Author: Nathan Wrigley

#83 â€“ Carrie Dils on How to Internationalise Your WordPress Code

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how to internationalize your WordPress code.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Carrie Dils. Carrie is a WordPress loving freelance developer with modern 20 years experience in web development and full scope WordPress projects. She teaches WordPress and front-end development courses for LinkedIn learning and blogs regularly about WordPress, and the business of freelancing.

This is another of the podcast interviews, which were recorded at WordCamp Europe in Athens. It took place soon after Carrie had completed her workshop at the event. This workshop was entitled international appeal, making your themes and plugins translatable.

WordCamp workshops are practical hands-on sessions. Carrie’s intention here was to make the audience aware of ways in which they could translate their code into other languages. Specifically it was to assist developers in localising their themes and plugins so that they could be consumed and understood by a wider audience. It covered translation functions for PHP and JavaScript, and a foundational understanding of how the process of localization works.

We started the podcast with some orientation, getting to grips with what internationalisation is in the context of WordPress. Carrie explains that there are workflows already available for developers to use to translate their plugins and themes. This enables their clients or customers to switch between languages in the admin interface so that they can understand more about what they’re doing.

Carrie talks about the fact that, although she’s not aware of any legal compulsion to carry out this internationalisation work, it’s very useful for consumers of your code. They will be able to rely on a language that’s familiar to them, and not always have to fall back on English. We get into the weeds a little as Carrie explains the foundations of how the translations actually work, and how developers can tap into this.

The fact that WordPress is so popular means that it’s in a great position to make the internet a more inclusive space. Part of that is making people from all over the world. Understand how WordPress, and the tools built on top of it, works.

Carrie says that it’s not about trying to translate every part of your plugin into the 200 plus languages which WordPress supports. It’s more about doing what you can, when you can, for those people who can benefit from it.

Carrie’s talk will at some point make it onto wordpress.tv, so you can see it there for yourself, but until that’s available she lays out some of the places where you can go to get support around this subject. The plugin and theme handbooks are an ideal place to start that journey.

We get into a chat about which languages are spoken most widely and how Carrie thinks about which languages to pick. If your resources are limited. She points out that as a developer, you’re building in the capability to have your code translated, and the actual work of making those translations can be handled by others if your code is created correctly.

Given that AI is always a hot topic, we digress a little towards the end about how the work of translations is likely to become more automated as large language models take on the burden of translating content and assisting in the writing of code.

If you’re a developer who is curious about making your code available to a wider audience through internationalisation, this podcast is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Carrie Dils.

I am joined on the podcast today by Carrie Dils. Hello, Carrie.

[00:05:12] Carrie Dils: Howdy, howdy.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: We are in Athens at the WordCamp EU celebration, 2023. Carrie’s just walked into the room and told me that she’s finished her workshop. How did it go?

[00:05:24] Carrie Dils: It went well. The rooms are kind of set up classroom style, well with desk like these that we’ve got sitting in front of us, so attendees could bust out their laptops and get on the wifi and participate. And it was small enough that acoustically, if they had questions and weren’t miced, it was okay.

[00:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What’s the difference between a workshop and a presentation?

[00:05:42] Carrie Dils: Well, so in theory a workshop is meant to be more hands-on, practical. Whereas a presentation is just sort of receiving information, a workshop might be actually doing something with the information that you’re getting. Workshops came in two flavors, a fifty minute and a, I guess roughly two times that, so a two hour workshop.

I was in a 50 minute slot and it’s a little difficult to do anything truly interactive, and I wasn’t sure how many attendees there would be. So mine was probably closer to presentation and workshop, but I tried to throw in some interactive elements.

[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: You were one of the early ones as well, so at least you’ve got it out the way. You can now enjoy the rest of the conference.

[00:06:26] Carrie Dils: Right, right.

[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: What was the subject?

[00:06:28] Carrie Dils: Internationalization in WordPress. So making your plugins and your themes translatable. So basically from a coding perspective, there are functions that you can use so that if someone wanted to take all of the text strings from a theme or a plugin, and translate them into another language, they could do that.

[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: So this was a talk specifically aimed at theme developers and plugin developers, as opposed to sort of end users who might use a plugin to translate their own site.

[00:06:59] Carrie Dils: Right. So the internationalization, which you might commonly hear that, with the word localization. So think of internationalization is the piece that a developer does when creating a theme or plugin. Localization is the process of then translating it into other languages.

Not to be confused with multilingual websites, where the actual content of a website is translated into other language. That’s actually a different process.

[00:07:26] Nathan Wrigley: So is this then a process of assisting developers to ensure that their products are usable by people all over the world?

[00:07:36] Carrie Dils: Exactly. So imagine, when I first started using WordPress. I didn’t know any better and you needed to do something and you just edited files directly, like edit the core files directly, edit the theme file directly. And I very quickly learned the first time I pushed that update button that it’s not meant to do that.

But if you want to think about translating the software into other languages, it’s impractical to go make a duplicate code base just to change, forget your password as an English phrase into say a Spanish or a German translation of that. You don’t need to copy all of WordPress just to change that one bit of text. So the way it is written with these translation functions enables others to then go in and grab those strings without touching the original code base.

[00:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know if there’s any jurisdictional, legal requirements to do this? So if you’re launching a product into the WordPress space, you are basically launching a product throughout the planet. Anybody can buy it anywhere. And the only two examples that cropped up into my head were, for example, in Canada where I believe everything has to be translated into French and English. If you are selling something there, if you put up signage or what have you.

And also in the UK, if you’re in Wales, Welsh and English would be another example. I didn’t know if there were guidelines around that. If you are a plugin developer, theme developer, whatever you are doing in the WordPress space where you potentially might be breaking law in different parts of the world?

[00:09:05] Carrie Dils: That’s a great question. To my knowledge the answer is no. There are no legal requirements. It’s not like accessibility where there are laws around site accessibility. Really because we’re not necessarily talking in the case, the examples you’re giving, that’s the end user. End user facing copy. Whereas this is more behind the scenes. So imagine what you would see in WP admin, that sort of thing.

[00:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess you had to get into the thick of the code, and put coding examples up to demonstrate. And I’m also guessing that most of this is built into WordPress. You are just leveraging things that are already there, or maybe not. Maybe you are extending the functionality that ships with WordPress.

[00:09:45] Carrie Dils: No, and it actually goes beyond WordPress. I’m going to get real nerdy on you. There is something called gettext and it is open source. It’s licensed under, GNU. I can’t say GNU without thinking of Gary Gnu that does the news from Giggle Snort Hotel. Now I’m showing my age. If you’re listening to this and are not familiar with that, this was children’s programming in the seventies.

So anyways Gary Gnu has the news, and there is something called gettext. And this is a sort of universally recognized system for writing translatable code. WordPress uses gettext and has its own kind of wrapper functions around that. So what we’re talking about is not, while there are functions that are unique to the WordPress ecosystem, the concept of internationalizing your code goes well beyond WordPress, and WordPress uses gettext, which is what most software languages use.

[00:10:41] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing the fact that you’ve done a talk about it indicates that you think it’s not being used as often as it perhaps should be?

[00:10:49] Carrie Dils: So I’m always going to come at things from a education, knowledge is power perspective. It’s quite possible that people may be listening to this and have already used, seen translation functions, and just didn’t know what they were.

For instance, if you see a double underscore, parenthesis and then some string of text in there, well, that double underscore parenthesis is a translation function. So it’s less about trying to convince people to use it, more educating that it exists and what are the reasons that it’s important to use it.

So WordPress powers over 40% of the web, I think around 43% at last count. Interestingly, if you go to wordpress.org/stats, s t a t s, there’s lots of details there about WordPress installs, and one of those is what language is WordPress, what locale is being used. And I think it’s around 55% are not in English.

So WordPress is global software. It’s used all around the world. And I love especially talking about this topic at WordCamp Europe, where we have so many languages, and cultures represented. And making WordPress available in around 200 different locales. And that’s the job of the Polyglots team. So if you go to make.wordpress.org, the Polyglots team is who’s in charge for making WordPress translatable.

And it’s of course volunteers from all of these different locales that are bringing it to life in their language. But if you’ve ever gone to say the settings page of your WordPress admin, there’s a little box that says what language would you like your site in? If you were to choose another language, one of those 200 languages that exist, then everything in the admin will be displayed in that locale.

The education piece is that it is global. It is used around the world and the process of internationalizing your code is what makes it possible to have your code exist in other languages.

[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s really easy to think about the fact that, well you and I both obviously native English speakers. More or less everything that I’ve ever endeavored to do with WordPress has been in English. If a plugin comes, or a theme comes and everything is displayed in English, I’m entirely happy. That’s fine by me. But I guess we are excluding a bunch of people for whom that obstacle is simply too high.

You’ll be presented with a bunch of options. Some of it probably in quite technical language, and if the developer hasn’t made the effort to translate it into some additional languages, I’m guessing in most cases, you’re not advocating while it’s 200 or nothing.

[00:13:33] Carrie Dils: Right.

[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe pick some low hanging fruit if you like. That’s just part of the job of WordPress. If we are going to endeavor to be truly international, that work has to be done. But how did you get interested in this? How come you are doing a presentation about this particular subject given the panoply of things that you could have picked?

[00:13:50] Carrie Dils: So I’ve been working with WordPress for over a decade now, and early into that I was introduced at, it was WordCamp Austin, actually, I think 2013 or 14. I was introduced to the idea of web accessibility, and specifically what accessibility looks like in WordPress. And if somebody’s listening and they’re not familiar, accessibility is basically writing both from a code perspective and from a design and presentation, really soup to nuts, your website. Making it accessible for anyone to use regardless of what kind of device they’re on, if they’re on a laptop, a mobile phone or a screen reader.

So making the web accessible and I was just so glad somebody told me that that was something that was important, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

So extend that idea that the mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. Well, how do you democratize publishing to someone who doesn’t speak English and sees software, to your point, we’re happy when it’s, when it’s in English. But if you’re seeing all these technical words or, you know, whatever it is. You’re walking through the WP admin experience and it’s not in a language that you’re comfortable navigating, well then your power to publish is diminished.

So I think of it in terms of, or I guess that’s where I got interested in it, is sort of, I don’t know that most people would consider it a branch of accessibility, but in my mind it’s related.

[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: So let’s imagine that I’ve been listening to this and found it persuasive. Okay, I’ve got a plugin, I’ve got a theme, what have you. But I’ve made no effort to translate anything. And I think, okay, I should. I should begin this journey. How straightforward is it? Does WordPress provide the tools and the infrastructure and the file types and whatever else is going on? Is it fairly easy to drop into this? Is there documentation which is up to date to make it straightforward? Or is this one of those impossibly difficult to find pieces of documentation? And if it’s easy to find, where is it?

[00:15:53] Carrie Dils: That’s a great question, and it’s easy to find. So if you go toward wordpress.org, there’s the plugin handbook, and there’s also the theme handbook. And both of those handbooks have sections on how to internationalize your code.

So I’m going to take your question a step further. As someone who is creating products to be distributed maybe for, you know, you’re selling your theme or your plugin. Writing your code in a way that it can be translated into other languages, increases your user base. It makes it accessible to people in other places, right?

So as the plugin or theme developer, I don’t necessarily have to go, my job is to write my code in a way that it can be translated. Other people can do their translations. I don’t have to necessarily ship my code with a ton of translations.

[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: So you are not suggesting that the burden to get these 200 languages out there is always going to be on the shoulders of the developer. You could ship something and let the community take it over. If this was an important plugin that you developed, which it turns out 40% of all WordPress websites wish to use, it could be a community effort to do that?

[00:17:02] Carrie Dils: Absolutely. If your customer base is international, then you might want to ship it, you know, with language packs, or the translations for, the locales where your customers live. That would just be common sense.

[00:17:15] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a little bit off piste, which languages would you say, matter is the wrong word, but do you know what I mean? So obviously English has become the lingua franca of WordPress. By default Most things happen in English. And we come to this event, and although we are in Athens, everything’s largely in English.

What are the languages which seem to dominate internationally that you would say, okay, if you’re a developer and you wish to get your things translated, do these ones first, because you’ll have the biggest reach. Now obviously if your product is designed for Hungarian users, probably Hungarian’s the first one to go for. But broadly speaking, if you’re just trying to open it up to the world, English, and then where do we go from there?

[00:17:55] Carrie Dils: Well, as I was doing some research for my session, I was looking statistically, I think about 13% and please, anybody listening to this that says she is very wrong right now. I acknowledge that I am probably very wrong right now. But I’m going to say it’s maybe 13% of the world’s population speaks English. Making it one of the largest, but not the largest. And again, I’m sure I’m about to say something wrong, I think Chinese, specifically Cantonese.

To your question, I’m not entirely sure. I think it would be more about what market are you trying to go after. I had the experience, maybe seven or eight years ago, of releasing a commercial theme. One of the goals I was trying to accomplish was, one, to create a theme that was accessible, and two, to create a theme that was translation ready.

And it was a learning experience for me, and I was able to collaborate. I put out a call to my network, to friends that don’t speak English natively, and asked them for translations. So I ended up shipping my theme with, I want to say eight to ten different translations ready to roll. And some of those, this was the particularly interesting bit for me, some of those are scripts that read right to left, versus read left to right, like English.

So depending on, I’m about to blow your mind, Nathan. Depending on the language, you may need to make layout changes to the front end of the site. So imagine you’ve got a content right sidebar for a site. Well, if you are switching to a right to left script like Hebrew, or Arabic. You would then detect if the language was loaded in one of these RTL scripts and reverse the layout accordingly. So there’s like a separate CSS file for rTL scripts. Isn’t that kind of fascinating?

[00:19:55] Nathan Wrigley: That is really fascinating actually, and also probably quite a bit of additional work. That’s my next question actually. We live in a very commercial WordPress now. I think if you and I were having this conversation 10 years ago, the whole commercial side of WordPress was far less significant. There’s now a lot of money tied up in WordPress. And you alluded earlier to this, you said that you could, you can open up your plugin, theme, whatever it may be, to a wider audience.

So I guess somebody listening to this might want to know, okay, how much work is this and what’s the payback? Is it easy to do this? If I pick these two or three popular languages, will I be able to achieve this in a matter of days? Do I need to employ professional transcribers or translators. And will I receive a return on by investment? Like I said, this question probably wouldn’t have occurred 10 years ago. Do you understand the motivation for this might be quite low on the pecking order?

[00:20:44] Carrie Dils: Yes. So it’s relatively low effort, Nathan. So think of, as developers, there are best practices for the way that we write code. Maybe it’s the way that we structure our comment. I mean, there are actually WordPress coding standards for how things should be formatted and all of that.

So using translation functions in your code is really just the best practice. It’s low effort to do as a developer. It’s very approachable. And again, the burden of doing the translations into other languages, you don’t necessarily have to do that piece, but of course that, if you know that you have a user base in a particular locale, it would probably behoove you to provide those translations out of the gate with your product.

But in terms of what’s the return, I’m not entirely sure. I don’t have any statistics that speak to that. But certainly from a goodwill aspect, that is there. And also, take away some of the arrogance factor, acknowledging that there are users that may be using your product that are not native English speakers.

So just providing that as part of your code base is a pretty, I don’t want to say easy, because that’s an overused word. It depends on who you are if it’s easy. But if you are already a WordPress developer used to writing code, chances are you’ve copy and pasted a translation function, or a texturing that was wrapped in a translation function and maybe you didn’t know that’s what it was.

[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: It is June in 2023, so it’s impossible to have a conversation without the words AI. Will there be a place for AI in this? Because it does seem, the burden may not be the coding side. It may literally be, well we haven’t got the finances to get the text translated. We don’t have any expertise in that area, and we don’t know people who can speak Hebrew, Arabic, whatever.

