 logo that they made, which is very sweet. I love a themed Wapuu.

DP: Yeah, absolutely. And for people who don’t know, Wapuu is the open source Creative Commons mascot for WordPress. And this Wapuu is bright yellow Wapuu with a festive hat holding onto a big blue balloon. And all I can think about with all the news coverage lately is I hope he got clearance for that balloon before he takes off. I hope he checked in with the FAA before he goes on any long flights. 

But, you can actually download the file from WP20.WordPress.net, and shout out to Emma DeRosia who did this art file. And Emily on that subject, did you have any WordCamp plans for this year?

ES: You know, not anything concrete. In the past, you and I Doc have done some videos. We got a cake one year. I think we’ll do something similar. We’ll have a Torque moment for sure, but that’s TBD.

DP: Yeah. And one other thing that we don’t really get to talk about on this episode, or it’s happening in like two days as of recording, is WordCamp Asia. February 17th is the date for that and this episode will be out after that. But Emily, is there anything you can tell us quickly about WordCamp Asia?

ES: Yeah, for sure. So we’re not there. Clearly, we are recording this in California and Canada, but it is the first WordCamp Asia. It is in the same place they were gonna have it in 2020. The place looks gorgeous. They sold out in like 24 hours. People are traveling from all over the world.

I think it’s gonna be very cool. I will be live streaming some of it, but the time zones, as you can imagine, they don’t match up very well. But I’m just so excited for everyone there and for the organizers who have been postponing this and replanning this for three freaking years. So I’m just so happy that it’s coming together.

DP: The very first WordCamp Asia is a huge deal. And you were talking about time zones, I think you said Matt’s talk is gonna be midnight for you. The ask me anything.

ES: Yep. Saturday night I will be live tweeting. This will already be up, I will be live tweeting at midnight.

DP: Well, in other WordPress News, I wanted to give a shout out to Matt Medeiros, who’s launched the WP Minute+, and the team at MasterWP have also launched a new podcast called Press the Issue as well. Brian Coords, who’s a regular contributor over at ManageWP, is doing a new podcast called viewSource, and we will be talking to Brian today on our livestream, the Torque Social Hour livestream, which you can check out on YouTube or you can go to TorqueMag.io to see these episodes.

So when you hear this episode, the conversation with Brian about viewSource podcast and the other projects he’s working on will also be on TheTorqueMag.io. And on that, I think we can wrap up here. Mike, if folks wanna hear more about your AI experiments and the other things you’re doing over at Delicious Brains, what’s a good way to be able to do that?

MD: I would follow @deliciousbrains and @WP_ACF on Twitter. And of course, keep an eye on DeliciousBrains.com and AdvancedCustomFields.com

DP: Emily, if, if people want to see that live tweeting of Matt’s AMA or any other Torque related news, what’s a good way to do that?

ES: Yeah, so you can find us on Twitter at @TheTorqueMag, and then TorqueMag.io is the website. And because it’s my favorite time of year, PluginMadness.com go to PluginMadness.com forever. Thank you.

DP: Good plug. 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.

It’s been a pleasure talking to Mike and Emily today. Thank you so much for joining me and thanks for supporting the WordPress community through your roles at WP Engine and Delicious Brains. It’s been great chatting with you.

The post Press This: Word Around the Campfire February 2023 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, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

On this episode of Press This, we’ll be talking about headless eCommerce. But first just a quick side note. On this day in 2011, Rebecca Black released her hit song Friday on YouTube, and within a few months the song had over 160 million views. 12 years later, the song has reached about 300 million views.

Now, if we look back at the web around that time, eCommerce back in 2011 made up a little over 4 percent of all US retail sales. 12 years later, and eCommerce is up to 16.5 percent of all retail sales in the US. Now, that’s a sharp growth. And unlike Rebecca Black’s debut single, that number is still rapidly increasing. We see a steep increase still happening.

So on today’s show, we’re gonna talk with Bryan Smith, the Principal Product Manager for Atlas eCommerce, about current trends in eCommerce and how decoupled WordPress is providing companies with more flexibility. Bryan, welcome to the show. I’m sorry if I accidentally got Friday stuck in your head.

Bryan Smith: Hey, no problem. Thanks for having me. Doc. I appreciate it.

DP: How did you get involved with WordPress and how long have you been in this space?

BS: Wow, that takes me back to 2011 actually. I think it was around the time that I moved to Austin. I was looking for a job and my brother-in-law was big into WordPress and he’s like, “Hey, you should set up your own website.” I think that was the first WordPress site that I ever set up.

But, it wasn’t until 2018 that I joined WP Engine and I worked closely with the Genesis team. It was right after the WP Engine acquisition. I was the product manager for that team for quite awhile. And here I am four and a half years later now working on headless eCommerce with the Atlas team.

DP: We talk about headless quite often on this show. There’s terms like headless, decoupled, and I’ve heard composable eCommerce. Can you tell us, are those three things the same thing?

BS: I would say certainly, headless and decoupled are used interchangeably quite often. I’d say composable is being used more. Some people use it interchangeably. I think, at least in my experience, I first read about composable from a Gartner research report. 

But it’s really the idea that, as more companies evolve their approach to building their digital experiences of the future, they’re gonna want to use, essentially what they think of as the best of breed tools. You want the best CMS, WordPress, to do the job you want the best eCommerce platform, whatever that is for you.

You want the best checkout solution, and maybe that’s not from your eCommerce provider. You want the best product review service. So there’s all these different, what they call package business capabilities. And of course, microservices and the APIs, these companies make it possible for you to kind of pick and choose the best tools that are gonna meet the needs of your site. So that’s really what we mean when we say composable. Like, you’re gonna want to compose the digital experience using the tools that you want. 

And oftentimes that implies headless. Because the presentation layer is just one of those pieces of the puzzle.

DP: Okay. By presentation layer you’re talking about if it’s a website or if it’s something else, right? Because it’s headless. It could be an iPhone app or something running on a screen on your Lyft or something like that. Right?

BS: That’s right. Absolutely.

DP: So why is headless architecture playing a larger role in eCommerce these days?

BS: Yeah, I think what a lot of merchants are finding is that some of the platforms that have sprung up over the last 10 or 20 years are kind of all-in-one solutions, but they’re all often built kind of on that monolithic architecture. Everything’s coupled together. And a lot of the challenges that they run into with that is they’re kind of the jack of all trades, the master of none, so to speak.

And they’re finding that, especially with the rise of these APIs and microservices that are now available. They can get really good services from another provider. A really good example of this is gonna be, say you’re on Shopify or some eCommerce platform like that.

Well, they’re not really a great CMS. So if content was important to you, you would want to use something like WordPress. And a lot of companies do that thing where they have the commerce site on one domain, and then they have a sub-domain for the blog site or something that oftentimes that’s WordPress, but those really aren’t coupled together at all.