So there’s a cost to that. I’m just wondering if that might well be brought down by things like AI. I’m thinking, you know, you can throw things into Google Translate and out it comes with the correct answer. I just wonder what your thoughts are on that. Whether that’s going to assist this endeavor.

I mean, I can imagine, I can really imagine a future in which we go to ChatGPT, or some variant thereof, and say translate my site’s admin area into Hungarian, for example. And it will wrap all the functions correctly and do it all for you. That sounds like a, possible future.

[00:23:08] Carrie Dils: I think so I have done zero experimentation in that regard, but I don’t see why it couldn’t. Because you can train AI, right? So if you’re training it on specifically what these functions are, and how you use them. I don’t know why it couldn’t take and theoretically generate both the code. And then on the translation side, to your point, Google Translate already exists. I think the issue right now at least at this stage with AI translations, you lose context.

So imagine, I gave this example in my workshop, so the word lead, L E A D in English has multiple meanings. I could be leading a presentation. I could get a sales lead for my product. I could have my dog on a leash, and it’s called a lead. So if you were just to tell Google Translate, hey translate the word lead into these 10 languages, who knows. There’s a reason for the phrase lost in translation. So I think probably that’s the first shortcoming I could see with the current state of affairs. Obviously, I think that could be addressed and would be really interesting to see what the applications are with AI.

[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it just feels like a fairly decent shortcut. In that, given everything that we’ve said before about how it would be, well, I’m going to use the word honorable. It would be an honorable thing to do to translate your plugin into the 200 plus languages that WordPress can accept.

Now, I realize in most cases that’s probably off the table. But if technology could assist in that effort, and you did have the time to double check to make sure that lead meant lead and not lead, if you know what I mean. Then that seems like a win-win because there’s just no downside to that.

[00:24:53] Carrie Dils: Exactly. Nobody ever cried because your site was faster or more accessible. Yeah, so it’s doing that. There’s not really a downside to it.

[00:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: Where would you direct us? I’m a plugin developer, a theme developer. You have mentioned the handbook, but I wonder if there’s other things out there. So there might be, I don’t know, YouTube channels or other documentation, maybe some books or something that you’ve written. I don’t know. Is there anything else that you would point people towards? And I will include whatever you say into the show notes so people can just click.

[00:25:21] Carrie Dils: I can provide you with a handful of articles on my site that I’ve written. I also have a class if I, just shameless plug, a course on LinkedIn learning on this topic, where I’m teaching more specifically exactly what these translation functions are. When you would use them, et cetera.

And I also met a gentleman this morning, Toby, whose last name I didn’t catch, but he’s presenting tomorrow on the same topic. And then of course in theory the workshop will end up on TV?

[00:25:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So by the time this podcast episode airs, typically, the WordPress TV won’t have caught up to that, but should it change at some point in the future, I will make the effort to update the show notes.

Another thing which people have in mind when we talk about translations in WordPress is Gutenberg’s stage four. Now, I realize there’s not a perfect overlap here because that’s more about changing the, well, my understanding, at least anyway, is that’s more about changing the content.

[00:26:16] Carrie Dils: Yes.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: How do you feel more broadly, the WordPress project more generally, in terms of accessibility and being able to read it in different languages? I know that’s a way off. It feels like three, phase three that we’re in at the moment could take decade or more to actually finish. I mean, it’s quite complicated, the concurrent editing, I think.

But are you fairly bullish that WordPress is going to be at the vanguard of this in the future? I know that we’ve been talking about the internals, the plugins and what have you, but broadly speaking, on the front end, how do you feel about phase four?

[00:26:46] Carrie Dils: I won’t overstep my bounds and pretend like I know more than I do about it. That said, when Matt laid out the four phases of Gutenberg, however many years ago that was. The project has continued to follow that roadmap, albeit maybe not at the quickest clip. So I have faith that will happen.

[00:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:27:04] Carrie Dils: At some point in the future. And that that works towards the WordPress mission of democratizing publishing. I don’t know exactly what, practically speaking, what shape that takes.

Oh, here’s a resource for you, and people who would know. Polyglots, I mentioned them earlier, the Make WordPress team. They have a Slack channel. They have weekly meetings. If you were to go to the Polyglot section on wordpress.org, that would probably be the place to tune in and, they would have much better information than me.

[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie, you’ve been very helpful. You’ve provided me with a question. I know that you wanted to mention that there’s been some updates recently. Well not recently, fairly long time ago, five years I think you mentioned, in the way that you can actually implement these things. You mentioned that it was only possible in PHP until five years ago, something like that. But now you can do this in JavaScript if that’s your thing. Talk to us about that.

[00:27:55] Carrie Dils: Yes. So earlier I mentioned the gettext library, sort of the standard for writing translation functions. And that’s common across many programming languages. WordPress is written primarily in PHP and JavaScript. And up until WordPress 5.0, there was no mechanism for translating JavaScript, only for translating strings that were included in PHP files.

So now, behold. If you love JavaScript and you love to learn JavaScript deeply, now you can also learn to translate, or include translatable strings in, your JavaScript. And they’re actually, it’s a subset of the functions that are available in PHP, but they work identically.

[00:28:37] Nathan Wrigley: And so all of that’s again, in the documentation. If we go to the resources in the show notes, we’ll be able to find all of that.

[00:28:42] Carrie Dils: Absolutely, yes. The handbooks are really, it might take you a little bit of digging around or jumping, jumping around pages, but yes.

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie, thank you so much for talking to us today. Before we part ways, if somebody has listened to this, is interested, wants to find out more, but wants to come directly to you, how do they do that?

[00:29:01] Carrie Dils: Twitter is probably where I hang out the most, and my handle is super simple, c d i l s.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: You got in early.

[00:29:10] Carrie Dils: Yes, I’ve been on for quite a while. And then I’m also on Mastodon, on the wpbuilds.social @cdils.

[00:29:18] Nathan Wrigley: Carrie Dils, really appreciate you talking to us today. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the conference.

[00:29:24] Carrie Dils: Thank you, Nathan. Great chatting with you.

On the podcast today we have Carrie Dils.

Carrie is a WordPress-loving freelance developer with more than twenty years experience in web development, and full-scope WordPress projects. She teaches WordPress and front-end development courses for LinkedIn Learning, and blogs regularly about WordPress and the business of freelancing.

This is another of the podcast interviews which were recorded at WordCamp Europe in Athens. It took place soon after Carrie had completed her workshop at the event. This workshop was entitled â€˜International Appeal: Making Your Themes and Plugins Translatableâ€™.

WordCamp workshops are practical, hands-on, sessions. Carrieâ€™s intention here was to make the audience aware of ways in which they could translate their code into other languages. Specifically it was to assist developers in localising their themes and plugins so that they could be consumed and understood by a wider audience. It covered translation functions for PHP and JavaScript, and a foundational understanding of how the process of localisation works.

We started the podcast with some orientation; getting to grips with what internationalisation is in the context of WordPress. Carrie explains that there are workflows already available for developers to use to translate their plugins and themes. This enables their clients or customers to switch between languages in the admin interface so that they can understand more about what theyâ€™re doing.

Carrie talks about the fact that, although sheâ€™s not aware of any legal compulsion to carry out this internationalisation work, itâ€™s very useful for consumers of your code. They will be able to rely on a language thatâ€™s familiar to them, and not always have to fall back on English. We get into the weeds a little as Carrie explains the foundations of how the translations actually work, and how developers can tap into this.

The fact that WordPress is so popular means that itâ€™s in a great position to make the internet a more inclusive space. Part of that is making people from all over the world understand how WordPress, and the tools built on top of it, works. Carrie says that itâ€™s not about trying to translate every part of your plugin into the two hundred plus languages which WordPress supports, itâ€™s more about doing what you can, when you can, for those people who can benefit from it.

Carrieâ€™s talk will at some point make it onto WordPress.tv so you can see it for yourself, but until thatâ€™s available she lays out some of the places where you can go to get support around this subject. The plugin and theme handbooks are an ideal place to start that journey.

We get into a chat about which languages are spoken most widely, and how Carrie thinks about which languages to pick if your resources are limited. She points out that as a developer youâ€™re building in the capability to have your code translated, and the actual work of making those translations can be handled by others if your code is created correctly.

Given that AI is always a hot topic, we digress a little towards the end about how the work of translations is likely to become more automated as large language models take on the burden of translating content and assisting in the writing of code.

If you’re a developer who is curious about making your code available to a wider audience through internationalisation, this podcast is for you.

Useful links.

Carrie’s Twitter

Carrie’s Mastodon

Carrie’s website

gettext project

WordPress stats

LinkedIn Learning course by Carrie

Tor-BjÃ¶rn Fjellner’s WCEU presentation

WordPress plugin handbook

WordPress theme handbook

Polyglots team

12.07.2023
#82 â€“ Louise Towler on How and Why You Can Make WordPress Sites Sustainable

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcastwhich is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how and why you need to be thinking sustainably when building websites.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Louise Towler. She joined me at the recent WordCamp Europe in Athens to talk about websites and making them more sustainable.

Louise is the founder of Indigo Tree, a UK based agency with deep expertise in WordPress websites. She gave a presentation at WordCamp Europe entitled, Digital sustainability: The benefits for business and the environment, in which she emphasized the impact websites can have on our planet. Her aim was to deliver practical tips for users and developers to help them make informed decisions. This presentation is the focus of today’s podcast, and we cover quite a lot of ground.

Louise highlights the significant role which electricity plays in powering data centers and transmitting data to end devices. Even if data centers use renewable energy, there is still a need to address overall electricity consumption. She points out that the internet is the fourth largest polluter globally, surpassing the airline industry.

We discussed how the continuous and widespread use of the internet has made it difficult to reduce its own impact, while still emphasizing the importance of the steps that we can take to make the internet more energy efficient.

She suggests ways that we can all make a difference right away. Educating clients about the consequences of certain design choices, such as using large videos or auto-play features that require substantial data to load. Optimizing videos, images, and other website elements, which makes it possible to reduce data consumption and improve performance.

The conversation then explores other suggestions, such as using modern image formats, using images as placeholders for videos, self hosted fonts, and considering the carbon footprint of email communications.

Louise acknowledges the challenges of discussing environmental concerns with clients, whilst also explaining that we have to come up with ways to make clients understand that these decisions are beneficial to them as well. After all, an optimized website is one that is looked upon favorably by search engines. Whilst clients ultimately are the decision makers, informing them about the consequences of their choices can help them be more informed.

Moving onto WordPress, we talk about the responsibility theme authors play. It’s a crucial role, helping users make sustainable choices. Her agency builds custom themes for clients which allows them to have full control over design decisions.

We get into the subject of how legislation is certainly coming, and so getting in early and understanding the implications of such legislation will help your endeavors in the future.

Towards the end of the podcast, we chat about some of the tools which you can use to assess the impact that your websites have, including a tool which Louise and her team have been working on for the last few years.

If you’re interested in how your sites can become more sustainable, this podcast is for you.

If you want to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Louise Towler.

I am joined on the podcast today by Louise Towler. Hi Louise.

[00:04:54] Louise Towler: Thank you for inviting me. Hello.

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: We’re going to talk today about, well possibly the most important topic ever, which is the environment and your website compared to the environment. Prior to that Louise, will you just tell us a little bit about you, so that we have some context. Who are you? What’s your relationship with WordPress and so on?

[00:05:13] Louise Towler: Okay. I am the founder of Indigo Tree. We’re a small but beautiful WordPress agency based about 30 minutes on the train north of London in the UK. There’s 15 of us in total at the moment. We have an engineering team, a project management team, and a support team, and we build WordPress websites.

I started building websites, well my first webpage that I built was built Christmas Day, the year 2000, because my husband was daft enough to buy me a book on html. So he cooked the turkey and I built myself a little webpage. I started freelancing about 20 years ago, and then one of my freelancing clients said to me, we’ve heard there’s this thing called WordPress. Would you mind building our website in WordPress? And I was like, okay, I’ll give it a go. And went off and Googled and found out how to do it, and the rest is history.

[00:06:09] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. You did a talk today entitled The Benefits for Business and the Environment. Just give us a bit of a background about your thoughts on the environment. What I mean by that, is this something that you are concerned about in your normal life? Does the environment figure heavily in your daily life?

[00:06:27] Louise Towler: It does. It’s really difficult to tread lightly on the planet. It’s very hard to do things in a sustainable way, but I think I’m very conscious of it. So I buy a few clothes, but I wear them a lot rather than throw them away, and the fast fashion thing. I use recycled paper. I try to do things in a good way. Turn off lights. Think about my travel. But it is genuinely hard. But then I have children and they’re going to live a lot longer than me, and global warming is going to affect them a lot more than it’s going to affect me. But 2050 is not that far away. And we are in trouble, as we can see by the mad world weather that’s happening at the moment.

[00:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: You work in the website building industry, as do I. Which feels in my daily interaction with my computer, it feels like the cleanest thing ever. I have a shiny laptop. I have a shiny phone. None of them put smoke out of the back when I switched them on. You know, if I worked in the automotive industry, it would be obvious what my footprint was. But I switch on my computer, there’s no connection between that and the environment. And yet it’s pretty bad.

[00:07:49] Louise Towler: Yeah.

[00:07:50] Nathan Wrigley: We browse the internet. We’re probably asking Google and all the other rivals, trivial things all the time. So make the connection for us. What is the environmental impact? What are the things which are happening between me switching on my computer and browsing WordPress websites? What are the things that are going on? What’s the technology, the bits and pieces that we need to be thinking about?

[00:08:13] Louise Towler: Well, if the internet was a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter. Compared to airlines, you know, that are 1.6%, it’s massive. It is just massive. And it’s fundamentally about electricity. Because it’s electricity that powers the data centers, whether or not they’re running on renewable energy, the fact is they still need electricity.

You’ve got the transmission, the wires between the data centers and the end devices, and then you’ve got the power to power your device. If you’re on a phone, you are recharging it. If you’re on a laptop, you are plugging it in, and that’s all using electricity. And not all of that electricity is renewable and the electricity that comes through the wires, you don’t have any control about what proportion of that is renewable.

On a hot, windy day in the UK, a vast proportion of that electricity is from renewable energy, from solar and wind turbines. But on a dark, gloomy day with no wind, a massive proportion of that is fossil fuel powered electricity.

[00:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like we’re completely addicted to the internet. I use the car that I have, a bit. But I use the internet more or less continually. You know, I’ve got my phone, it’s constantly charged up. The merest thought in my head can easily lead me to whip out the phone, do some banal scrolling of Facebook or whatever it may be. And that feels like that’s crept up on us. We’re all using it all the time. You said what was it, 4%?

[00:09:57] Louise Towler: It’s the fourth largest polluter.

[00:09:59] Nathan Wrigley: Fourth largest polluter. Can you compare that to another industry? You mentioned airlines. Does the internet as a whole, so every website, all the online services that we can use and so on, does that pollute more than the airline industry? Because the airline industry is the poster child of pollution, isn’t it?

[00:10:15] Louise Towler: I believe it does. I mean, the problem is finding out, and even measuring it is really hard. So all the estimates are that it is just massive, and it’s getting worse. With AI, the stat that I’ve read is that to do a search in ChatGPT takes four times as much energy as to do a search in Google. And to build that AI model takes a massive amount of processing power to suck in all the data and build out that model that then does predict the next word that’s going to come out in the chat box.

And so it’s not getting better. When you are talking about carbon footprints and getting to net zero, you’ve not just got to change the energy mix so that you’re running off renewable energy. You need to actually reduce demand. In the UK there’s a carbon reduction in task force. Their target is by 2030, they will have reduced demand by 15% for electricity in comparison to 2021. You have to reduce the demand as well.