I mean, and I don’t wanna overload that term coupled, but there’s no knowledge between the product data from your eCommerce backend and the content that you have in WordPress. And really what you want to provide the most optimized experience for your customers is this dynamic knowledge where the content and the data are tightly associated with each other, so you can create these really rich, immersive experiences.

DP: You talked about optimization just then. Why is this more optimized than traditional eCommerce market or sales.

BS: Yeah, I think a lot of people start to look at the decoupled, headless approach really for the performance benefit because I think they find kind of like the monolithic architecture can slow them down, but it also makes it challenging at times for them to make changes.

So, why is it important? I think they wanna be able to quickly adapt. I mean if anything, change is the constant here, especially in this space. There’s new services, new providers, and the really good ones specialize. If you want the latest technology in terms of search, you might want a third party’s API for that. You’re not necessarily going to get the latest and greatest from the existing platform that you’re on. So that’s just one example. But I mean, that could apply to payments or checkout or product reviews or recommendations, all the things that are increasingly important to drive those conversions on your store.

I think that’s what they’re looking for is again, I said it before the best of breed tools.

At the same time guaranteeing that the performance is the best available as competitive as possible, because that really starts to matter for things like SEO rankings and just the time your site visitors are willing to spend on the page.

If the mobile experience is too slow, they’re gonna bounce off to somebody else that can deliver it on a poor connection.

DP: You know, it just occurred to me, I feel like I’ve been talking about this as if it’s either/or. Is it either/or? Are you headless or doing a traditional Shopify or WooCommerce? Or are these two things, can they go together?

BS: Oh, I think they definitely can go together. I think what we’re seeing, especially with a lot of the agencies that we talk to is their clients are already on these eCommerce platforms. It’s not that they’re looking to re-platform. They think those platforms are still really good for order management, for product catalog. A number of the services they provide around the product itself, like the SKU, if you will. They’re quite good at those things, but it’s the stuff outside of that. Search or reviews or checkout, the data analytics, the recommendations, the things to really take your site to the next level.

t’s those things and the orchestration of those things, that those platforms are finding at least increased competition as more and more competitors come out every day that really specialize in these areas.

DP: I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. We will come back with Bryan Smith to talk about headless eCommerce as well as Atlas BigCommerce Blueprint. So stay tuned after this short message.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, your weekly WordPress show. My name is Doc Pop. I am talking with Bryan Smith, a Principal Product Manager for Atlas eCommerce. So far we talked about the rise of eCommerce with decoupled websites and also I mentioned Rebecca Black’s Friday, which is on my mind today.

I guess kind of bringing you back to that intro, there was another anniversary that just happened about a year ago. Atlas launched Atlas Blueprint at a DE{CODE} event. And Bryan, I think you were there or a part of that? Can you tell us what is an Atlas Blueprint?

BS: Yeah, absolutely. So Atlas Blueprints are complete starter projects. So it includes the frontend Atlas app. When you deploy one of these blueprints on the Atlas platform, it includes the WordPress site, which is your CMS on the backend. So it provisions that as well. And then, it installs all the Atlas plugins that we support, Atlas Content Modeler, the Faust framework, as well as, the WPGraphQL plugin so that you can get the data out of WordPress to the Atlas front end.

But essentially, you have a complete store with demo content, in less than five, ten minutes. So it’s really intended to be something that you can learn the tools of the Atlas platform from. So it can serve kind of as an example in that way. But the ultimate goal of them is really for the user to be able to take these and essentially extend them for your own use cases, your own projects.

So that you have the preconfigured tools and the template that you can use for your next project and the project after that.

DP: So, we’ve talked about Atlas Blueprints and a blueprint, you were saying before the show, is sort of like a starter theme, and this particular blueprint is one that gets you set up to have a shop right away. And then Atlas is WP Engine’s headless program to make it easier for WordPress sites to be able to use WPGraphQL and all the hooks that they need. Is that what Atlas is or is there a better description there?

BS: Yeah, that’s absolutely it. So the goal of Atlas is to make WordPress a great headless CMS and they provide a suite of tools that are plugins that make it like GraphQL. WPGraphQL is a perfect example of that for getting that data out of WordPress, but then Atlas also provides the node.js hosting for your headless frontend as well.

DP: Okay. Of course. That would be necessary. So, since we’re talking about headless eCommerce, I’m curious, do you happen to have any examples of decoupled eCommerce that a lot of listeners might already be familiar with without even really thinking about headless?

BS: Yeah. I mean, one that I use a lot is a really good example and they’re always changing, but Nike.com does a great job of pulling in rich content with the products that they’re featuring. Oftentimes all on the same page.

DP: And then also Nike would have their web app. I know Adidas has their own web app. Yeezy has its own web app. So like, these would be also examples of, not web app, smartphone apps, where a lot of people I know who are big sneakerheads would have the mobile app as well as the website open and trying to get that drop the minute it comes out. 

And both of those are pretty much going to the same thing, right? This is an example of a headless website where they can view it online or they can also view it through other apps.

BS: Exactly. Yeah, that’s it. And I mean, those types of sites especially in the sneaker world are really embracing the way that people wanna shop these days. Which is, you start on one device and maybe you finish the purchase on another and you need a similar and consistent experience, personalized experience as well to pick the sneakers that you want.

So that’s a really good example of not only just bringing together like good, rich content with the products that they’re selling, but it’s a consistent experience across all the devices that you’re gonna use to view that content and the products.

DP: There’s a belief in marketing that it takes three impressions for someone to click on your product. And I don’t know how true that is, but I do have to say what you’re saying about transitioning from things. You got my number. I didn’t even realize it, but I’m thinking about it now and yeah.

I oftentimes start on the eBay app, but don’t actually make the purchase until I’m on my laptop or something on the web. It’s interesting, I hadn’t even thought about just how fluid that is sometimes and how it can be. Are we seeing a massive rise in these sorts of decoupled eCommerce experiences, or is this just sort of the beginning and people are still figuring it out?

BS: Yeah, I think it all depends on  the vantage point. I think you’re looking at it from. Of course decoupled architecture has been around for a really long time, and you’ve seen the biggest technology companies embracing it for a really long time. And then these companies like Nike that aren’t necessarily technology companies, although maybe you could argue that they’re kind of evolving in that direction out of necessity, are really embracing it.

But I think the context in which we’re talking about it with making WordPress a great headless CMS. Bringing it together with these best of breed tools so that you can compose the frontend that you want. I think those technologies that have been too complex or too expensive, have been a bit out of reach for the mid-market and those of us in the WordPress community.

And I think what you’re now seeing is it becoming more accessible. There’s more players in the space like WP Engine, that are making investments to kind of bring this to the agencies and the users that make up the WordPress community.

DP: Now by operating a headless eCommerce site, is it doubling your cost because you have to have developers of the app as well as the WordPress side? or Can you just talk about the cost associated not just with hiring developers, but are there extra costs or even savings in hosting?