[00:11:25] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:11:26] Louise Towler: And the connection to IT and websites is that if you transmit less data, you are, there’s not a direct correlation always, but you are essentially using less electricity to transmit that data.

[00:11:37] Nathan Wrigley: So the easiest way to mitigate your use of the internet is just to stop using it. But that’s completely unrealistic now?

[00:11:44] Louise Towler: Well, a company with zero carbon footprint is probably a company that’s not in business. You can’t not use the internet. What you have to do, we have to try and make sure the internet uses less electricity to do what it does.

[00:11:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so given that we’re not going to be switching our computers off, we’re not going back to the internet stone age, if you like. We’ve got to figure out ways to reduce the amount of carbon that we put out. So we’ve got to become responsible citizens because we’re using the internet. But also, we’re in a slightly unique position, you, I, and the people listening to this podcast, because we’re sitting behind the websites that are causing the pollution. And that’s, I guess, where the rest of this conversation is going to go. What are the things that we can do to make our websites for our clients, for ourselves, pollute a little bit less?

[00:12:38] Louise Towler: Think about the data and educate your client. So in the first instance, if your client wants that amazing stock video on the banner of their homepage, that auto plays in the background and looks absolutely fab. But actually the amount of data that you are then having to load on the homepage to deliver that video is massive. Well explain to them the consequences of that decision.

It’ll probably mean the homepage is a little bit slower, which won’t be as good for Core Web Vitals and for search. So whether or not they care about the planet, they should be caring about the performance of their website. And the fact is it will use more data and that’s not good for people or the planet.

If I’m on a fixed price data plan, because I’m on a low income and my children’s school has a massive video on the homepage of their school website with lots of happy kids running around the playground. And every time I visit that website, I’m using up my scarce resources of data, auto playing that video, that’s not very respectful to me when I’m trying to go about my daily life.

So there’s lots of levels you can talk to your clients about why it’s good to do things. So it’s things like optimizing videos, optimizing images. If you’re familiar with Core Web Vitals and trying to speed up websites, these are nothing new. But you know, design your website with two fonts rather than five.

Think about when you embed videos on the page. The block editor, it’s really easy to embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo, but use a plugin and put a facade in front of it so that when you actually load the page it loads an image. If it’s below the fold, you can lazy load the image. If people don’t scroll down, the image doesn’t load, and it’s only when they click on that image that the video plays and actually downloads that extra data.

So you are being really respectful to your visitors as well as to the planet by consciously thinking about these things. And it doesn’t cost anymore if you plan it in from the beginning. Talking to your clients and planning it, most clients are really happy to have that conversation because in the end, performance and speed should increase conversions and profit.

[00:14:56] Nathan Wrigley: Actually, that’s a really good point. You mentioned, just as we were beginning, that you run an agency.

[00:15:00] Louise Towler: Yeah.

[00:15:01] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have this conversation with your clients?

[00:15:03] Louise Towler: I talk about performance and speed.

[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so how does that go down?

[00:15:09] Louise Towler: Fine.

[00:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: Have you ever had somebody push back and say, no, we need the video? Or is it generally a conversation of look, okay you could have the video, but here’s the reason why I think for the planet, you shouldn’t have the video. How does that conversation normally go?

[00:15:19] Louise Towler: We advise them. It’s like with banners, with sliders, we advise them. I emailed something to a client last week saying, here’s the Google stats. About 8% will see banner number two. Do you really think banner number three, as one of your key important messages being viewed by 4% of your home paved visitors, you’re better off putting that content on the page. It is the client’s choice in the end, but I will educate them so they’re conscious of the choice that they’re making. Rather than not aware and then complain that nobody clicks through from banner number three. And I’m like, well, we did tell you.

But there’s some things I don’t give clients a choice on, like accessibility. They don’t get a choice about having an accessible website because you don’t want to give people a choice where you don’t want them to make a poor decision.

[00:16:04] Nathan Wrigley: And in terms of your agency, do you advertise your environmental credentials?

[00:16:09] Louise Towler: We don’t really talk about it at the moment, but we will be dipping our toe in the water and talking more and more about it over the next few months, because we’ve been doing some interesting stuff in the background.

[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned that an autoplay video, that seems like the most extreme example. You know, you go to a website, suddenly you’ve downloaded without your realizing it, I don’t know, 10 megabytes of data that you really didn’t need. Just run through the components of a typical webpage. So what have we got? We’ve got text, we’ve got images, we’ve got video, we’ve got, audio like this.

What are quick wins? What’s the order, if you like, that you should go through when in your head you’re trying to make a page more environmentally friendly?

[00:16:49] Louise Towler: I would start with images because a website typically has more images than videos. And if you’re doing something with images like you are, I don’t know, using a CDN, or you’ve installed the performance plugin and you are delivering things as WebP, then one plugin and one solution might work across all images on your website.

So I would definitely think about images in terms of making sure you deliver the right sized image for the device as well. So make sure that in your theme, you’ve got that function which saves it all out at the various different break points.

[00:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: If you’re on a, mobile website, the image that’s loaded should be the same size as the device that you’re looking at. Not a great big image that’s been squished down, okay.

[00:17:30] Louise Towler: Exactly. And that can be a bit tricky because sometimes on mobile sites for example, we’ll have a nice banner image, but we’ll make it cropped and square. Whereas on a desktop site you might have it that letter box shape. And actually it won’t really work on a mobile. It’s too sort of narrow and thin.

So you sometimes need to be a bit careful about, especially with the block editor, do you need to have different versions of images unless the cropping is right in the middle. Doesn’t work very well with the block editor to just auto crop. It’s about thinking about it. So I definitely start with images.

Little things like making sure you are using SVGs where it’s appropriate. If you’ve got an animated gif, turn it into a video. I then look at the videos. Just make sure you’ve got facades or posters on videos and try and persuade your client not to have that large banner video.

I would then look at fonts and make sure all your fonts are self-hosted. Which is a good thing anyway because certainly from a GDPR perspective, if you are using Google fonts in Europe, then there’s been some case law around, it’s leaking data to Google about who’s using those fonts and you don’t want to be doing that.

But that again will speed it up because you can cache the fonts and things like that. And subset the fonts. So I think you can do things where if you are only, if you’ve got a font set that’s in multiple languages, but actually your website’s just in English, only use the bit of the font that you need for the language that you are working in.

And then I would definitely think about things, other things on the website, like email. If you’ve got a transactional site and you are sending out lots of confirmation of shipping emails. Do you need a really big logo in the email? Can it be a tiny logo or even just text on a colored background and make those emails have a lower carbon footprint as well.

[00:19:18] Nathan Wrigley: How does WordPress out of the box do with helping you get to some of these targets?

[00:19:26] Louise Towler: It’s not helpful.

[00:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: So I was going to say, I imagine that most people listening to this podcast have an understanding of everything that you just said, but the typical user of WordPress is not somebody that’s listening this podcast. Used by millions of people who probably see the media library throwing the biggest image they’ve got, and that’s it.

[00:19:43] Louise Towler: I think you’ve got to be a responsible theme author. As an agency, we build our own custom themes for each client. So we’re not constrained in any way at the design stage. But if you’re choosing either a free theme or a paid for theme, you can be quite wise about it. So if you are you’re building a brochure site for a client, you don’t need to choose a theme with every possible e-commerce, form plugin, event plugin, all that extra code. If you’re not using font awesome icons, then don’t let the theme pull in the complete font awesome icon set.

Just download a little SVG. So try and think about the theme that you choose. It can be a bit of a pain to actually turn off on some of those very flexible all singing, all dancing dancing themes, the options when you just want something really simple.

There are some plugins that can help. So for example, we often use a plugin called Perf Matters, which is really good for performance. And one of the things I particularly like about that plugin is, so if we are working with a client where they might have an inquiry form or a landing page with an inquiry form on it. You install a plugin, we use Gravity Forms. Really brilliant plugin. Love it. But of course you get that plugin code in the head of every page, just in case the form’s required. Well turn it off.

You can use Perf Matters and go in, and go I only want the Gravity Form code to be embedded on these three pages, on the site that have forms on. Doesn’t need to be downloaded for any other pages.

The same with something like Google Maps, the API for Google Maps. Often you’ll put it in so that you can have a nice map on your contact page. Well actually, number one, could you replace that map with an image, and then just link out to Google Maps? How many people are actually going to be scrolling in and out on the page?

Think about it from the user’s perspective, but then actually just have that Google Maps API code in the contact page. Don’t have it anywhere else on your website. It’s just not needed. But you see it a lot where all the plugins inject all their stuff into the head on every single page just in case. So go through and turn things off.

[00:22:02] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned earlier that obviously this is something you’re trying to embed in your company. You also mentioned that you don’t have the conversation about accessibility. It’s just the way it is.

[00:22:10] Louise Towler: Well, we talk about it. The only time we really push back is where clients have got brand colors, which aren’t AA accessible, and then we discuss with them whether we can change them.

[00:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: But are you going to in the future be having more conversations like this?

[00:22:26] Louise Towler: Yes.

[00:22:27] Nathan Wrigley:And if so, how forceful are you going to be with your clients if they push back? Say, no, no, no, no. There’s a delicate line here, isn’t there? You want to do the best for your client and the best for your client may be a bitter pill for them to swallow.

[00:22:39] Louise Towler: There may be a really good a brand reason, depending on the client, as to why they have to use a particular font. But I would be going to the client and saying, I’m going to tell you why it’s not a good idea. In the end, it is your choice. It is your website. You own the site once you’ve paid me for us to build it. So it is yours to do what you want with. But do it consciously, knowing the consequences of the decision that you are making.

So I will always tell them, in the end it is their choice. But with things like brand and fonts and that, well you know, the consequences of pulling in an Adobe font is 6 to 800 milliseconds of a page load. That can be the difference between a first and second spot on google.

So sometimes you can argue it really strongly from a commercial reason, and they will listen and go, right, let’s go back to our brand designer and get them to find some web fonts or some Google fonts that we can use. And elsewhere, yes, you’ll use that fancy type kit or whatever font, but let’s use something for the web that actually will work and not impact on the performance of the site. Because if they’re a commercial client, they’re going to care about the performance. We need to make them look good to their boss.

[00:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: Given exactly what you just said, is there some accreditation that websites can expose to the world to say, we made an effort here? I’m trying to think of an example, but there are badges that you can get in all manner of industries to say, okay, we went through this training. We made the effort here, and so we have a badge to prove that we made an effort.

Is there something that people can do on the internet to say, look, our website is consuming 50%, 30%, whatever, less energy than it might have done. We made an effort. Here’s our badge to prove it.

[00:24:32] Louise Towler: I’m not aware of a badge, but there are lots of people doing lots of things out there. So there might be. I think it’s really hard because what might be a good score for a e-commerce site, might be of a poor score for a different type of site. And I think that in the end, yes, you can measure against other people, but actually you have to have that intrinsic motivation for just wanting to do it. It’s not about collecting badges.

Does it matter if your site is AA accessible and you have a badge on your site? Or does it matter that you basically have enabled 40% of the population with disabilities or temporary impairments to actually access your goods and services, and you’ll increase your profits as a result?

[00:25:15] Nathan Wrigley: So that was the website piece. You know, can you expose this credential to visitors? What about you as an agency? Can you expose your credentials to your clients? Is there anything there?

[00:25:26] Louise Towler: Well, we’re working, and it is a very much a work in progress, towards something called B Corp, which is an accreditation thing that you can get for being, if you like, a good citizen to the planet. It covers environmental. It also covers governance, and more things to help with inclusivity and diversity. And we are rewriting our staff handbook, and we’re measuring our carbon footprint as part of that, as an agency. But we’re also doing other things as well. Making sure that we do things in a way that’s consciously responsible, and there’s got to be a business for good. We want to be a good citizen for the planet. And I think that’s quite a high standard. And there’s, I think about a thousand companies in the UK who have that. And we are not there yet, but it’s something that I think we can aspire to be.

[00:26:12] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any sense that this message that you are preaching here is beginning to catch on? You are definitely in the vanguard. Most people are not talking about this. If we go downstairs, we’re not really picking up on that message yet. But do you sense some kind of change? Are you communicating with people on a more regular basis about this? Clearly you are interested in it, but are you talking into the void or are people beginning to listen?

[00:26:37] Louise Towler: There’s a lot of people in communities where the communities are talking about this a lot. I think what’s really nice is I was given the opportunity to speak at a conference, and this conference, to the entire WebPress community had a session about digital sustainability. I personally think that every conference that anyone puts on should have at least one speaker, or channel, or workshop, or something talking about sustainability in the industry, or sector that the conference is in. Because it is looming.

The legislation is coming. The governments are legislating now, and at the moment in the UK it’s only very, very large businesses who have to do reporting. But if you are a large business wanting a government contract with a value of more than 5 million pounds, which you know, even small consultants and agencies can go for big contracts. You have to have your scope one, scope two, and some scope three emissions and a carbon reduction plan will be coming.

By 2028 The National Health Service in the UK will require every product or service that is supplied to it to have a carbon footprint. So you need to be starting now because for some things that’s going to be really hard to do and it’s going to take a while to do.

So start now with the little things, the quick wins. Start measuring where you are, because your carbon reduction plan has to say how you’re going to reduce. And then you have to show that you are making those reductions. So start measuring now, so that all the things you start doing now can be part of that reduction that you make and you can report on.

[00:28:18] Nathan Wrigley: So you are describing things in the UK. In the UK in the future, you are literally going to be unable to get certain types of website client work if you cannot prove that you’ve done the due diligence.

[00:28:31] Louise Towler: Yeah.

[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s really interesting. But still a way off. We’re still five years out from that portcullis closing?

[00:28:37] Louise Towler: Yeah. But if you are a large business, very large business, you already have to do mandatory reporting. The government is slowly going to bring that down. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if by 2030, as well as putting in my annual tax return, on my submission of my company accounts to Companies House, I have to do a carbon accounting report. Every small business.

The EU, 23 million organizations there are in the EU at the moment, by 2028, all of them are going to be expected to put in some sort of carbon report on what they’re doing. The legislation is coming.

But even quicker than that, procurement is starting to change. So I think it was the back end of 2021, Tesco sent out a letter to all of their suppliers saying, we want you to do these four things. You need to have a carbon reduction plan. You need to move to green energy. Otherwise you can’t be part of a supplier to Tesco. Doesn’t matter whether or not you are a large business or a small business, they sent it out as part of their procurement. So the government legislation is coming, but larger businesses are doing it quicker because they’re using procurement as a tool to do that.

And then on top of that, for some organizations now it’s affecting their access to finance. So if I’m a pension fund or I want to invest in a large enterprise or a business, why would I invest in you, if you are not sustainable in 5, 10, 15 years time? They are now beginning to ask for those carbon reduction plans, sustainability report. What are you doing for your ESG as a condition of investment?

[00:30:22] Nathan Wrigley: So the window of opportunity for ignoring this is fast closing?

[00:30:25] Louise Towler: And why not get ahead of it? Why not be that agency that can help your clients with these challenges?

[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Although you described that there’s no badge necessarily for this. It really does feel that for the right client this is a conversation which will win you work. If you can prove that you are going to do this work now, like you said, who’s going to say no to a more green website? Would you like your website to be much more environmentally friendly than it could have been? Well, no, actually we’d like it to pollute more, please. That’s just not a conversation you’re going to get into.

[00:30:56] Louise Towler: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s interesting. So the only piece that I can see in this conference where anything is mentioned about the environment is hosting. And even that, it’s probably I don’t know, one in fifty, one in a hundred who have that badge. Talk to us about that side. So obviously we build websites, we’ve got a computer, we know that it’s stored somewhere, but tell us about hosting, and what people are doing.

[00:31:22] Louise Towler: Actually some of the hosting companies here are very green, but you have to consider the political climate. So if you are a hosting company based in Texas, in the US. And you are being told that you have to support big oil because that’s what runs Texas. You don’t talk about the fact that you are running your hosting data centers on green energy. So it’s not that they’re not. It’s just that they’re not, it’s not necessarily part of their marketing message at this point, because the political climate isn’t necessarily conducive to that.

[00:31:55] Nathan Wrigley: So you are saying that the hosting industry broadly are doing a fairly good job of this?

[00:32:00] Louise Towler: Well, some of them are, yeah. I know for a fact a lot of the Google Cloud hosting is green and a lot of the big, they’re using Google data centers.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: That feels like one of the most grounded things that you can do. If you’re having a website, you can actually go out and look for green hosting.

[00:32:16] Louise Towler: And the Green Software Foundation has a little URL. It’s a little tool. You can literally go and put in your domain name and it will tell you whether it’s running on a green hosting.

[00:32:25] Nathan Wrigley: What is the Green Software Foundation?

[00:32:27] Louise Towler: It’s a sort of organization that is talking about green software, green web, green all sorts of things. They’re doing some really interesting stuff. They work a lot with very large organizations. I think to be a member you have, like have to pay up 10,000 pounds or something. It’s like out of my league to be a member, but it doesn’t mean I can’t see what they’re doing and listen to what they’re doing.

They’ve also got a really interesting free course that you can do on sustainable software development. And it gives you all the background and all the things you should be considering when you’re building software and websites basically, and the things that you can do to make them run better in a greener way.

[00:33:09] Nathan Wrigley: If I wanted to make my website more SEOable, I’ve got a whole suite of tools available to me. And many of them will give me some sort of data saying, okay, this page is, you’ve done a good job here. Like a traffic light or something you, you know what I’m saying?

[00:33:25] Louise Towler: Yep.

[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: Are there tools similar to that, that we can use in WordPress?

Maybe it’s some kind of extension to a browser where we can see what our browsing is doing on the internet. In other words, is there a plugin, something which will show us a dashboard saying, okay this page, based upon the hosting that you’ve told us you’re using is consuming or creating this much carbon debt.

[00:33:51] Louise Towler: There’s individual tools at the moment that I am aware of. You can put in a URL and it will say, oh yes, your page is this many grams of CO2. Actually what we’ve done is something. We’ve been doing a thing. I did that thing of having a side project to the agency, and we’ve been building something for the past couple of years, and we’re about to launch a piece of software. It’s an extension to WordPress, which will actually, in the dashboard, show you a daily carbon footprint of your website based on daily visits and page views.

[00:34:24] Nathan Wrigley: How is that working then? So presumably the daily page bit is fairly straightforward. This website has been consumed 25,000 times, we can make the connection there. But presumably it must be figuring out, okay, that page had a video on it. This one had nothing but text, and it’s based upon upon some hosting.

[00:34:40] Louise Towler: So we’re basically measuring the page, a measure of the data or page weight for each page. And then we’re looking at the visitors to the pages as well.

[00:34:50] Nathan Wrigley: And are you giving like a score out at the end?

[00:34:52] Louise Towler: We’re not giving a score at the moment, but eventually when the software’s launched and there’s lots of people using it, we will be able to say, oh, actually, in comparison to other people using our software, you are in the top quarter, or bottom quartile or you are in the middle. So we can give some feedback. But more importantly, if you look at it and you use things like traffic, then you can start to see where you should be optimizing.

[00:35:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And is this tool going to give you helpful advice on how to optimize it?

[00:35:22] Louise Towler: Yes, we’re building out a knowledge base as well.

[00:35:23] Nathan Wrigley: I was going to say, it’s all very well saying this page is doing really badly, but, you know, tough luck.

[00:35:27] Louise Towler: Yeah.

[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: So, where will it point me? What are the sort of metrics that you’re going to be helping me with?

[00:35:31] Louise Towler: We’ll be helping with all the basics. It’s actually about empowering the content editors. Because as website theme builders and as website developers and designers, we can build the most amazing AA accessible website that’s really lightweight and fast.

And then a year later we could audit it and find, oh, content editors added, you know, 30 images and they didn’t realize they had to add alt text to each one. And they can have loaded that really large video and not realized that it needed a poster attribute to make sure that the page didn’t take a long time to load.

So what we are trying to do is give that feedback to editors in the browser when they’re editing the site, in the backend of the admin. Because that continuous measurement, if they see a little spike, or they see that suddenly something’s changed, they can go in and fix it. Rather than end up just doing an annual check, or checking every so often and ending up with a list of defects to fix, basically.

So the whole point is, it’s about designing out people making those unconscious mistakes in the first place. And making sure the website continues to be at the standard it should be at and potentially improves over time.

[00:36:44] Nathan Wrigley: So slightly off piste a little bit. That’s lovely. I mean I would hope to be able to see that kind of data and it would be really useful to me as a website builder. What about by just general browsing the internet? Do you know if there’s any tool which can tell me, right at the end of today Nathan, you’ve been a poor citizen. Some kind of, I don’t know, a browser extension or something which tells me.

[00:37:05] Louise Towler: I don’t know that. Nobody’s ever asked me that question, so I will have to take that away Nathan and I will have to come back to you, because I genuinely don’t know the answer to that.

[00:37:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think that would be quite a useful thing to know. At the end of the year, Nathan, your internet use is the equivalent of a 20,000 mile flight or something that would be.

[00:37:22] Louise Towler: You must be online a lot.

[00:37:23] Nathan Wrigley: I really am. Yeah. Okay, when are you hoping to get this tool out?

[00:37:28] Louise Towler: We are doing a soft launch, early adopter, by invitation to Indigo Tree clients mid-July.

[00:37:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So really soon.

[00:37:35] Louise Towler: Yeah. And then from then on we’ll be building out new features and basically getting it to the point where we can launch it to people as a SaaS product.

[00:37:45] Nathan Wrigley: So going to go beyond WordPress at some point?

[00:37:47] Louise Towler: Couldn’t possibly say, but yes.

[00:37:49] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe. Maybe, yeah.

[00:37:50] Louise Towler: Well, it depends on the roadmap and it depends what interest we get. And for me it’s not just about the commercial side of, we to build something that’s obviously profitable and successful. It’s actually where can we make the biggest impact? How can we, with what we are doing, make sure that we get the biggest carbon reduction overall.

And the great thing about when you’re measuring stuff is we can actually report on global stats that are sort of, you know, a thousand clients and cumulatively this month they have reduced their carbon footprint by this amount. You know, so it is going to be an interesting journey to see how we get on and where the biggest impact can be whilst being commercial as well.

[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It really does sound interesting. Okay, so we’re going to have to wrap it up. We’re probably at the edge of the amount of time that we’ve got.

Where would we go if we are curious about the things that you’ve talked about? So maybe that’s a link to your, the product that you’ve just mentioned. Maybe it’s just a more general set of resources. What are the two or three top places that you would send people?

[00:38:45] Louise Towler: I’d definitely have a look at the Green Software Foundation. I would also go to, there’s a Slack channel in the WordPress. I think they’re just about to create a team in Core for sustainability. So I’d be going and talking to them.

And then I would be keeping an eye on people like Wholegrain Digital. Tom and Vineeta talk about things a lot. Tom’s got a really great newsletter that you can subscribe to. So there’s lots of people talking about it, but I think it’s about figuring out where it fits with your particular clients. And some of our clients are very values based and will immediately go for this. Some people just need that more commercial argument as well.

[00:39:26] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Louise, thank you for telling us all about your efforts regarding sustainability and the environment. It is a genuinely fascinating subject, and my prediction is that this conversation is only going to get louder and louder.

[00:39:39] Louise Towler: I hope so.

[00:39:39] Nathan Wrigley: As the years go on. Yeah, thank you for talking to me.

[00:39:41] Louise Towler: You’re welcome. Thank you.

On the podcast today we have Louise Towler. She joined me at the recent WordCamp Europe in Athens to talk about websites and making them more sustainable.

Louise is the founder of Indigo Tree, a UK based agency with deep expertise in WordPress websites.

She gave a presentation at WordCamp Europe entitled, Digital sustainability: The benefits for business and the environment in which she emphasised the impact websites can have on our planet. Her aim was to deliver practical tips for users and developers to help them make informed decisions.

This presentation is the focus of today’s podcast, and we cover quite a lot of ground.

Louise highlights the significant role which electricity plays in powering data centres and transmitting data to end devices. Even if data centres use renewable energy, there is still a need to address overall electricity consumption. She points out that the internet is the fourth largest polluter globally, surpassing the airline industry.

We discuss how the continuous and widespread use of the internet has made it difficult to reduce its own impact, whilst still emphasising the importance of the steps we can take to make the internet more energy-efficient.

She suggests ways that we can all make a difference right away; educating clients about the consequences of certain design choices, such as using large videos or autoplay features that require substantial data to load. Optimising videos, images, and other website elements, which makes it possible to reduce data consumption and improve performance.

The conversation then explores other suggestions such as using modern image formats, using images as placeholders for videos, self-hosted fonts, and considering the carbon footprint of email communications.

Louise acknowledges the challenges of discussing environmental concerns with clients whilst also explaining that we have to come up with ways to make clients understand that these decisions are beneficial to them as well. After all, an optimised website is one that is looked upon favourably by search engines. Whilst clients ultimately are the decision makers, informing them about the consequences of their choices can help them be more informed.

Moving onto WordPress, we talk about the responsibility theme authors play. Itâ€™s a crucial role, helping users make sustainable choices. Her agency builds custom themes for clients, which allows them to have full control over design decisions.

We get into the subject of how legislation is certainly coming, and so getting in early and understanding the implications of such legislation will help your own endeavours in the future.

Towards the end of the podcast we chat about some of the tools which you can use to assess the impact that your websites have, including a tool which Louise and her team have been working on for the last few years.

If youâ€™re interested in how your sites can become more sustainable, this podcast is for you.

Useful links.

Louise WordCamp Europe presentation – Digital sustainability: The benefits for business and the environment

Indigo Tree website

Perf Matters plugin

Gravity Forms website

Green Software Foundation website

Sustainability Slack Channel

Wholegrain Digital website

05.07.2023
#81 â€“ James Dominy on Why AI Is to Be Embraced, Not Feared

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast, which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how AI and WordPress can work together.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for. WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you. And hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have James Dominy. James is a computer scientist with a master’s degree in bioinformatics. He lives in Ireland working at the WP engine Limerick office.

This is the second podcast recorded at WordCamp Europe, 2023 in Athens. James gave a talk at the event about the influence of AI on the WordPress community and how it’s going to disrupt so many of the roles which WordPressers currently occupy.

We talk about the recent rise of ChatGPT, and the fact that it’s made AI available to almost anyone. In less than 12 months, many of us have gone from never touching AI technologies to using them on a daily basis to speed up some aspect of our work.

The discussion moves on to the rate at which AI systems might evolve, and whether or not they’re truly intelligent or just a suite of technologies which masquerade is intelligent. Are they merely good at predicting the next word or phrase in any given sentence? Is there a scenario in which we can expect our machines to stop simply regurgitating texts and images based upon what they’ve consumed; a future in which they can set their own agendas and learn based upon their own goals?

This gets into the subject of whether or not AI is in any meaningful way innately intelligent, or just good at making us think that it is, and whether or not the famous Turing test is a worthwhile measure of the abilities of an AI.

James’ his background in biochemistry comes in handy as we turn our attention to whether or not there’s something unique about the brains that we all possess. Or if intelligence is merely a matter of the amount of compute power that an AI can consume. It’s more or less certain that given time machines will be more capable than they are now. So when if ever does the intelligence Rubicon get crossed?

The current AI systems can be broadly classified as Large Language Models or LLMs for short, and James explains what these are and how they work. How can they create a sentence word by word if they don’t have an understanding of where each sentence is going to end up?

James explains that LLMs are a little more complex than just handling one word at a time, always moving backwards and forwards within their predictions to ensure that they’re creating content which makes sense, even if it’s not always factually accurate.

We then move on from the conceptual understanding of AI to more concrete ways it can be implemented. What ways can WordPress users implement AI right now? And what innovations might we reasonably expect to be available in the future? Will we be able to get AI to make intelligent decisions about our websites SEO or design, and therefore be able to focus our time on other more pressing matters?

It’s a fascinating conversation, whether or not you’ve used AI tools in the past.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you James Dominy.

I am joined on the podcast today by James Dominy. How are you doing James?

[00:04:51] James Dominy: I’m well, thanks. Hi Nathan. How are you doing?

[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good, thanks. We’re at WordCamp Europe. We’re upstairs somewhere. I’m not entirely sure where we are in all honesty. The principle idea of today’s conversation with James is he’s done a presentation at WordCamp Europe all about AI. Now, I literally can’t think of a topic which is getting more interest at the moment. It seems the general press is talking about AI all the time.

[00:05:17] James Dominy: Yeah.

[00:05:17] Nathan Wrigley: It’s consuming absolutely everything. So it’s the perfect time to have this conversation. What was your talk about today? What did you actually talk about in front of those people?

[00:05:24] James Dominy: Right. So my talk was about the influence of AI on the WordPress community. The WordPress community involving, in my mind, roughly three groups. You’ve got your freelancer, single content generator, blogger. You have someone who does the same job but in a business as in an agency or a marketing or a brand context. And then on the other side, you’ve got software developers who are developing plugins or working on the actual WordPress Core.

And AI is going to be changing the way all of those people work. Mostly I focused on the first and the third groups. I don’t know enough about the business aspects to really talk about the agency and the marketing side of things.

I personally, I’m a software developer, so I suppose I really skewed towards that in the end. But, my wife has been a WordPresser for 15, 20 years, which is how I ended up doing this. And a lot of the things that she’s been using ChatGPT quite actively recently.

And she’s been chatting to me after work going, you know, I was trying to use ChatGPT to do X Y Z. And I thought, well, you know, that’s interesting. I know some bit about machine learning and the way these things work. I’ve read some stuff on the internals and I have opinions.

[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect.

[00:06:34] James Dominy: So that’s how I got here.

[00:06:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, that’s perfect. Thank you. It seems like at the moment the word ChatGPT could be easily interchanged with AI . Everybody is using that as the pseudonym for AI and it’s not really, is it? It really is a much bigger subject. But that is, it feels at the moment, the most useful implementation in the WordPress space. You know, you lock it into the block editor in some way shape and you create some content in that way.

[00:07:00] James Dominy: And I mean, I am absolutely guilty of that. I think the number of times I’ve said ChatGPT, I mean AI generative systems, or something during my workshop this morning is well beyond count.

it is likely to fall victim of a trademark thing at some point. Like Google desperately tries to claim that Google is a trademark and shouldn’t be used as a generic term for search. I expect the same thing will happen with ChatGPT at some point.

[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: This is going to sound a little bit, well, maybe snarky is the wrong word, but I hope you don’t take it this way, but it feels to me that the pace of change in AI is so remarkably rapid. I mean, like nothing I can think of. So, is there a way that we can even know what AI could look like in a year’s time, two years’ time, five years’ time? So in other words, if we speculate on what it could be to WordPress, is that a serious enterprise? Is it serious endeavor? Or are we just hoping that we get the right guess? Because I don’t know what it’s going to be like.

[00:07:59] James Dominy: I think if we rephrase the question a bit, we might get a better answer. So AIs are human design systems. And there is a thing called the alignment problem where there is an element of design to AIs, and we give it a direction, but it doesn’t always go the direction we want and I think that is the unanswerable part of this question.