BS: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it depends, right? I mean, I would say to go headless with WordPress, you still need to be a developer or have a development team or work with an agency that is experienced in doing it. I think it varies on a couple of different factors.

If you are a developer and you just have an interest in this, there’s a lot of ways to get set up cheaply. In fact, Atlas has some low cost plans to get you started. But I think the target audience that we’re working most closely with right now are agencies that serve SMB and mid-size businesses that are really looking just to embrace the latest available technologies.

Maybe a good example would be a WooCommerce store. A lot of Mom and Pop-type shops embrace WooCommerce as opposed to going with Shopify or somebody else just because there’s not really any cost to get started if you wanna start a business online, and that’s great.

We have tons of customers on WP Engine platform that fall right into that category. The business does well, they start to scale and maybe at a certain point, at least an idea enters their head that, “Am I outgrowing this platform or are there new costs that I have to have because I have to get several more extensions to facilitate this online business. Would it be cheaper if I went somewhere else? Should I go headless?” 

And a lot of it will come down to like the volume of transactions or even just the need for performance that headless gives you.

Also the need for composability. Do you really need a whole bunch of different third party APIs to deliver the front end experience that your customers want. So if it’s yes to all of those things that yes, I need to go headless, I need the performance benefits of it. Yes, I’m willing to hire an agency development team and maybe even some developers on my own staff to maintain the site after it gets built.

And yes, I need to bring together multiple vendors to compose that customized, performant, immersive experience that I have in mind for my headless store. Then I think a lot of folks are finding that it is more cost effective for them because they’re optimizing their funnel.

They know what their customers want. They know their customers need the best search recommendation, checkout experience. They’re seeing the results of that. And they also need to be at the top of the search results. So they need a performant, SEO optimized website. Now, it’s not that you can’t get those things with traditional WordPress.

It’s just the more you scale the more fierce the competition oftentimes is, and the need not only for speed, but just using the best tools out there to create the experience that you have in your head on the site or in the mobile app. There is a good return on investment. But I would say, it can be challenging especially if you’re just starting out, it can be challenging to kind of do a good return on investment. So oftentimes I would recommend going with an agency who’s experienced in building these.

They’ll be perfect to ask you like the right set of questions and like, what do you need for your site? And they’ll help you come up with the right solution, but the right solution might be headless for you.

DP: I think that’s a good spot for us to take our final break. When we come back, we’ll be talking with Bryan about Atlas BigCommerce Blueprint, and I think we’ll talk a little bit about how agencies can better use these sorts of tools. So stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. We are talking about decoupled eCommerce, composable websites, and shops. We are talking with Bryan Smith from Atlas BigCommerce Blueprint. In the last segment we did, Bryan, you were talking about how some sites might outgrow their website so these are like WordPress sites that are doing really successful and see that they now need to continue growing, and part of that might be going composable with decoupled eCommerce. And you mentioned something that was interesting to me. You mentioned that a lot of times I’ll go to agencies to try to get that help, to try to help build out their sites.

I’m just kind of curious first off, is that mostly at least what y’all are encountering, it’s agencies that are building these headless sites, or are a lot of these websites trying to do it themselves?

BS: Yeah, certainly what we’re encountering with Atlas customers is they’re oftentimes going through an agency, or an agency is at least involved. Sometimes they’ll have development teams on staff. Sometimes they don’t. But typically with what we’re seeing, at least an agency is involved. And if not the site build, just in kind of the whole process for helping them realize their vision for their headless.

DP: And how is Atlas BigCommerce helping those agencies?

BS: Yeah, that’s a great one because this blueprint actually is geared towards agency developers who are working with clients that are on BigCommerce. So with this tool, an agency can spin up this Blueprint site in under 10 minutes. That includes the provisioning of the the WordPress instance.

The WP Engine hosts the Atlas frontend app. It integrates with their GitHub repo. It installs all the plugins, activates them, and it builds that storefront using all those tools that I mentioned, Atlas Content Modeler, WPGraphQL, Faust and the BigCommerce connector Plugin that we introduced with this Blueprint. 

To build a headless storefront in under 10 minutes. So that really helps them get to production faster. It kind of outsources some of that boilerplate that they would have to otherwise spend a lot of time setting up. And really the intent is  for us to take on that kind of stuff so that the agency developers can spend more time working on the really interesting components of the site that are part of their client’s vision.

DP: I’m just curious here thinking about this from the agency perspective, if they’re talking to a client who wants just an eCommerce site, they don’t ever mention anything about decoupled architecture. Is there ever a reason that an agency might still try to pitch them something like this?

Like is it maybe further down the road you might need this or this will save you some money in the long run? Is there any reason that they might do something like that?

BS: Absolutely. Especially the agencies that are close partners of ours, the things that they’re looking for when they’re having these conversations with their clients is, tell us about the solution that you’re on.Tell us about the changes that you have with it and tell us about your vision.

You know, as we’ve already covered, the eCommerce environment is ever changing. It’s changing faster than ever. If there is a desire on the client’s part to move very fast, embrace the latest technologies. They wanna make changes to the site without heavy customization. They wanna move quickly in response to customer demand.

Perfect example is what we’ve seen with COVID over the last few years with more people buying more things online. The need to quickly respond to customer demand is more important than ever. If they also want to be less reliant on the commerce platform that they’re on because, as we mentioned earlier, those are really optimized for managing a product catalog, but not necessarily for managing their content or their customer relationships or even things like search and recommendations. 

So I think those are the things that the agencies are looking for when they’re asking what’s important to you? What’s your vision for this online store? And if they’re looking for best of breed tools, the fastest performance out there, and less reliance on that commerce platform, oftentimes they’re gonna suggest the headless composable solution.

DP: Well, Bryan, I think that’s all we have time for today. I really enjoyed talking with you. If you’re just tuning in. We talked with Bryan Smith, Principal Product Manager for Atlas eCommerce about the new Atlas BigCommerce Blueprint, and just kind of a recap of blueprint as sort of like a quick theme that you can install to get started. Really quickly setting up a headless eCommerce site using WordPress.

Bryan, if people wanna learn more about you, what’s a good way for people to follow? Maybe ask any questions after the show or find out more about Atlas?

BS: Sure. Yeah. There’s a few ways you can find me, on Twitter at SmithKBryan. You can email me directly, Bryan.Smith@wpengine.com. I’m also in the WP Engine Agency partner channel, just under Bryan Smith. So find me there, ask me questions. I love to always engage with folks that are interested in headless and composable commerce.

DP: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Bryan, and thanks to all the folks for listening today.

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: Headless eCommerce with Bryan Smith 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, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

On this episode, we are joined by Ryan Singel, a former writer and editor at Wired, and now the founder of Contextly and Outpost. Ryan, I am super excited to have you on here. I’ve always enjoyed our conversations in the past. Let’s start off, why don’t you just tell me your WordPress origin story?

Ryan Singel: Thanks, Doc. So yeah, WordPress origin story when I was at Wired, I played around on my own to sort of set up my own site and that started with movable type, back in the day. And Wired was on some terrible internal CMS, and we lobbied really hard at Wired to move that over to WordPress.

And so I think about halfway through my tenure there we moved over. I spent about five, six years at Wired working with WordPress as our main CMS for publishing the entire site. So got to be very familiar with what needed to be done to make things look good and to push out content at scale.

We were often writing five, six blog posts in my section a day and having to figure out how to make that work with lots of different people touching it and so forth. And then got frustrated. So one of the things we would always do at Wired was link back to our original coverage of a story.

So if we’re writing about WikiLeaks or Chelsea Manning or the NSA, we’d written a bunch before. So we wanted to make sure when somebody read a story, they had an easy way to get back to it. And that was not a part of the WordPress Core. So we had to do a lot of editorial grunt work just searching Google and clicking through to get past the redirect and copying the URLs.

And I got frustrated with that and figured that should be something that was smarter and easier, and that led me to found Contextly and I left Wired to make recommendations for readers on WordPress smarter.

DP: It seems like a lot of influence came out of Wired, I mean, obviously journalistically, but we also have Jake Spurlock, who’s a Core Contributor and very active. And I met him visiting the Wired offices and talking about WordPress with him a long time ago.

So there always has kind of been this relationship with Wired. I don’t think they’re on WordPress anymore, although they might be, but it’s just kind of interesting to see their history and the WordPress timeline like that.

RS: Jake is great, and he came on I think a year or so after we moved over to WordPress. So the Condé Nast Wired story is a very convoluted one, but essentially getting Wired to run on WordPress, it was the first of the Condé Nast sites.

So Wired is owned by the same company that owns, like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, et cetera. And we essentially had an internal writer rebellion because Wired was really, at the time, the only sort of daily production. And so we have this terrible CMS that was built for magazines. There was so much editorial work that had to go into and sort of just grunt work to get something published.

And this was in the early days of the blogging revolution, the TechCrunch’s of the world show up and you know, the need to sort of publish stories quickly and we were just dying. So we essentially had a rebellion that brought WordPress and we got Condé Nast to allow us to bust out of their system and move over to WordPress.

Eventually, it proved to be so useful that WordPress moved to like almost all of the other sites. And then Condé Nast has since done what many large companies do, which is built their own CMS, which is something I never recommend, but I’m not there anymore. I think they are largely off of WordPress now and onto something homegrown.

But it ran on WordPress for, I don’t know, a good 10 plus years and there was that moment when WordPress broke out of just being, the sort of run a small blog or power a small businesses site to being like, sort of a big tech tool and saw the rise of WordPress professional services and the New York Post and so forth were running on it.

It was fun to be there during that time when watching WordPress be pushed into service as a really professional publishing platform.

DP: Absolutely, and it was during your time there that you got the idea for what became Contextly. What does Contextly, which is a WordPress plugin that I use all the time, what does Contextly do for WordPress sites?

RS: Yeah. I would start with what the kind of the architecture is. So what we do is we help readers of your posts find other good things to read on your site. The core example, somebody gets to the bottom of your story. They just read your post and then you want to present them with relevant or interesting options for more things to read from your site.

So everything we do is either from your own site or from sister sites that you tell us to include in the recommendations. So architecturally, what we do differently than most Related Post Plugins is everything we do is computed in the cloud. So instead of using your WordPress database we sort of do all the computations outside of your database.

Have the intelligence live outside of WordPress and compute either related using multiple sets of algorithms, et cetera. Figure out which of your stories are popular and which of your stories are what we call evergreen. So essentially your oldies but goodies and automatically compute those for you and let you show those off.

And then also just cause I come outta the editorial world there are times when an author knows better than an algorithm what’s the best related recommendation for a given post. So we make it easy for you if you want to, to choose what related posts show up at the bottom or in the body of your story.

DP: The way I use it on my site, I spend a lot of time writing these articles and not all of them go viral, most don’t. Right? But you still do a lot of work on ’em and they’re still maybe relevant in the future. And so if a post does happen to get traffic and it’s a first time visitor and they enjoyed that post about weird jazz instruments or something, right?

They can see at the bottom the Contextly suggestions. And there’s different ways that I can show them things. I can either just let Contextly pick or I can kind of like add my YouTube channel, I think was one of the things you could do. You can kind of add things and kind of have it added in there.

I might be wrong on that, but there’s all this customization that I can do and hopefully people, if they like that one article, they’re just gonna continue on over to another article. And then my favorite feature is the Contextly email, it sounds like I’m doing an ad for you, but like the emails that I get every day, that’s like, you had this many visitors and here’s what they visited.

Obviously Google Analytics and things like that have that, but there’s just something really nice about that Contextly email that I get that shows me here’s the article that’s doing really well for some reason today. And I can kind of find out why if I dig down and then here’s how many people clicked from that article to another article.

So here’s another article that might be doing better than usual. That’s a cool feature.

RS: Yeah. When we first started off, we were doing cool stuff, but we needed to sort of prove to people how well it’s working, right? And I think credit for this goes to my co-founder, Ben. We decided to just start with reports rather than building a dashboard.

So almost every other service you sign up for it and they’re like, oh, you can check the dashboard. And it was like just coming from the writing world, there’s like five dashboards I have to check every day and we’re like, no, we’re just gonna send people a report.

Right. That tells ’em up the top, the sort of the basics, and then like, lets ’em dive more in. And just honestly, when we were first doing sales to big companies, the first question, well, not the first question, but we get them past the features and they’d be like, oh, so then you have a dashboard?

And we were like, no, we don’t have a dashboard, but we send you reports and then there’s kind of this “Sigh, oh no.” And then as soon as they start getting reports, nobody ever asked us for a dashboard again. Cause everybody already had enough dashboards and they like the daily reports that give them not just a sense of how Contextly it’s doing, but just a nice general overview of what’s happening on their site.

DP: Absolutely. And you know, I think that’s a great spot for us to take a quick pause and when we come back, we’re gonna talk with Ryan Singel of Contextly and Outpost about Contextly and what it can do for WordPress. So stay tuned. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, joined by Ryan Singel from Contextly, a plugin that helps keep visitors stuck to your site longer. Ryan, we talked about my favorite feature which is the emails that I get. Can you tell us about some of the advanced features that Contextly has?

Because I know that what I mentioned was pretty early on. I feel like y’all have done a lot of work since then that I might not be using as much.