Yes, there are going to be emergent surprises from the capabilities of AIs. But for the most part, AIs are developed with a specific goal in mind. Large language models were developed, okay I’m taking a wild educated guess here perhaps, but they were developed with the idea of producing text that sounded like a human. And I mean, we’ve had the Turing test for nearly a hundred years, more than a hundred years? 21, yeah, more than a hundred years now.

So I mean, that’s been a goal for a hundred years. Everyone says that AI has advanced rapidly and it has, but the core mathematical principles that are involved, those haven’t advanced. I don’t want to take away from the people who’ve done the work here. There has been work that’s been put into it, but I think what’s really given us the quantum leap here is the amount of computational power that we can throw at the problem.

And as long as that is increasing exponentially, I think we can expect that the models themselves will get exponentially better at roughly the same rate as the amount of hardware we throw at it.

[00:09:28] Nathan Wrigley: So we can stare into the future and imagine that it’s going to get exponentially, logarithmically it’s going to, it’s just going to get better and better and better. But we can’t predict the ways that it might output that betterness. Who knows what kind of interface there’ll be, or.

[00:09:41] James Dominy: Yeah. I think better’s a very evasive term perhaps, on my part. I think there are specific ways that it is going to get better. For example, we are going to see less confused AIs, because they are able to process more tokens. They have deeper models. Deeper statistical trees for outputs. They’re able to take more context in and apply it to whatever comes out. So in that sense we’re going to see a better output from an AI. Is it going to ever be able to innovate? Ooh, that’s a deep philosophical question, and I mean we can get into that, but I don’t know that we have time.

[00:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think I would like to get into that.

[00:10:22] James Dominy: Okay.

[00:10:22] Nathan Wrigley: Because when we begin talking about AI, I think the word which sticks is intelligence. The artificial bit gets quickly forgotten and we imagine that there is some kind of intelligence behind this, because we ask it a fairly straightforward, or even indeed quite complicated question.

And we get something which appears to pass the Turing test. Just for those people who are listening, the Turing test is a fairly blunt measure of whether you are talking to something which is a human or not human, masquerading as a human. And if something is deemed to have passed the Turing test, it’s indistinguishable from a human.

And so, I have an intuition that really what we’re getting back, it’s not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s kind of like a regurgitation machine. It’s sucking in information and then it’s just giving us a best approximation of what it thinks we want to hear. But it’s not truly intelligent. If you asked it something utterly tangential, that it had no capacity, it had no data storage on, it would be unable to cope with that, right?

[00:11:22] James Dominy: I think yes. If you can clearly delineate the idea of, we have no data on this, which is very difficult considering the amounts of information that, you know, give something access to Wikipedia and that AI generative system might well be able to produce an opinion on practically anything these days.

But if it hasn’t read the latest paper on advanced quantum mechanic theory, it’s not going to know it. That text isn’t going to be there. Could it reproduce that paper? That’s a subtely different question, because then it comes down to, well, when a human produces that paper, what are they really doing?

They’re synthesizing their knowledge from a bunch of different things that they’ve learned, and they’re producing text in a language, in a grammar, that they have learned in a very similar way, that statistically speaking this sentence follows this grammatical form. Because I have learned that as a child through hearing it several thousand times from the people around me and my parents. What’s different?

A more practical example here, I was having this discussion earlier today, and someone said yes, but they’re not truly intelligent. But if you consider it, even now, we can ask Chat GPT something, and I’m going to be abstract cause I don’t have a concrete example here, I’m sorry. But we can say to ChatGPT, I want you to produce a poem in the style of Shakespeare, a sonnet or something. But I want you to use a plot from Goethe.

Okay, fine. Now it can do that. It can give you a response. I’m not sure that it’ll be a good response. I haven’t tried that particular one. But in that context, if you are asking a human to do that, and we automatically make the assumption of other human beings that they understand. And, sorry, I’m making air quotes here. That they understand, in quotes, who Goethe is. That that is a person and a character. That Goethe has a particular style and a proclivity for a certain pattern in his plots.

And that those are all, to use a computer science term, symbolic representations. Abstract concepts. So is ChatGPT actually understanding those abstract concepts? Does it understand that Goethe is a person? Educated guests here, probably not. But it does understand that Goethe refers to a certain, can draw a line in all the stuff that it has learned and know this is Goethe.

It has a concept of what it thinks Goethe is. Then from there it can say, and he has done work on the following things, and these are plots. And so it kind of understands. There’s another line there about what a plot is, which is a very abstract concept.

Does that mean it’s intelligent? Does that mean it understands? I don’t know. That’s my answer because I did biochemistry at university, and there’s also the question there, and it’s exactly the same question. It’s at what point do the biological machines, the biochemical machines, your actual proteins and things that are obviously on their own, unintelligent, and yet when they act in concerts, they produce a cell, and a living being.

Where does that boundary exist? Is it gray? Is it a hard line? And the same for me is true of the intelligence question here. Intelligence is a, it’s an aglomeration of lots of small, well-defined things that when they start interacting, become more than the sum of their parts. Does it come down to the Turing test? I mean, the fact that people on support, little support popups on the web, have to ask, are you a human every now and then. It immediately says, we have AIs that have passed the Turing test long ago.

But here in this case, like the extended Turing test is the thing actually intelligent? I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know the answer there. In some sense, yes, because it’s doing almost the same thing as we are, just in a different, with different delineations and different abstractions, but the process is probably the same.

[00:15:33] Nathan Wrigley: Given that you’ve got a background in, forgive me, did you say biochemistry?

[00:15:37] James Dominy: Yeah, biochemistry and computer science, bioinfomatics.

[00:15:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, do you have an intuition as to whether the substrate of the brain has some unique capacity that can lock intelligence into it? In other words, is there a point at which a computer cannot leap the hurdle? There’s something special about the brain, the way the brain is created? This piece of wetwear in our head.

[00:16:00] James Dominy: Unpopular opinion, I think it comes down to brute force count. We’ve got trillions of cells. Large language models, I don’t know what the numbers are for GPT4, but we’re not at trillions yet. Maybe when we get there, I don’t know where the tipping point is, you know. Maybe when we get to tens of billions, or whatever number it happens to be, is the point where this thing actually becomes intelligent.

And we would be unable to distinguish them from a human, other than the fact that we’re looking at a screen that, that we know it’s running on the chip in front of us. But if it’s over the internet and it’s on a machine running, or whether we’re talking to a person in the support center. Or we are at the McDonald’s kiosk of 2050 and being asked whether we want fries with that. If we can’t see the person who’s asking the question, if we’re at the drive-through, we can’t see the person. Do we care?

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. You mentioned a couple of times large language models, often abbreviated just to LLM. My understanding at least, forgive me I’m, I really genuinely am no expert about this. This is the underpinning of how it works. I’m going to explain it in crude terms, and then I’m hoping you’ll step in and pad it out and make it more accurate.

[00:17:12] James Dominy: I should caveat anything that I say here with I also am not an expert on these, but I will do what I can.

[00:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: So a large language model, my understanding is that things like ChatGPT are built on top of this, and essentially it is vacuuming up the internet. Text, images, whatever data you can throw at it. And it’s consuming that, storing that. And then at the point where you ask it something, so write a sonnet in the style of Goethe, written by Shakespeare. It’s then making a best approximation, and it’s going through a process of, okay, what should the first word be? Right, we’ve decided on that. Now, let’s figure out the second word, and the third word and the fourth word. Until finally it ends in a full stop and it’s done.

And that’s the process it’s going through. Which seems highly unintelligent. But then again, that’s what I’m doing now. I’m probably selecting in some way what the next word is and what the next word is. But yeah, explain to us how these large language models work.

[00:18:03] James Dominy: I think that’s a pretty fair summation. I think the important bit that needs to be filled in there is that what we perceive and use as customers of AI systems in general is a layer of several different models. There is a lot of pre-processing that goes into our prompts and post-processing in terms of what comes out.

But fundamentally the large language model is, yes, it’s strings of text generally. There are different systems that the AI images, image systems, are a different form of maths. Most of them, at least the ones that I know of, are mostly based on something called Stable Diffusion.

We can chat about that separately, but large language models tend to be trained on a large pile of text where they develop statistical inferences for the likelihood of some sequence of words following some other sequence of words. So as you say, like, if I know that a pile of words were written by Goethe, then I can sub select that aspect of my trained data.

And I’m personifying an AI here already. The AI can circumscribe, isolate a portion of its training set, and say, okay I will use this subset of my training, and use the statistical values for what words follow what other words that Goethe wrote. And then you will get something in the style of Goethe out.

[00:19:29] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of astonishing that that works at all. That one word follows another in something which comes out as a sentence because, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried that experiment on your phone where you begin the predictive text. On my phone there’s there’s usually three words above the little typewriter, and it tries to say what the next word is based upon the previous word.

[00:19:49] James Dominy: It’s not called auto corrupt for nothing.

[00:19:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so you just click them at the end of that process, you have fantastic gibberish. It’s usually quite entertaining, and yet this system is able to, in some way just hijack that whole process and make it so that by the end the whole thing makes sense in isolation.

It is Goethe. It looks like Shakespeare, sounds like Shakespeare, could easily be Shakespeare. How is it predicting into the future such that by the end, the whole thing makes sense? Is there more processing going on than, okay, just the next word. Is it reading backwards?

[00:20:22] James Dominy: Yes absolutely. Again, not an expert on LLMs, but there is this thing called a Markov Model. Which is a much more linear chain. It’s used often for bioinformatics, for genome and predicting the most likely next amino acid or nucleic acid in a genomic or a proteomic sequence.

And so Markov Models are very simple. They have a depth and that is how much history they remember of what they’ve seen. So you point a Markov Model at the beginning of the sequence of letters of nucleic, the ACGT’s. And then you want to say, okay, I’ve managed to sequence this off my organism. I’ve got a hundred bases and I want to know what the most likely one after that is, because that’s where it got cut off.

You give it a hundred, maybe you have a buffer of 10. So it remembers the last ten. It sort of slides this window of visibility over the whole sequence and mathematically starts working out, you know, what comes after an A? Okay, 30% of the time it’s a C. 50% of the time it’s a G. And by the end of it, it can with reasonable accuracy to some value of how much information you’ve given it, predict okay, in this particular portion of 10 that I’ve seen, the next one should be T.

And they get better as you give them more and more information. As you give them a bigger and bigger window. As you let them consume more and more memory whilst they’re doing their job, their accuracy increases.

I imagine the same is true of large language models, because they do. They don’t just predict the next word, they operate on phrases, on whole sentences. At some point, maybe they already do, but I imagine they operate on whole paragraphs. And again, it depends on what you’re trying to produce. Like if you’re trying to produce a legal contract that’s got a fairly prescribed grammar and form to it. And you know, then like statistically you’re going to produce the same paragraph over and over again because you want the same effect out of contracts you do all the time.

[00:22:22] Nathan Wrigley: You described this slider. That really got to the nub of it. I genuinely didn’t realize that it wasn’t doing any more than just predicting the next word. And because that’s the way I thought about it, I thought it was literally astonishing that it could throw together a sentence based upon just the next word, if it didn’t know what two words previously it had written.

It’s back to my predictive text, which produces pure gobbledygook. But it still, occasionally, it goes down a blind alley, doesn’t it? Because although that is, presumably 99 times out of a hundred that will lead to a cogent sentence, which is readable. Occasionally it does this thing, which I think has got the name hallucinate, where it just gets slightly derailed and goes off in a different direction. And so produces something which is, I don’t know, inaccurate, just nonsense.

[00:23:06] James Dominy: Yes. Well known for being confidently wrong for sure. I’ve experienced something similar, and I find that it is especially the case where you switch contexts. Like when you are asking it to do more than one thing at a time, and you make a change to the first thing that you expect to carry over into the context of the second task, and it just doesn’t. It gets confused.

And then the two things, this is especially true in coding, where you ask it to produce one piece of code and a function here, and another piece of code and a function on the other side. And you expect them, those two functions to interoperate correctly. Which means that you have to get the convention, the interface between those two things, the same on both sides.

But if you say, actually, I want this to be called Bob, that doesn’t necessarily translate. Again, I suppose this is my intuition. There are a lot of ways that that failure can happen. The most obvious one is that you’re doing too much and it’s run out of tokens.

Tokens are sort of an abstraction. Sorry I used that word a lot. Computer scientist. Tokens are, they’re not strictly speaking individual words, but they are a rough approximation of a unit of knowledge, context. I don’t know what the right word here. They chose token, right? So, if you use the API for ChatGPT, one of the things that you pass is how many tokens is the call allowed to use?

Because you are charged by tokens. And if you say only 30 tokens, you get worse answers than if you give it an allowance of a hundred tokens. Meaning that you might have given it a problem that exceeds the window that I was describing earlier. That sort of backtrack of context that it’s allowed to use.

Or you give it to two contexts and together they just go over and then it’s confused because it doesn’t know which, again, I say this as a semi-educated guess. We as humans don’t have a good definition of what context means in this conversation. How do we expect a computer system to?

[00:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: Just as you’ve been talking, in my head, I’ve come up with this analogy of what I now think AI represents to me, and it represents essentially a very, very clever baby. There’s this child crawling around on the ground, I really do mean an infant who you fully forgive for knocking everything over and, tipping things over, damaging things and what have you. And yet this child can speak. So on the one hand, it can talk to you, but it’s just making utterly horrific mistakes because it’s a baby and you forgive it for that. So I don’t know how that sits, but that’s what’s it landed in my head.

[00:25:40] James Dominy: I wouldn’t say that AI is in its infancy anymore, but it’s probably in its toddler year, and maybe we need to watch out when it turns two.

[00:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: So we’ve, done the sort of high level what is AI and all of that. That’s fascinating. But given that this is a WordPress event and it’s a WordPress podcast, let’s bind some of this stuff to the product itself. So WordPress largely is a content creation platform. You open it up, you make a post, you make a page, and typically into that goes text, sometimes images, sometimes video, possibly some other file formats. But let’s stick with the model of text and images. Why do we want, or how could we put AI into WordPress? What are the things that might be desirable in a WordPress site that AI could assist us with?

[00:26:21] James Dominy: I am totally going to be stealing some ideas from the AI content creation things that have happened this morning. I mean, there’s the obvious answer. I need to generate a thousand words for my editor by 4:00 PM today. Hey, ChatGPT, can you generate a thousand words on topic, blah?

I think there are a lot of other places. I’d be super surprised if this hasn’t actually happened already. But, hey ChatGPT, write me an article that gets me to the top five Google ranking.

The other obvious place for me as a software developer is using it to develop code. Humans are inventive. We’re going to see a lot of uses for AI that we never thought of. That’s not a bad thing at all. The more ways that we can use AI, I think the better.

Yes, there are questions about the dangers, and I’m sure that’s a question coming up later on, so I won’t dive into them now, but in the WordPress community, there’s content creation, but there’s also content moderation, where AI can probably help a lot. Analyze this piece of text to me and tell me is it spam? Does it contain harmful or hateful content?

Again, it’s a case of you get what you give. There’s that story about Microsoft, I think it was Microsoft, and the chatbot that turned into a horrible Nazi racist within about two hours, having been trained on Twitter data. We need to be careful about that, certainly. I’m struggling to think of things beyond the obvious.

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I think probably it is going to be the obvious, isn’t it? Largely, people are popping in text and so having something which will allow you within the interface, whether you are in a page builder or whether you’re using the Gutenberg editor, the ability to interrupt that flow and say, okay, I’ve written enough now, ChatGPT, take over. Give me the next 300 words please. Or just read what I’ve written and can you just finish this? I’m almost there.

[00:28:11] James Dominy: Yeah, we are doing it already, even if it’s a sort of fairly primitive flow now where we write some stuff in our block editor, copy it up, pop it in ChatGPT or Bard or whatever, and say, hey, this is too formal. Or this is not formal enough. And it’s really great at that. Make this sound more businessy. And it understands the word businessy. The tool integration, it’s obvious in a lot of ways, but I think there are going to be a lot of non-obvious integrations. Like, oh wow, I wish I thought of that, and, you know, made my millions off that product. I mean, Jetpack is doing it already, you know. I am able to actively engage with ChatGPT whilst I’m editing my blog post. Fantastic.

Another thing that I’ve just thought of is oh, I run a WooCommerce site and I want to use, not necessarily ChatGPT, but some other AI system to analyze product sales and use that to promote, to change the listing on my product site, so that I can sell more product. That’s going to happen.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, given that it’s incredibly good at consuming data.

[00:29:13] James Dominy: Yeah, or even generating it on the fly. Generate 300 different descriptions of this product and randomize them. Put them out there and see which one sells best. We are doing that manually already. It’s AB testing at a larger scale.

[00:29:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You can imagine a situation where the AI runs the split test, but it’s divided over 300 variations. And it decides for itself which is the winner.

[00:29:39] James Dominy: On a day-to-day basis.

[00:29:40] Nathan Wrigley: On an hourly basis. Implements the winner and then begins the whole process over and over again. I also wonder if in WordPress there is going to be AI to help lay out things. So at the moment we have the block editor. It enables you to create fairly complex layouts. We also have page builders, which allow us to do the same thing. So it alludes to what I was speaking about a moment ago.

Talking, so literally talking, as well as typing in. I would like a homepage. I would like that homepage to show off my plumbing business, and here’s my telephone number. I’d like to have a picture of me, or somebody doing some plumbing, some additional content down there. You get the picture?

[00:30:17] James Dominy: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: A few little prompts, and rather than spitting out text or an image, whole layouts come out. And we can pick from 300 different layouts. I’ll go for that one, but now make the buttons red. The AI takes over the design process in a way.

[00:30:32] James Dominy: Yeah. I’m going to confess here that I’m absolutely stealing this opinion from the AI panel earlier. I think the danger for WordPress specifically there, is that that level of automation for us with human engagement and, you know, developing something through conversation with an AI, might actually skip WordPress entirely. Why must the AI choose WordPress to do this?

Maybe if we as a WordPress community invest in making WordPress AI integrated, then yeah, absolutely. Then hopefully we’re first to market with that in a way. And then it will generate stuff in WordPress. But there’s no, there’s no reason for it to maybe choose a Wix page as a better solution for you as a plumber, who doesn’t update things very often. You just want a static, you know.

Chances are it’ll just say, here is some HTML it does the job for you, it’s pretty. I made some images for you as well. And, all you need to do is run the sequence of commands to, SSH it up to provider of your choice. Or I have selected this provider because I know how much they all charge and this is the cheapest. Or you’ve asked for the fastest, whatever.

[00:31:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting, okay. So it’s not just bound inside the WordPress interface. Literally, put this in the cheapest place as of today. And then if it changes in the next 24 hours, just move it over there and change the DNS for me and.

[00:31:53] James Dominy: One day. For sure. Yeah.

[00:31:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that very nicely ties into the harms.

[00:31:58] James Dominy: There it is.

[00:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: What we’ve just laid out is potentially quite harmful to a lot of the jobs that people do inside of WordPress. We’ve just described a workflow in which many of the things that we would charge clients for, which we could potentially get AI to do. Whether that’s a voice interface or a visual interface or a type, we’re typing in.

So that is concerning, if we are giving AI the option to put us out of work. And I know at the moment, this is the hot topic. I’m pretty sure that there’s some fairly large organizations who have begun this process already. They’ve taken some staff who are doing jobs which can be swapped out for AI, and they’ve shed those staff.

And whilst we’re in the beginning phase of that, it seems like we can swallow so much of people getting laid off. The problem, potentially is, if we keep laying people off over and over and over again and we give everything over to the AI, we suddenly are in a position where, well, there’s no humans in this whole process anymore. Does any of that give you pause for thought?

[00:32:53] James Dominy: Yeah, it certainly does. I think we should temper our expectations of the capabilities of AI. So there’s a technical term called a terminal goal. The delineation between specific artificial intelligences and machine learning, in that world, and the concept of the general artificial intelligences, which is what everyone thinks of when they think of the I in artificial intelligence, is an AI that is capable of forming its own terminal goals.

Its own, don’t get me wrong, like we have AIs that are capable of forming what are called intermediate nodes. If you tell an AI of a particular type to go and do a particular thing, then it is capable of forming intermediate steps. In order to do the thing you’ve told me, I need to first do this, which requires me to do that. And, you know, it forms a chain of goals, but none of those goals are emergent from the AI. They are towards a goal we have given the AI externally.

That ability to form a goal internally is the concept of a terminal goal. And we don’t have, large language models don’t have terminal goals. Large language models, stable diffusion, all of the different algorithms that are hot topics today, are all couched within the idea of solving a problem given to them as an input.

Which means there’s always going to need to be a human. At least with what we’ve got now. No matter how good these models get, how much brain power we give them. And this maybe is going against what I said earlier of like, I think it’s probably a quantity thing.

Maybe there’s a tipping point. Maybe there’s a tipping point where the intermediate goal that it forms is indistinguishable from a terminal goal in a human brain. But for the moment, I think there always needs to be a human there to give the AI the task to solve. Open AI isn’t just running servers randomly just doing stuff. It spends its computational time answering users prompts and questions.

[00:34:48] Nathan Wrigley: So if we pursue artificial intelligence research, and the end goal is to create an AGI, then presumably at some point we’ve got something which is indistinguishable from a human because it can set its own goals.

[00:35:02] James Dominy: The cyberpunk dystopia, right?

[00:35:03] Nathan Wrigley: But we’re not there yet. This is a ways off, my understanding at least anyway. But in the more short term, let’s bind it to the loss of jobs.

[00:35:11] James Dominy: In my workshop this morning, I think the primary point that I wanted to get across is, if you are currently in the WordPress community, employed and or making an income out of WordPress. ChatGPT, Bard, generative AI, large language models are a tool that you should be learning to use. They’re not going to replace you.

Maybe that’s less true on the content generation side, because large language models are particularly good at that. But there’s a flip side to that because on the software development side, programming languages have very strict grammars, which means the statistical model is particularly good at producing output for programming languages.

It’s not good at handling the large amounts of complexity that can exist in large pieces of code. But equally so, I mean, if you ask it to give you a hundred items of things to do in Athens, whilst I’m totally, totally, working hard at a conference, uh, then you are probably going to get repeats. You might run into the confusion problem, the hallucination issue at some point there, where just a hundred is too much.

Nobody has ever written an article of a hundred things to do in Athens in a day. I don’t know, I haven’t tried that. I’m guessing that there are going to be limitations. So some jobs are more in threat than others, but I think that if you’re already in the industry, or in the community and working with it, go with it and, absorb the tools into your day-to-day flow.

It’s going to make you better at what you do. Faster at what you do. Hopefully able to make more money. Hopefully able to communicate with more people, translations et cetera. Make your blog multilingual. There are a lot of things that you can use it for that aren’t immediately coming after your job.

The problem for me, and this again is the point that I was trying to get across in the workshop, the problem is the next generation. The people who are getting into WordPress today and tomorrow, and in six months time. Who are coming into a world where AI is already in such usage that it’s solving the simple problems. And the same as true, my editor wants 200 words or whatever on fun things to do in Athens overnight.

Okay, great. ChatGPT can do that for the editor. Why does he need a junior content writer anymore? But the problem is, I mean, we’ve already said, sometimes it’s spectacularly wrong. Does that editor always have the time to actually vet the output? Probably not. And so the job of that junior is going to transform into, they need to be a subeditor. They need to be a content moderator almost, rather than a content generator.

But that’s a skill that only comes from having written the content yourself. We learn by making mistakes, and if we are not making those mistakes because AI is generating the stuff, and either not making mistakes or making mistakes that we haven’t made before ourselves, and thus don’t recognize his mistakes. So my fear of the job losses aspect of AI is not that it’s going to wipe out people who are working already. It’s going to make that barrier to entry for the next generation, it’s knocking the bottom rung out of the ladder.

And unless we change the ways that we teach people as they are entering the community, the WordPress community, the industry, and all the industries which AI is going to affect, the basics, and we focus on it. You know, it’s a catch 22. We have to teach people to do stuff without AI, so they can learn the basics. But at the same time, they also have to learn how to use AI so they can do the basics in the modern world.

And I mean, we get back to that old debate like, why am I learning trigonometry in school? Because maybe someday it actually helps you do your job. Admittedly, so far, not so much. But I will say this. History, I did history in school. That has surprisingly turned out to be one of the most useful subjects I ever did, just because it taught me how to write. Which I didn’t learn in English class. Go figure.

[00:39:17] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like you are quite sanguine for now. If you are in the space and listening to this podcast now, everything is fine right now.

[00:39:26] James Dominy: Yeah.

[00:39:27] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe less sanguine for the future. Given that, do you think that AI more broadly needs to be corralled. There need to be guardrails put in place. There needs to be legislation. I don’t know how any of that works, but manufacturers of AI being put under the auspices of, well it would have to be governments, I guess. But some kind of system of checks and balances to make sure that it’s not, I don’t know, deliberately producing fakes. Or that the fakes are getting, the hallucinations are getting minimized. That it’s not doing things that aren’t in humanity’s best interests.

[00:39:59] James Dominy: Absolutely. Yes. Although I’m not sure how we could do a good job of it, to be fair. The whole concept of, we want AIs to operate in humanity’s best interests. Who decides? The alignment problem crops up here where, it’s well known that we can train an AI to do something we think that it’s going to do, and it seems to be doing that thing until suddenly it doesn’t.

And we just get some weird output. And then when we go digging, we realize actually it was trying to solve an entirely different problem to what we thought we were training it on, that just happened to have a huge amount of overlap with the thing that we did. But when we get to those edge cases, it goes off in what we think is a wildly wrong direction. But it is solving the problem that it was trained to solve. We just didn’t know we were training it to solve that problem.

As far as regulation goes. Yes, I think regulation, it’s coming. I really want to say nobody could be stupid enough to put weapons in the hands of an AI. The human race has proved me wrong several thousand times already in history. Yeesh, I personally think that that’s an incredibly stupid idea. But then the problem becomes what’s a weapon?

Because a weapon these days can be something as subtle as enough ability to control trading, high frequency trading. Accidentally crash a stock market. It’s already happened. Accidentally, and again, I’m air quoting the accidentally here, accidentally crash your competitor’s stock, or another nation’s stock market. AI is there, is being used as a validly useful tool to participate in the economy, but the economy can be used as a weapon.

Putting AI in control of the water infrastructure in arid countries. Optimization, it can do those jobs a lot better. It can see almost instantaneously when there’s a pressure drop. So there’s a leak in this section of the pipe. Somebody needs to go fix it. And also it can just shut off the water to an entire section of the city because, I don’t know, it feels like it. Because for some reason it is optimizing for a different goal than we actually think we gave it.

The trick is we can say, we can input into ChatGPT, I want you to provide water to the entire city in a fair and equitable way. That doesn’t mean that’s what it’s going to do. We just think that that’s what it’s going to do. We hope.

[00:42:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think we kind of come back to where we started. If we had a crystal ball, and we could stare five, two years, three years, 10 years into the future. That feels like it would be a really great thing to have at the moment. There’s obviously going to be benefits. It’s going to make work certainly more productive. It’s going to make us be able to produce more things. But as you’ve just talked over the last 20 minutes or so, there’s also points of concern and things to be ironed out in the near term.

[00:42:52] James Dominy: Absolutely, yeah.

[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: We’re fast running out of time, so I think we’ll wrap it up if that’s all right? A quick one James, if somebody is interested, you’ve planted the seed of interest about AI and they want to get in touch with you and natter about this some more, where would they do that?

[00:43:06] James Dominy: The best way is probably email. I am not a social person in the social media sense. I don’t have Twitter. I don’t do any of that. So I’m probably terrible for this when I think about it. My email is, J for Juliet, G for golf, my surname D O M for mother, I, N for November, Y for yankee at gmail.com. Please don’t spam. Please don’t get AI to spam me.

[00:43:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. James Dominy, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:43:34] James Dominy: Thank you for the opportunity. It’s been great fun, and I’ve really enjoyed being able to kind of deep dive into a lot of the stuff I just had to gloss over in the workshop. Thank you.

On the podcast today we have James Dominy.

James is a computer scientist with a masters degree in bioinformatics. He lives in Ireland, working at the WPEngine Limerick office.

This is the second podcast recorded at WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens. James gave a talk at the event about the influence of AI on the WordPress community, and how itâ€™s going to disrupt so many of the roles which WordPressers currently occupy.

We talk about the recent rise of ChatGPT and the fact that itâ€™s made AI available to almost anyone. In less than twelve months many of us have gone from never touching AI technologies to using them on a daily basis to speed up some aspect of our work.

The discussion moves on to the rate at which AI systems might evolve, and whether or not theyâ€™re truly intelligent, or just a suite of technologies which masquerade as intelligent. Are they merely good at predicting the next word or phrase in any given sentence? Is there a scenario in which we can expect our machines to stop simply regurgitating text and images based upon what theyâ€™ve consumed; a future in which they can set their own agendas and learn based upon their own goals?

This gets into the subject of whether or not AI is in any meaningful way innately intelligent, or just good at making us think that it is, and whether or not the famous Turing test is a worthwhile measure of the abilities of an AI.

Jamesâ€™ background in biochemistry comes in handy as we turn our attention to whether or not thereâ€™s something unique about the brains we all possess, or if intelligence is merely a matter of the amount of compute power that an AI can consume. Itâ€™s more or less certain that given time, machines will be more capable than they are now, so when, if ever, does the intelligence Rubicon get crossed?

The current AI systems can be broadly classified as Large Language Models, or LLMs for short, and James explains what these are and how they work. How can they create a sentence word by word if they donâ€™t have an understanding of where each sentence is going to end up? James explains that LLMs are a little more complex than just handling one word at a time, always moving backwards and forwards within their predictions to ensure that theyâ€™re creating content which makes sense, even if itâ€™s not always factually accurate.

We then move on from the conceptual understanding of AI to more concrete ways it can be implemented. What ways can WordPress users implement AI right now, and what innovations might we reasonably expect to be available in the future? Will we be able to get AI to make intelligent decisions about our websiteâ€™s SEO or design, and therefore be able to focus our time on other, more pressing, matters?

Itâ€™s a fascinating conversation whether or not youâ€™ve used AI tools in the past.

Useful links.

ChatGPT

Stable Diffusion

Markov Model

28.06.2023
#80 â€“ Angela Jin on How and Why WordCamps Might Change in the Future

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and did this case, how and why WordCamps might change in the future?

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox. And use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Angela Jin. It’s the first of six episodes recorded at WordCamp Europe, 2023 in Athens, Greece.

Angela is the head of programs and contributor experience at Automattic, where she oversees the work of multiple teams dedicated to the WordPress open source project. These are the community events and engagement, education, and marketing teams. Her passion lies in building strong, inclusive communities.

Several weeks ago, Angela wrote a blog post entitled The Next Generation of WordCamps. It laid out how WordCamps have been run for many years, as well as trying to begin a conversation about how they might look in the future.

During the pandemic, online events filled the gap left by in-person gatherings, but they didn’t fully replace the experience. As restrictions eased in person WordCamps made a comeback. In 2022 there were around 35 events, with only one being held online. In 2023 there have been 20 events so far, and more a planned for the rest of the year.