RS: Yeah. So we have a couple other things we kind of built. So one we wanted for sites that have a wider range of content to make it an easy way for readers to just subscribe to a topic, right? So you are interested in Mac Minis and you’re reading Cult of Mac then if you’re reading a Mac Mini story, there’s an ability to follow that topic. And then we automate the emails that go out. And so this essentially works like a notification service. So you know, when there’s a new story about Mac Mini’s we’ll send the reader a nicely formatted email that has the new story.

And then we’ll include down below either related or new or popular stories to sort of do that. And so that creates kind of a distribution channel for your readers who care the most without you having to do any additional work. We think of it as a compliment to most sites that do a newsletter.

But it’s just as kind of an additional way for getting your best readers to know when you’ve got stuff, right. We also built a way you can do that for particular writers. So if you wanted to follow a writer and get notified when they do that. 

And then we’re just about on the algorithm- ish side. So we built some tools where the recommendations work in layers. So we look at different things, right? So we look at the author, we look at the tags, we look at the categories, we look at the body of posts. We look at the age of a post, et cetera.

And we built a nice little graphic equalizer in our backend where you can literally sort of change how the related works. And then over on the side you can start to change what an algorithm would actually do for your site.

So you kind of pick a story, kick up the bass and see what happens, for the recommendations for a given post. And so we’re just about to add a new feature that essentially is a way to tune the related algorithm. So if you’ve just written a new post about Mac Minis there may be a post from five years ago about Mac Minis and that version is maybe not interesting anymore.

So what we’ll be doing is a way to sort of look at the older posts, and even if they are very related, if we think that post is sort of past its deadline and then it’s close to its end of life in terms of reader interest, it gets dropped down in the relevance rankings.

We don’t do that for all stories. We don’t want say anything old no longer is interesting, right? There are definitely posts people have that are evergreen that are still generating interest years after they’ve been published. And so what this does is figure out the difference between those things that are old and still relevant and things that are old and no longer interesting.

We’ll be rolling that out soon, and then we will add in there as another slider that sites can use to tune their own related recommendations.

DP: So if I wrote an article about Twitter launching a brand new API that will help developers everywhere, the algorithm will be like, that’s kind of out of date, that’s maybe not gonna age so well. So that’s cool. 

RS: [laughter] No Twitter API has ever aged well.

DP: You were talking about algorithms here. Are y’all using any of the kind of modern AI to help with these decisions?

RS: So we’ve been doing a bunch of machine learning for a long time. So my co-founder Ben is a long time data scientist. There’s some fun stuff bubbling up that we’re gonna start playing with that I think you can do some cool stuff around AI to increase the quality of just kind of your usual recommendations. That I’m pretty excited about. I think they’ll be really cool. 

I think there’s gonna be some other fun stuff around AI that will be interesting. One of the things I’ve been watching is using AI as a way to kind of create a sort of question and answer semantic search on your site. So essentially being able to ask on Doc Pop site, “Who’s the coolest glitch artist.” And being able to have that system, that AI, look just at your stuff, right? And create what it thinks is the best answer. The one problem with AI though, is that it often makes stuff up when it doesn’t know the answer. So that’s kind of an unsolved problem, which is AI likes to pretend it’s authoritative.

We all know that person at a party that just spouts off and you know way better than they do. So I’m interested in that, because I think there’s enough places that are smaller on the web that instead of AI trying to answer every question and replace Google, is can it make kind of an interesting search on smaller domains?

DP: Do y’all have a search feature? Like a search widget in WordPress?

RS: We don’t. So the thing is, like with our backend, we know enough about the content, we could deliver a search feature and maybe that’s something we should do. Just adding a smart, full text search. Honestly, no one’s ever asked us for it, so we’ve never done it. But I dunno, maybe we should.

DP: If we’re taking feature requests now, just when you were talking about AI, I think some people would hate this idea. I’m just gonna say it. What if when it’s showing my list of articles after my list of relevant other articles. What if Contextly tried rewriting some of those using AI. Like just like experimented with other titles and let me know like, “Hey, this is performing better if you change the name or anything like that.”

Is there anything possible with that?

RS: Yeah. So I think there’s some fun stuff around that. So there’s an AI writer I’ve been playing with called Lex. It’s built by the folks that made a newsletter subscription site called Every.to. You can sign up and play with it for free. I think there’s a little bit of a waiting list.

But it has some really nice tools around suggesting titles and you know, the sort of usual, write in a paragraph and then ask it to write the next paragraph or two for you. Robin Sloan is a fiction writer, has been playing with AI for a really long time and has used it.

And I think what a lot of writers have found is that it’s useful in order to find some maybe interesting new paths or sometimes it comes up with some clever new language. But really with AI, you’re gonna have to rewrite stuff pretty hardcore?

And I think the problem with AI is it will act authoritative even when it’s not. I dunno if you saw the stories CNET tried writing 60 something articles for kind of the SEO-ish style how-tos or explainers and they got fact checked and they were just wrong in many, many places.

Right. Getting the formula for how compound interest works wrong. But it acts like it knows. So that’s my one concern is I think what will continue to stand out with AI is we’re gonna see a lot of generated AI stuff all over the place, right?

There’s just too much incentive to spam Google. What’s gonna stand out is people who are authoritative. And so I’m interested in the ways that we can help make things authoritative and then having AI help that rather than doing too much with AI sort of helping you write more articles than you probably should.

DP: Yeah. They say AI is a 100 percent confident and 75 percent correct.

RS: [laughter] yeah.

DP: I think that’s a good spot for us to take another quick break, and when we come back, we’re gonna wrap up our conversation with Ryan Singel from Contextly, and I’m a hundred percent confident that you’re gonna enjoy the ending of this episode.

So stay tuned. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, joined by Ryan Singel, the founder of Contextly and Outpost. Ryan, I wanted to ask you, since we’re talking about stickiness on site and keeping folks who landed on your site there. Have you learned anything while you were doing this that kind of like you’ve applied to your writing? Are there any lessons you’ve learned from Contextly that help you keep people on your site longer?

RS: Yeah. We have found that it is not always true that short articles do better than long articles. There used to be a sense that you had to have a ton of volume, so you had a lot of posts but the posts would kind of be short.

And that definitely is a strategy that works if you keep it up. If you publish 10, 15 blog posts a day you’re gonna get some search traffic and people find you. But we find the things that people tend to click related and links on often tend to be longer stories. So even though it takes them longer to get to our recommendation modules they’re more likely to do that on posts that are thorough or interesting or new or a scoop or something like that. So that’s one of the things that we do in the reports is here’s the percentage of people that got so far into your story, and here’s the percentage of people that clicked on related links.

So what I took from that is we all like the sort of cheap content, right? Or the filler things. The 10 most interesting celebrities of 2022. Those stories don’t keep people around. They don’t tend to click to another story. What does keep people around is a deep, interesting story about something. 

And then I guess the other thing we’ve learned and seen a lot about is that I don’t think people think enough about what the end of their story looks like.