Angela talks about how she’s perceived a growing need for experimentation in the format of WordCamps. Currently, most WordCamps follow a tried and tested formula, with contributor days, multiple speaker presentations, the hallway track and sponsorship opportunities.

She wanted to understand the purpose of gathering people together and what they gain from these events. To gather insights Angela had conversations with organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees within the WordPress community. She also sought out input from experts outside the community, such as the community manager focused group CMX.

The feedback confirmed to Angela that events are essential for communities, but also that there are many event formats being used elsewhere. She explains that there is an opportunity to add more variety to WordPress event formats, and explore the connections and opportunities they create.

We discuss some ways that WordCamps might evolve by having events focused on a particular area such as SEO, or a particular demographic such as students. We also get into how these amendments might be rolled out to ensure that interested groups and geographic locals don’t miss out.

We also chat about how sponsorship plays into these changes and how funding for WordPress events might be allocated in the future.

Angela points out that there’s no specific format which has been proposed. Rather, this is a process of trying things out and seeing what works and what does not. The goal is to say yes to new event ideas and foster, a culture of innovation within WordPress events.

If you’re curious about how WordPress events might change in the future, this podcast is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Angela Jin.

I am joined on the podcast by Angela Gin. Hello, Angela.

[00:04:45] Angela Jin: Hello. How are you doing?

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Really, really good. Thank you for joining me. We are at WordCamp Europe. Angela is going to talk to us today about, well, remarkably WordCamps and possibly the future of WordCamps. Prior to that conversation, Angela, would you mind just spending a minute just telling us who you are, who you work for, what your relationship is with WordPress?

[00:05:04] Angela Jin: So yes, my name is Angela Gin and I am with Automattic, where I am head of programs and contributor experience. I am full-time sponsored and so I get to work on the WordPress open source project for everything, which is fantastic.

[00:05:19] Nathan Wrigley: So we are at WordCamp Europe. Let’s just deal with that bit first, because I was just saying to somebody, I actually think of all the WordCamps I’ve ever attended, this feels like a really, truly remarkable event. I don’t know if it’s just the configuration of the building, or how people are squeezed in by the corridors and things, but it does seem to be hugely attended.

[00:05:40] Angela Jin: It is. The attendance numbers that they showed at opening remarks this morning here, that they, what it was like 2,800 people, something like that. Over that, which is really exciting.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: So WordCamps are still popular? We might get into a conversation about whether there’s an ebb and flow to that. But big events like this are still a big part of people’s calendars.

[00:06:01] Angela Jin: For everybody here, certainly so. It is buzzing with activity here.

[00:06:06] Nathan Wrigley: More broadly though, WordCamps and WordPress events, so we might use the word MeetUp for that, but I’ll just say WordPress events. Do they follow the trend of maintaining popularity? In the back of my mind when I ask that question is basically the pandemic. So pre pandemic everything was sailing along smoothly, and then we had this massive wall in the road. Everything stopped.

It felt like at that moment there was a bit of a change. The online events filled a gap, but they didn’t fill the entire gap. And then WordPress events came back online in various different formats. Where are we at now? Obviously this event is super well attended, but if we were to look at the whole of WordPress events, would that be the case, or are we still trying to rebuild a bit?

[00:06:54] Angela Jin: Yeah, I think we are definitely trying to rebuild, but I think that is true for everything, even not just events. So yes, prior to the pandemic we were smooth sailing. We were very active WordCamps around the world. And yeah, during the pandemic it was, we needed to shift how we met.

So we met online and it was difficult. And so since 2021, we’ve started shifting into, I think we had one in-person WordCamp that year at the very, very end of the year. Last year in 2022, I believe we had around. 35 events total, and I think only one of them was online. And so clearly we are coming back, which is great. But we are nowhere near where we were prior to the pandemic. But I think that is, that’s very understandable. As we’re trying to get back into things.

So far this year we are at, I believe we have had, not including this event because we’re not quite all the way through yet. I think we’ve had 20 events, I want to say. And so we’re well ahead of where we were compared to last year. And we do still have quite a few events on the calendar through the end of the year.

So yeah, from a pure numbers of WordCamp perspective, I think we are trying our best to come back. From an attendance perspective, interestingly during when we had online events, our attendance rates far exceeded what we expected them to be. I think because it’s so easy to have an online event and then just show up for however much of it you want to show up for. And so, that’s an interesting attendance piece there. But attendance rates are pretty much in line with what we saw prior to the pandemic as well.

[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh really? As of now, so we’re recording this in June 2023. Broadly speaking, the numbers are similar to 2019, say.

[00:08:53] Angela Jin: So with fewer events, from a pure number of people’s perspective, fewer, but, the attendance rate for events, by which I mean expected attendance for events versus actual attendance. It’s always hovered around like 90 to 95% for events, and so we are, we’re holding study there, and also in the average number of attendees per event.

[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We’re going to reference a piece that you wrote on make.wordpress.org. It was written last month, it was May 8th, and it was called The Next Generation of WordCamps. I think this will probably dominate the rest of the conversation. And in that piece you laid out the possible groundwork, I’ll say possible, for a change to the way these WordPress events are done.

I could lead you with the questions, trying to tease out what’s in that article. I don’t know if you can remember all the details. But do you just want to run us broadly what you were saying in that?

[00:09:46] Angela Jin: Yeah, that was, it was quite a post to write and to put out there. But I’m really excited by it. So, what I set out to do there was to capture some of the needed updates to our events program that I’m seeing, that I think we might need to have in our events program.

The way this came about was pretty interesting because I think prior to the pandemic we were starting to see some people want more out of their WordCamps. And I think that makes a lot of sense. This format that we have has been the staple since 2006. And what’s really changed is how many events that we have, and the scale of them, and the size, and how many people are able to attend.

However, even prior to the pandemic, we were starting to hear from people that they wanted more variety in their content. They wanted advanced topics. They really wanted to be able to have more workshops to learn things that they were able to take back to their everyday lives. And that, coupled with all of the changes with the pandemic, at this point in WordPress events, I really started thinking about how the way that we meet has shifted dramatically. And after 20 years, of course, like that makes a lot of sense.

And so, I am very much a community manager at heart, and so when I think about gathering people together, I really think about what is the purpose of gathering people together. When we ask people to come join us in this space, why? Like what are they getting out of it? What draws them here? What makes the best use of their time and attention?

And so that prompted a whole discovery session where, it was hard to write about at that time, because I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting myself into. I started really asking a bunch of people in the community, organizers, sponsors, speakers, first time attendees, experienced attendees. And I think everybody really loves this community. Like that is a resounding sentiment that I hear all the time.

And at the same time we want more out of our events, and we want some more specific things. And it was very similar to what I was seeing before the pandemic as well. And so there was a lot of, within the WordPress community, confirmation that this seemed like something needed to be updated.

[00:12:15] Nathan Wrigley: So, where did the information that people wanted this come from? Did you do surveys? Were you just polling in places like Slack? Where did the feedback that updates needed to be done, where did that tend to come from?

[00:12:28] Angela Jin: Yeah, for sure. So it did start with a lot of conversations within the community, with organisers, speakers, sponsors. And the community team is very fortunate to have this excellent community deputy group. They’re all past organizers, and are very experienced with the make community team. So they’re very familiar with our program.

And so I started there. And then I also went outside of the WordPress community to chat with a number of event organizers, like event experts, people who do events for a living. To see what sort of trends that they were seeing as well. And one group that I really like to look to is CMX. It’s a community for community managers. And they, every year they put out an excellent report. They pole well over 400 community professionals from around the world.

And they confirmed that events are a staple for communities, and of course, no surprise there. And that it was both in-person and online events. And some of the report findings there, they were seeing where certain types of events were filling certain needs.

So I think, education is a really good one. So like trainings that we’re providing to our community, those are, really popular in both online and in person formats. And I think Learn WordPress has done a great job in continuing, like I think that helps me confirm what CMX expressed in their report, because we do have these great online workshops that happen all the time. They’re really well attended.

At the same time, trainings also work really well in person, according to the CMX report. And in-person events, it’s really good for one-on-one connection. Things like this when we’re looking at each other, having a conversation. And so, like different formats fill different spaces. And I think we are really missing an opportunity to add more variety into our event formats, and see what sort of connections that creates. What sort of opportunities that unlocks.

[00:14:33] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll get onto the new possible formats, and you’ve thrown out a whole bunch of different things that we might do. I’ve got a question around sponsorship. I don’t really know what the sponsorship picture is. I confess, I don’t. explore that data. I don’t try to find it. So, I don’t know what the state of sponsorships are. But how does that feed into this?

Are you changing things? Has there been in the back of your mind changing things in order to attract sponsors? Has there been a, an up swell in the same way that you described just now that the community are coming back, there’s more people attending. Have the sponsorships come back? Because my understanding anecdotally, at least anyway, is there was a period a little while ago where the sponsorship felt a bit sketchy for a while. It wasn’t quite getting where it ought to be.

[00:15:13] Angela Jin: Yeah, I think there’s a number of things there. As we all know, companies are very financially aware right now, and at the same time cost are extremely high. And so I think we are definitely feeling that pressure of really justifying the value of these events to sponsors and also being able to afford venues, for example. Venues are one of our, they are the highest cost right now. And then when you add on food, after party, AV, those expenses are very high right now.

And so yeah, the amount of sponsorship that we want to raise is higher, and at a time where the economy is struggling, that’s a difficult thing. However, we are doing, we are doing well overall. I think, as you can tell from the sponsor activity downstairs, it seems to be doing really well.

We raised enough for the global sponsors that we aim to raise, and we also just added another global sponsor. So overall we are doing well and I think it’s really wonderful that WordPress community support has always been very budget conscious. We work closely with organizers to make sure that we are as responsible and as aware of what we’re spending money on as possible.

With new events, I think it’s a really interesting thing for sponsorship, and I have spoken with, before I posted that post, I did speak with our global sponsors because I didn’t want them to be surprised by this change, given that they fund all of our events for the full year.

They were excited by it overall. They were seeing the same trends that I was seeing, and I was very clear that this is an experiment, and we’re going to, we’re going to encourage the community to try things out and see what happens. And that I really wanted to hear from them what sort of sponsor benefits they saw, they would like, and that we would have that conversation. Yeah, I think that’s largely what I’m seeing from our sponsors. They’re really curious to see what comes of this, and they’re excited as well.

[00:17:15] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder, does an event like WordCamp EU , which is truly on a very different scale from let’s say a local meetup or something like that, or a much more regional WordCamp. It feels as if sponsors and all of that would be falling over themselves to come here, because they can capture a truly enormous audience of interested people.

But I wonder what the trickle down of that is. In other words, if we were to have the same conversation, but we weren’t sitting in WordCamp Europe and we were sitting in a much smaller event. How does the sponsorship work there? Are we still in a strong position to put on local WordCamps with the model that we’ve got and, Meetups, regional WordCamps, all of that kind of thing?

Because it feels like WordCamp Europe, that would almost be the last thing to fail. The sponsors would be desperate to get here. How is it looking for the smaller events, the ones in, I don’t know, capital cities or the ones in regional cities throughout the world?

[00:18:14] Angela Jin: It is different, given the scale of WordCamp Europe. Overall our events large and small, have, they’ve been able to raise a good amount of money locally. We do augment that with global sponsorship. That’s what the global sponsor fund is there for. And so yeah, we do our best to, the priority of WordCamps is the attendees. And so we really want our organizers to be able to focus on creating the best experience for WordCampers, as opposed to spending so much time raising money. Because fundraising is challenging. I’ve done plenty of it myself and it is hard work.

[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a list of WordCamps which in an ideal world, these ones would be put on? In other words, I’ve got a list of 800, here’s the top 10 that we must make happen. Here’s a further a hundred, which we’d love to happen. And sadly there’s a few down here which might not make the cut. I don’t know how that decision tree looks.

[00:19:11] Angela Jin: Oh, it’s very much up to the community. Any organizer that wants to have a WordPress event, the community team wants to support them in having that. That is very much what the community team is there for.

And so I think one of, bringing this back to Next Gen events, one of the things that I was seeing that I think a lot of community members are seeing, from organizers, is that they have interest in doing something that’s a slightly different format from the WordCamps that we know and love.

But they feel like they can’t do that because it’s not a WordCamp. And I think we should be saying yes to those. We should be encouraging all those, all those really creative ideas for how to connect and engage with each other, not do them for sake of doing what we know and love.

[00:20:00] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s always true that things have to evolve. That much is clear. So let’s get into that. You just called it, them, Next Gen events. Whether or not that’s the word we end up using, I don’t know, but for now, let’s go with that. What are some of the things that you are proposing could be a Next Gen event? How do they differ?

So, a WordCamp at the moment, at least the ones that I’ve been to, is several days. You show up, there’s often several tracks. There’s a whole range of different topics on offer. There’s usually a hallway track where people engage. There’s an after party, all of those kind of things. So that’s how we know it at the moment. What are you thinking of doing to change that?

[00:20:39] Angela Jin: Yeah, I really am curious to see what people come up with. What I propose there was a really, I consider it more of a evolution as opposed to a change. We’re not doing away with any of the WordCamps that are currently on the calendar, that want to come and organize. What we are doing is encouraging community members to express what sort of events they want to see. And so a few that, I think I had included in that post, were things like, focused on contribution.

They were focused on all day workshops that really help people learn specific skills. One thing that I’ve heard over and over is that people want to learn advanced skills. Advanced WordPress development, design, content creation, things like that. And so we could really do a lot with that.

One interesting format, it was described to me as a shark tank, but nice. We’re a very, I know, I love that. We’re a very entrepreneurial community and if we’re going to help everybody really succeed in that, then we need to give them some place to come and explore their ideas. Learn from each other around what it really takes to make all of that happen.

Yeah, coming to an event, sharing a pitch, and getting feedback from people who have been there before, who are able to help them refine and strengthen their ideas and then make connections to make those happen. That’s pretty exciting.

[00:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to quote directly from your piece because I think it perfectly sums up what you’d hope. What you are looking for in the future. So this is not a cast iron set of things which are going to happen. These are just some possible suggestions, and it says, so I quote, the hope is that a period of innovation and experimentation will follow this critical shift in the purpose of our rents with the following outcomes.

Events curated for clearly defined audiences, resulting in a clearer idea of what attendees will gain from participating. For example, events for students, for designers, for contributors. So that’s point 1. Point 2, a more precise focus around event content types or topics. This will also help further clarify who the event is for. For example, maybe an event on AI and WordPress, user experience enterprise, et cetera. That’s point 2. And point 3, a variety of event formats that are freshly exciting and engaging for attendees. For example, workshops, unconference, job fairs, pure networking, et cetera.

So there’s the three points, and each of those, if I attended an event like one of those, it would be radically different to something that we’re attending now. So let’s just take those piece by piece. This idea of defined audiences. So you mentioned here, for example, students, designers, contributors. That’s an idea, it may have legs, it may not. You’re trying to figure that out.

Is the intention there then to literally put an event up where it’s advertised toward students primarily, or to designers primarily. So people seeing that, who are not students, or not designers would feel, do you know what, that’s maybe one I’ll hold back on. I’ll look for a different one at a different point. Is that the idea of that one?

[00:23:51] Angela Jin: Yes, kind of. The point is definitely not to, I don’t want to exclude anybody from any of these events. However, I do think that, where we are in a world where finances are tightened, and it is expensive to commit to the time and to commit to the travel to an event, that people want to know what they are going to get out of it.

And by clearly articulating who this event is really designed for, we can provide an event that really delivers that kind of content. I was recently at Open Source 101, was held at a community college, and the mix there was very clearly students. Or people who were looking to change jobs into open source. And they were very clear from the beginning that this was,

I mean, it’s in the name Open Source 101. This is introductory content for anyone who wants to learn about open source. It’s really broad, but at the same time, very clear about what you’re going to get by participating in this event.