And what I mean by that is when somebody reads a post on your site and they get to the bottom, they’ve come to sort of a moment of inattention or indecision. And they have to decide, am I gonna go share this article? Do I email it to somebody? Do I go back and do my actual work? Do I go to Facebook or TikTok? 

And then oftentimes people then show the author’s bio at the end of the post. Which is the least interesting thing. It doesn’t give people a choice. Nobody really wants to read the author bio. When looking at your site and get to the bottom of the article, put yourself in the mindset of somebody who is trying to decide what to do next.

And so the closer you have good related recommendations, they perform better than any other form of recommendation. Get good related recommendations close to the end of the story. Make it clear that they’re related, right? And don’t say, “You Might Like.” That sounds like it’s gonna be some terrible recommendation system.

Just make it clear it’s related. And we think you should do multiple sets of recommendations. Then just move the author bio either to a link from the top or underneath all of that. If people want to comment, they know they just gotta scroll down.

So that would be my one piece of sort of most actionable advice for somebody, even if they’re not using us, which is get your recommendations as close to the end of the article as possible.

DP: I wanna give you one more shout out here for Outpost, which is also doing great stuff. Can you tell us real quickly, how would you describe Outpost?

RS: Yeah, Outpost is sort of power business tools for newsletter and subscription first sites using Ghost. So I can think of Ghost as, and WordPress will be mad about this ‘cause they’re trying to move into the space. But Ghost is sort of WordPress of the newsletter space. They’re open source. 

So what we do is help those sites build their audience. So with tools like an easy to use tip button and a set of like autoresponders that are smart. So somebody signs up for your free site, will set up a drip system that let’s the site tell people what they’re about and sends them links to their previous best stuff and then sends them sets of different offers to sign up for a paid subscription.

So the goal there Outpost is just to help publishers who have moved into that newsletter, subscription sort of space convert more free readers, get more free readers, and sort of build their business without having to do a ton of work.

DP: And on that, Ryan, what is the best way for folks to follow what you’re doing these days?

RS: Yeah. So I used to say Twitter but I’ve largely moved off Twitter for the fediverse. So if they’re interested in me, find me on the fediverse, I’m RyanSingel@writing.exchange or you can check out Contextly. It’s still on Twitter and Outpost is also still on Twitter, or they can check us out at outpost.pub.

DP: Well, thanks for joining me, Ryan, and thanks to the folks who listened to this episode. I hope you had a great time and enjoyed our conversation. This has been Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR.

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: Keeping Users On Your Site Longer 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, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

If you follow tech, then you know it’s been an exciting time for AI. Last year we saw a boom in text to image synthesis via tools like Dall-e and Midjourney. This year, that excitement seems to have pivoted to tools like ChatGPT. In recent weeks, we’ve seen ChatGPT used for everything from writing high school essays to creating new WordPress plugins with no external coding.

On this episode of Press This, we are joined by Ellis LaMay, a podcaster and WordPress Practice Director at AmericanEagle.com to talk to us about how AI tools like ChatGPT can change the WordPress ecosystem. Ellis, how are you doing today? 

Ellis LaMay: I’m doing great. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

DP: I would love to hear your WordPress origin story before we dive in deep into Large Language Models.

EL: Sure. Yeah. Sounds great. I was thinking about how to tell this story and I think like a lot of people that I’ve met over my years working with WordPress, I kind of fell into it basically by accident. Growing up I was always fascinated with technology and as a kid I would take computers apart and put ’em back together just to try to kind of figure out how they work.

Then eventually that led to trying to figure out how to get them to work in ways they weren’t intended to work in. And you know, I was lucky enough to have a dad who worked for a local college and so he would bring home junk computers from their IT department and that’s how a kind of a never ending source of materials to work with.

As I kind of got a little bit older, I started to get more interested in the software side of things. Started to try to get computers and Windows to do things that it wasn’t meant to do basically. But, uh, eventually I went off to college, believe it or not, and didn’t study computers in college.

The whole time growing up I was also working in bike shops. So at a certain point, the bike shops that I was working for, they needed websites. They needed technological help. And so I was kind of like that internal employee who could always do those things. And one day it sort of just occurred to me that there is a need for a classified bike website that at the time didn’t exist.

And I kind of got this idea from all the customers we’d have that would ask us if we knew of such a thing or if we knew of places that sold used bikes. And so I set about trying to create this on my own, just kind of based on my tech background and my light coding experience. And that was how I basically found WordPress themes.

So you’re talking about probably back in, let’s see, that would’ve been probably 2015ish, 2014 maybe, around there. Once I got my hands on WordPress themes, kind of my childhood passion of like taking things apart and figuring out how they work just came rushing right back in because that’s how I learned theming and plugin building was through basically reverse engineering them.

DP: And as part of your current job, you study technology trends and you’ve always kinda kept your eye on WordPress stuff, but lately you’re also really diving into the potential of AI, including tools like ChatGPT, which I mentioned many times at the beginning of the show.

Can you tell us a little bit about ChatGPT and how it works?

EL: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s kind of the layman’s explanation and then there’s of course deeper explanations about the technology that’s powering it. But on the surface level, it’s really grabbing a lot of people’s attention, including people who are not technologists or maybe don’t consider themselves to be. Because essentially what it is, is a piece of software put out by OpenAI where you can look at a chat-like interface, a box where you type in your input except you’re talking to a computer that has learned off of language models.

It can then interact with you as if it’s a person. So it can do interesting things like understand context that other search interfaces and things like that that most people are used to can’t do. So, that’s essentially it kind of on the surface level. I think beneath that there’s probably some really intense algorithms that work through combing through data and large language models and huge data structures for it to soak up that knowledge.

DP: Before the show you and I were kind of mentioning how one of the things unique to ChatGPT is the chat-like interface where you can kind of have a discussion with the computer and it’ll spit out something very confidently. It may or may not be correct. But that’s kind of the interface that’s happening, and that’s a pretty revolutionary thing. Can you tell us how a tool like ChatGPT, or something else out there like it, how can those improve experiences for WordPress visitors? Visitors to my WordPress site?

EL: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think that some of the potential that tools like this, and ChatGPT in particular, may have one day for improving user experiences, maybe from the implementer side. And perhaps I’m biased cause I’m a guy who builds websites all day every day. But something I kind of pictured that I thought would be really fascinating is, I get involved in all kinds of UX studies where essentially what we’re doing is taking the feedback from dozens and dozens of users of a website or an application and getting their qualitative feedback on what their user experience was like.

I imagined a situation where you scaled that out to potentially hundreds or thousands of people and then used a tool like ChatGPT to do the analysis on those large volumes of qualitative feedback. Just to distill it down into some takeaways, some literal actionable, tasks or steps you could take with your interface based off of analyzing thousands of user feedback sessions. And that’s something that people could do, but it would just take a long, long time.

DP: I think that sounds pretty cool if I understand that correctly. It sort of sounds like you are describing running a test or just kind of looking at the way users visit your site and then you have this big data and having something like ChatGPT to help kind of break that data down so that you don’t have to know how to look through all that data. You can have something kind of talk to you and give you suggestions. Is that what you’re saying?

EL: Yeah, pretty much. Imagine you give a survey to say a thousand people, where you ask them to describe their experience using a piece of software. And you just leave it open-ended like that because you’re looking for their qualitative feedback. At the end of that survey, someone’s gotta go through all that feedback and distill it down into some kind of takeaway.

What does it mean? What does it tell us? What can we learn? That’s a very large task for a human being to go through, right? Reading thousands of feedback surveys and kind of tracking the input and sort of pulling it together in a cohesive message. But if you’ve got something like ChatGPT that can understand context, but because it’s ultimately a computer power through those tasks much faster. You can get much larger takeaways from big data. Like really fast.

DP: We’re already kind of talking about how web developers can use this for improving sites. We’ve got things like Copilot from GitHub, which allows developers to kind of have things auto completed, I guess. Kind of like having a computer help you write code and not write the code for you.

Is this something that you think WordPressers are gonna see or are already using, maybe Copilot to code WordPress?

EL: I think that’d be really cool. I have seen, I don’t know if they’re ChatGPT affiliated per se, but I have seen the emergence of a couple AI tools out there that report to write WordPress code. Right? So this could be something like building out the structure for a Custom Post Type with some custom meta fields where what you’re putting into this software is just the layman’s description of what you want.

And then the AI will actually translate that into code and structure your content types and Custom Fields. So I’ve seen stuff like that out there in the wild. I think the real thing I’m curious about is how reliable these technologies are, especially at this stage of the game. Mostly because my experience with developing websites, particularly WordPress, is that the context of other plugins and other site functionalities matters heavily.

So I don’t know if AI can account for that just yet, but I’d imagine that’s coming soon in the near future.

DP: I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break, and when we come back, we are gonna continue our conversation with Ellis LaMay about the potential of using AI tools with WordPress. Stay tuned.

DP: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Popular, and joined this week by Ellis LaMay, a podcaster and WordPress Practice Director at AmericanEagle.com. And Ellis has been studying the potential of AI tools like ChatGPT and kind of thinking about how they could be used by WordPress developers and just website developers, not just WordPress.

And we’ve talked so far about Copilot and how ChatGPT could potentially help people create sites. I’m kind of curious, have you seen any of your research, have you seen any cool examples of ChatGPT being used on a website in a way that you just weren’t expecting?

EL: I’m trying to think of unique examples. I’m a little hard pressed to come up with some unique ones, but I have definitely seen it being used in ways that you would kind of guess. Right. And I think one of the topics that a lot of folks are aware of by now is how a lot of these technologies are being used to generate content really quickly.

A big part of getting your name out there, promoting a brand and climbing up Search Engine results is a matter of putting out good content regularly. And so I think that’s where the most immediate fit is gonna be for things like this. And I’ve seen even as of this week, there’s two plugins out there that allow you to install a plugin into WordPress, connect an API key to get ChatGPT working within that plugin, and then start generating blog content based off of some keywords or topics you give it. And the one I was playing with earlier today, actually, even writes that content with structured headings and the right semantic markups.

So, I think for marketers right now, it’s kind of the Wild West because they can use tools like that to quickly, sort of prototype and ideate blog content and then perhaps tweak it from there.

DP: Talking about Gutenberg blocks and their potential for something like this. I wanna mention that we have talked to the creators of Imajinn, which is an AI art generator. And it takes place as a WordPress block. So you install the plugin and then you just add a block in the middle of your post and you can type in your prompt.

And I’ve been using it sometimes to create featured images for posts, right? Like that’s always a hard thing when you’ve got everything kind of ready and you know you need to have a featured image, you just don’t wanna grab a stock photo, and you don’t really have time to create a photo of your own.

So there’s ways that I’ve already been kind of integrating AI into my workflow for generating content. And then what you’re talking about, it sounds sort of like a plugin installed and then a block and you can kind of, within your dashboard, create content around probably a prompt.

That sounds pretty cool. There’s this talk that the generated content might start overwhelming Google search and kind of overwhelming the web, right?

It’s very easy and there’s a lot of potential, a lot of incentive for people to create content and if they can do it without hiring someone, if they can just kind of generate it through a ChatGPT, there’s gonna be a lot more of it. And so there’s been this idea that maybe Google might have a way of detecting AI text and maybe try to punish it or anything.

Have you heard anything about Google cracking down on AI generated content?

EL: I haven’t heard any specific news about Google doing this, but it’s really easy to imagine that they would want to, right? Because a few weeks ago, when I first started to hear about ChatGPT and explore it, all you had to do was get on YouTube and within a matter of, like half a minute, you’d start seeing headlines for videos about how ChatGPT is gonna end Google as we know it.

I gotta imagine Google’s not a fan of hearing messaging like that. So from that standpoint, of course they’d probably wanna kind of control this a little bit. But you know, the other thing too is, as a developer, I’ve always been tracking Google pretty much since day one because everything you build has to play well with it from a structure standpoint. But also for digital marketing purposes, ranking and promotion.

You know,what I’m curious to see is, as I’ve understood it, one of Google’s core missions is to kind of democratize the web. Their goal is to basically get the best content, the most relevant content into the hands of people who are looking for it. And so you kind of have to ask the question of, if everyone is using AI to generate content, is content sort of across the board going down in quality? Because you no longer have the critical thinking and thought leadership of people behind it, but some of it’s being generated by a computer, you know?

And if you think about all of the changes to the Google algorithm over the years and how they’ve basically made big strides to weed out things like keyword stuffing, and things like that, you gotta think that they’re gonna start to put an emphasis on staying away from computer generated content because it just won’t be viewed as authentic as human generated content.

DP: Yeah, I mentioned earlier, the answers ChatGPT gives are very confident, whether it’s writing code or whether it’s giving you a book report. And it is definitely a better writer than I think I am. I have to admit, that’s not my strong point. But just because it’s a better writer, I am personally a little worried that it might start to trend higher on Google with not necessarily the correct answers. 

And I don’t know if Google has a fix for detecting AI, but also for detecting accuracy. But then I guess that’s a whole other thing that currently we haven’t worried about. Google detecting how accurate is a thing? We just look at how long visitors stay in the site, how does the site perform? And other parts of their algorithm. There’s gonna have to be some tweaking for Google to still be relevant in a post-ChatGPT world, it seems.

EL: Yeah, it really will. And I almost wonder too, where that sort of thing kind of collides then with the world of academia. Some of the people that I’ve talked to about this over the last few weeks are people who are teachers at all levels, and one of the first questions they have is almost this look of astonishment, where they look at me and go, “Oh my gosh, are my students already using this to like cheat on papers and things?”

And my genuine answer is, I don’t know, but maybe. And so you gotta wonder too, you already have Google and search engines that really changed the landscape of how students did their work. But that was 20 years ago, you know? And so kind of what new sort of risks is ChatGPT gonna invite into that scenario?

I think it’ll be really interesting to see how that plays out.

DP: There is a lot of conversation too about how calculators were going to break students. Like students need to know how to do all this very advanced math, not everyday math, but some of the more advanced stuff. They need to know how to do that, even though is it something they’re actually gonna have to apply.

I think there’s probably 20 years from now, there’s a chance that we might be looking back at these conversations in the same way that we are looking back at “How calculators ruined high school for students.”

EL: Yeah, absolutely. It could be, and I think with every technical advancement, there’s the potential that it’s used for good and then the potential that it’s used for not good. I’m kind of a self-taught person. A lot of the things that I know about development and that have been pivotal for me in my career development have been things I’ve self-taught myself.

It’s interesting developing your career that way because for me it’s essentially a matter of piecing together a bunch of great resources and learning how to learn along the way. But I have had occasions sometimes of learning certain languages where you kind of get stuck and you need someone to sort of fill in a knowledge gap for you.

And when you’re a self-learner, you’re kind of at the whim of what you can find going through Google. I think that ChatGPT could actually be something that helps facilitate people who are self-learners because it could help show them resources that they might not know exist or just fill in knowledge gaps because it’s got that context from those language learning models.

DP: On that point, there are tools, I think we mentioned, or alluded to them earlier, tools like CodeWP, which is a website where you can go and explain what you want out of a plugin and AI will create it. I think they’re using ChatGPT, to create a plugin that may or may not work, but supposedly it’s trained on WordPress plugins as its knowledge base. So it should be very specialized for that. Do you think at the moment this is a good tool for people to use if they wanna avoid coding? Should they be using tools like that?

EL: I think right now I’d have to go with kind of a solid No. The reason being is because again, the context of the rest of your application matters. If you kind of push all that context to the side, and you write a plugin to do some specific functions or something specific, I think there’s a high likelihood that you would install that plugin and then have conflicts with the rest of your ecosystem, or maybe encounter conflicts later on.

Right? As you introduce new variables and factors into your site architecture, you’re writing more functions, you’re building more functionality. I just think that it’s not like a slam dunk one and done. I kind of look at ChatGPT and other tools like it, sort of like any other tool. 

The hammer doesn’t build the house. The person holding the hammer builds the house and that person needs to take into context a lot of other factors along the way during that journey. And I just see ChatGPT as really no different, at least for now.

DP: That’s another great spot for us to take a quick break and when we come back, we will talk to Ellis LaMay about potential uses for ChatGPT that he sees for WordPress developers. So stay tuned for more. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and this week we are talking about ChatGPT with Ellis LaMay, the WordPress Practice Director at AmericanEagle.com. 

Ellis, at the beginning of the show, you were saying you’re keeping your eye towards this technology, and you also were saying you’re building websites on a daily basis.

I’m kind of wondering, have y’all had the conversation yet about using ChatGPT for some web design for some project at AmericanEagle.com?

EL: Very, very lightly. And I think one of the practical uses that we see for it during development is filling in placeholder content. I think everyone who’s worked on a website at some point has gone to a Lorem Ipsum website to basically copy and paste tons of placeholder content so that they could just simply build out their layouts.

And when you’re presenting prototypes and concepts to clientele, It really does go a long way to have some relevant content in your designs that at least it isn’t Lorem Ipsum. And so for now, we’re just kind of dipping our toe and starting to use it for creating blog titles and things like that.

Really just for the purpose of demoing sites, we’re not really promoting it as a tool to replace thoughtful content writing, but that’s one way we’re using it. But we also have a great program at American Eagle called The Hatchery, where its sole purpose is to build upon emerging technologies and try to come up with innovative ideas to carry ’em forward.

And so, I can’t share any details yet, but there have been some ideas recommended to The Hatchery for developing it further.

DP: The example you were just mentioning about using it to create dummy content, I hadn’t even thought of that. That’s such an obvious one, but that’s such a game changer if you are building sites and you wanna be able to show here’s how it would look to a restaurant, or here’s how this site would look for something else.

And maybe even have some localized text in there or whatever. All with prompts. Man, that would be so much better than Lorem Ipsum. That’d be like Lorem AI-ipsum it reads in my head, but it doesn’t sound good. But that’s a really cool usage. That’d be cool if we saw something like that out there.

EL: All right. Well, maybe a listener will take that idea and push it forward.

DP: It might be early days and I know that a lot of bugs are still getting worked out and we said, we probably wouldn’t be using this to code a website yet. But I think early days, one of the things I’m kind of most excited about is definitely using it as part of my workflow.

If I make a video and I’m kind of struggling to come up, Description of it that needs to go in the body of the text. I might go to ChatGPT and kind of tell it kind of what I’m looking for and it gives me something. And I don’t think I’ve used that exactly yet, but it’s helped me out a lot.

And I have, even for art, I’ve used Midjourney kind of help get started with an art idea and then I end up redrawing it from scratch. So just integrating it into my workflow, not necessarily replacing my workflow with it has been really nice for me. And it kind of sounds like y’all are thinking in the same way.

EL: Yeah, I agree. You know, one simple way that I’ve used it over the last couple weeks is to get quick references to the meaning of things while I’m on calls with clients and partners. It’s almost kind of embarrassing to admit, but an example would be the other day I was on the phone with some leadership from an insurance company.

We were talking about the 2.0 version of their website and there’s a lot of acronyms in the insurance world, and it was really helpful to have ChatGPT up because I could just type into it, “What does blah, blah, blah mean relative to car insurance?” 

And even though I could do the same thing through Google, you still have that sort of manual aspect to Google where you have to make sure that you know what you are looking at is the right result.

And you might have to kind of peruse through some of Google’s interface to find your literal answer. But with ChatGPT I just get the answer. So that’s been pretty useful. And the people that I’m talking to on the phone really have no idea that I’ve got that in my back pocket. So I think a lot of little uses like that will continue to embolden the business world.

DP: Well, that’s really interesting. I really appreciate your time today talking to me about ChatGPT. I think I’m thinking about it in much different ways than I was before. Ellis, if people want to follow you online, what’s a good way to kind of keep up with the work you’re doing?

EL: You can follow me on AmericanEagle.com’s blog. As well as on LinkedIn.

DP: Well, I really appreciate you joining me for this episode of Press This. Press This is a weekly podcast. Next week we’re gonna be talking to Ryan Singel from Contextly about how to make your website stickier using tools like Contextly. Thanks for listening to Press This. I’m your host, Doc Pop.

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: AI-to-Code, Building WordPress Plugins with ChatGPT appeared first on Torque.