[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: I guess because WordPress events have largely tried to scoop everybody up in the past. You know, if you’ve got in any way a connection to WordPress, you could attend this event. But I suppose I wouldn’t really be attending an event about, oh, I don’t know, let’s pluck some subject out of the top of my head. Cisco networking. It’s in the technology space. I’m not interested in it. I’d far rather attend a WordPress event. So what you’re really trying to do is subdivide what we’ve already got into maybe something that you would be just slightly more interested in, because it’s more directly related to what your business does or what you’re interested in.

[00:25:30] Angela Jin: Yes, and I do think that there is a space where we are undeniably multidisciplinary. It does not serve us well to just have events where we only have developers meet in one location and community builders meet in another location. And yeah, there are many developers who are also community builders. I’m just pulling those two groups as examples. And so yeah, I would also love to see events where we do celebrate that multidisciplinary community, and bring all of them together because, amazing connections and ideas come from that.

And so I’m not trying to segment the community into all these events, but to increase the variety in events and to help people understand what they’re going to get by participating in one or the other. And I think that for many WordPressers, they would benefit from an event that is specialized for them, with content where they are going to learn more than what they currently know and further their career, further their skills, further their interests. And to participate in another event where they can focus on learning more about something that they touch in their life, but don’t necessarily know a ton about.

[00:26:47] Nathan Wrigley: The third bullet point that I just talked about there was event formats. And you mentioned workshops. I’m quite familiar with that. We have those at WordCamps, so it’s more, instead of being presented at, from a stage, that’s more, okay, let’s all try the things together. You bring your laptop and we’ll all try to figure out the same problem at the same time. But there are some other ones in there that are really new to me. So an unconference. What is that?

[00:27:12] Angela Jin: I think it’s also referred to as like birds of a feather. I think it has its roots in the tech community where we basically just get a bunch of people together in a room, around one topic, and the attendees really drive the agenda.

They suggest a topic around what everybody is brought here for. And then people will vote with their feet and go to those discussions to talk about them. And so the conversation is very, very attendee driven and very organic. There’s no one speaker. Sometimes there is, whoever proposes the topic can be the facilitator, but that’s not a requirement.

[00:27:50] Nathan Wrigley: I think the other ones we probably understand a little bit more as well. So we’ve just mentioned workshops, unconferences, job fairs, and pure networking. They probably speak for themselves. So I’ll leave those to one side.

Is there a danger that one of the consequences of trying this out is that we will end up with events which are more specific? That therefore would attract a more specific audience? At the moment, if you wander downstairs into the hall, there’s just this broad church of people from all over the world with different backgrounds.

You know, you’ve got the SEO people, the marketing people, the coders. You name it, they’re there. And because of that, you get this serendipitous collision of people meeting in the hallway track. Unexpected connections are made. Unexpected partnerships are forged, and all of that. Is there a danger that we may lose a part of that? And that’s an unquantifiable part because nobody’s really writing up what connections they made. It just is what people talk about.

Is there a danger that that may be lost, because we’ve just got a bunch of SEO people in the room, or we’ve just got a bunch of AI people in the room

[00:28:55] Angela Jin: I understand that worry, and I see where the post might make that feel more like a reality. But I can never imagine a WordPress community that would ever let that go. I want to encourage that as well because I love it. One of the concerns that came, that I’m hearing after this post, is are we going to lose that community led feel of our events?

And I do not want to. Like that is, that is our strength. We are community first. All of our events are very community first. And we have a number of values that come along with that that I truly feel are non-negotiable. Things like our ticket prices to attend WordCamps are very low.

We want to make them as accessible as possible. I don’t want to lose that. I want to be able to have everybody come to these events. And so things like diversity and inclusion and creating welcoming spaces, those are all non-negotiables. And so I really believe that we can take this experiment, this evolution, and make it community led.

And we do have a ton of businesses in WordPress, and I could see a more business focused event, where it is for agencies, for enterprise, because they are a part of this community. And I believe we can do those events as community led first.

[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: I guess there’s something about geography in here as well in that if, let’s say, you have a business event and it’s in Miami. Then Miami has had its business event. But Sydney didn’t. Brussels didn’t. So there’s got to be some new piece of the puzzle where, okay, we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got these new event types and we’ve got to spread them out evenly over time so that we don’t exclude Miami. They never get the SEO event, it never comes their way.

So there’s a whole other piece about, there’s more management to be done about the topics and whether a certain geographical area has had something recently, or if it’s been five years ago. Do you know what I mean?

[00:30:55] Angela Jin: Yeah. And in my mind, this goes to one of our open source philosophies that we create things because we’re scratching an itch. And so yeah, if Miami has an amazing contribution event and Brussels says we want one too, then let’s do it. Like I said, the community team it wants to encourage events, so let’s have it.

[00:31:19] Nathan Wrigley: With this change over happening, presumably there’s going to be a period where the events that we’re used to will carry on. So, I think you said a little while ago that if you’re already on the roster, if you’ve already put in a proposal and it’s been accepted, we are going to be staying with how it always has been. So it’s more from now on. You’re going to be encouraging people who haven’t yet submitted proposals. Is that true? Is that how it’s going to be rolled out?

[00:31:42] Angela Jin: Yeah, we want to support all organizers to know the latest and greatest in the program. And so yeah, as new organizers come, we will let them know about what the community is doing, and where we’re going, where we hope to go.

This is very much an experiment and it seems to be getting a lot of interest. We already have, I believe, over 60 idea submissions. We do have an idea submissions page, so if there is an event that you would like to see, please, please do go and share it with us. By sharing an idea, you are not committed to it.

But part of what we’re trying to do is to collect all of these great ideas and share them with everyone so that if something sparks interest in people, they can do it in their community. Or if they have an idea to add on top of that, let’s try it out. I’m really hoping that we learn from each other to see where this goes. It is an experiment. If we all decide that we don’t like it and it doesn’t work, then we can definitely go back to what we know and do really well.

[00:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve already anticipated one of my questions, which was do we have a reverse gear?

[00:32:48] Angela Jin: Yes.

[00:32:49] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of this being rolled out, if I have already submitted a proposal, we know where that’s going now. How though are we going to make the transition? Are we going to do it all at once? So we’re going to, let’s say two years from now, a new event and it’s about this one topic. Are we going to mix what we’ve got now? So say one day, just like it is at the minute, with another day of the new format, so that people can attend both at the same time and vote with their feet if you like?

And a poll afterwards to figure out, okay, everybody like the new format, let’s push forward with that. In other words, how are you going to manage the rollout? Is it going to be sudden? So a new event is a new type, or are you going to gently mix it in with the old ones?

[00:33:29] Angela Jin: I don’t know. I think it’s really going to be what the community would like to see. We are starting to see people, there’s a lot of excitement for this from what I can see. We already have organizers reaching out to the community team to host these events. We are also figuring out the tooling for it right now.

So, there’s another post about that, please go share your thoughts on that. But we do have some that are being scheduled. I believe there is one event that is, actually we talked about this, an event for organizers to, to help train other organisers.

[00:34:04] Nathan Wrigley: Like an event for an event?

[00:34:06] Angela Jin: Yes. I’m hearing about events that want to bring WordPress to communities that don’t necessarily have a strong WordPress community or any WordPress community at all. And see how bringing this technology to a different place, how it goes. And I’m also hearing events where we want to provide, new to WordPress, come to this day of workshops and learn how to use the site editor and learn how to, launch your own website.

[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: So new events will be more refined? At the moment if we attend an event, we can see, let’s say an event like this, we can probably see 30 different topics. We’re going to refine the events. Are there certain things which are outside of the remit of an entire event?

So, for example, SEO feels like a big enough subject for an entire WordCamp. There’s enough content there. But maybe there’s something a bit more niche, which you hear once at an event like the one we’re at. But it wouldn’t span the whole weekend say.

So that’s my question really. Are there some things which are within the purview of this and some things which you are excluding? You maybe don’t have any thoughts on that, but I’m just curious to know if there is going to be some things which are in scope and other things which are not.

[00:35:21] Angela Jin: Yeah, it’s an interesting question because, I think everything that we’re seeing proposed right now does very much feel within the scope. But I’m sure at some point there’s going to be some topic that raises some eyebrows. And I think this is why having a purpose is really helpful for that. Because we are asking that. How does your idea align with the purpose of what we’re trying to do here?

And I would really encourage us to be experimental because WordPress is not an island. We are a part of a much larger tech ecosystem and understanding the external influences to WordPress, and how WordPress influences those areas is really important, and will help us grow. And help us bring new people in, new ideas in.

I would like to, I keep coming back to this word, but I would really like to be very experimental about it. And like I said, if we don’t like it, we can always go back and we have a very strong track record of being responsible with sponsor dollars. And so if there is an event that we’re like, hmm, like, we’re not quite sure how that’s going to work out, maybe we try it in a smaller scale and see how we can scale it.

[00:36:34] Nathan Wrigley: You could try something a bit novel in a smaller event and see if it’s popular, see if it gains traction and what have you.

[00:36:40] Angela Jin: I’m really excited to see where this goes. And it is really lovely being here at WordCamp Europe to talk about this, because I’m excited by how excited everybody else is about this.

I think there are a lot of questions about it, which is totally understandable, and I really believe that we can figure them out together. So, yeah, let’s see where it goes. And the only thing I would add is, please come and share your thoughts. Please share your thoughts on the idea as a whole, what ideas you have for events, and on what potential tooling needs we might need.

[00:37:13] Nathan Wrigley: Where do we share the thoughts?

[00:37:15] Angela Jin: Uh, yes. There are three posts on the community, on the make community blog, and that is where a lot of the discussion is happening. The community team has regular meetings where this is a regular topic of conversation. And so yeah, come chat with any of the community deputies. Come chat with me and yeah, let’s see where this goes.

[00:37:36] Nathan Wrigley: So I will link to those places in the show notes. So if you’re curious about anything that Angela said, you can find the post on WP Tavern, and click on the links. Angela Jin, thank you very much for talking to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:37:47] Angela Jin: Thank you.

On the podcast today we have Angela Jin. Itâ€™s the first of six podcast episodes recorded at WordCamp Europe 2023, in Athens, Greece.

Angela is the Head of Programs and Contributor Experience at Automattic, where she oversees the work of multiple teams dedicated to the WordPress open source project. These are the community events and engagement, education, and marketing teams. Her passion lies in building strong, inclusive communities.

Several weeks ago, Angela wrote a blog post entitled The Next Generation of WordCamps. It laid out how WordCamps have been run for many years, as well as trying to begin a conversation about how they might look in the future.

During the pandemic, online events filled the gap left by in-person gatherings, but they didn’t fully replace the experience. As restrictions eased, in-person WordCamps made a comeback. In 2022, there were around 35 events, with only one being held online. In 2023, there have been 20 events so far, and more are planned for the rest of the year.

Angela talks about how sheâ€™s perceived a growing need for experimentation in the format of WordCamps. Currently, most WordCamps follow a tried and tested formula, with contributor days, multiple speaker presentations, the hallway track and sponsorship opportunities. She wanted to understand the purpose of gathering people together and what they gain from these events.

To gather insights, Angela had conversations with organisers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees within the WordPress community. She also sought input from event experts outside the community, such as the community manager-focused group CMX.

The feedback confirmed to Angela that events are essential for communities but also that there are many event formats being used elsewhere. She explains that there is an opportunity to add more variety to WordPress event formats and explore the connections and opportunities they create.

We discuss some ways that WordCamps might evolve by having events focussed upon a particular area, such as SEO, or a particular demographic, such as students. We also get into how these amendments might be rolled out to ensure that interested groups and geographic locales donâ€™t miss out.

We also chat about how sponsorships play into these changes and how funding for WordPress events might be allocated in the future.

Angela points out that thereâ€™s no specific format which is being proposed, rather this is a process of trying things out and seeing what works and what does not. The goal is to say “yes” to new ideas and foster a culture of innovation within WordPress events.

If youâ€™re curious about how WordPress events might change in the future, this podcast is for you.

Useful links.

The Next Generation of WordCamps

CMX website

Learn WordPress

Open Source 101 website

21.06.2023
#79 â€“ Robert Abela on How to Keep Your WordPress Website Secure

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how to keep your WordPress website secure.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Robert Abela. Robert is the CEO and founder of Melapress, formerly known as WP White Security. They make niche WordPress security and admin plugins. He has over 18 years of experience in the IT and software industries and has written numerous web security articles and white papers.

We all know that your website is potentially under attack 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. But why is that? And what can we do to mitigate that risk?

Robert talks about the security of WordPress Core and how it’s matured over the years. He feels that in most cases, it’s not the Core of WordPress that you need to be concerned about, rather the array of plugins and themes which are added on top. The unique cocktail of software that you add to your site makes it challenging for security products to secure it.

That being said, Robert is optimistic that there are strategies you can adopt which will make your site less likely to fall prey to malicious actors or bots. Updating plugins on a regular basis, keeping fresh backups and the monitoring of logs, all play a vital role and a straightforward to do.

Robert is also at pains to point out that this is not a one-click or one time fix. You’re going to need to dedicate time and resources to your website security, and those resources and time will need to be increased as the importance and reach of your website grows. Evolution is the key here. What worked yesterday might not work so effectively tomorrow.

Another topic we touch on is the automated nature of many of these attacks. Unless you’re hosting a website of some importance, hackers are not trying to break your specific website. They’re deploying automated attacks, trying to infect many websites at the same time. But why do they do this? What are the motivations of these bad actors? Robert explains that it’s not personal, but that does not mean that you can ignore the threat.

We also chat about the many layers which go into making your website work. Typically, you’ve got a web server, a database, and often much more, and Robert explains why you need to be mindful of all of these when drawing up your security posture.

Then, of course there’s the users of your site. The people who you’ve allowed to have legitimate access to the WordPress admin. If you’re in a large company with a high churn of employees, you’ll need to make sure that only people who need access have access, and that the permissions that they’re afforded a correct for the work they need to do.

If you’re curious about how you can secure your WordPress website as it grows this podcast is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WP tavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Robert Abela.

I am joined on the podcast today by Robert Abela. Hello, Robert.

[00:04:31] Robert Abela: Hello, Nathan. Thank you very much for the invitation. Always nice to talk to you.

[00:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: Really nice to talk to you. I’ve spoken to you on various other occasions, so I know who you are, but it occurs to me that perhaps the audience don’t. Would you mind just spending a moment giving us a little potted history of yourself? Your relationship with WordPress. We’re going to be talking about security today, so perhaps that would be a good thing to concentrate on as well. So, Robert, over to you.

[00:04:55] Robert Abela: Sure, I started when I was 20. I started working for a security software company. And through the process of 10, 12 years, I worked through different number of software security companies. So I was working in security.

And for the last company I was working for, we needed a blog. And back then WordPress was up and coming basically. So yeah, we started using WordPress. Back then was the only viable, very good solution to use. But still, it was in its early days. It was around 2012, 2011, 2012. So of course back then security was a big issue, and there weren’t the vendors that there are today and the solutions that there are today. It definitely got my interest.

So while I was working with the company, of course we implemented WordPress, but it got my interest. And then I met some people who worked in WordPress. You know, I like the idea of working from home or doing something for yourself. So yeah, it started as a hobby.

I started writing about WordPress security and reading a bit more, because I was using it for my full-time job. Slowly, slowly it turned into a part-time, from a hobby into a part-timer. And then, yeah, it developed into full-time. And now yeah, I run a company, it’s called WP White Security, which currently by the way, we are re branding to Melapress.

And yeah, we develop a number of security and management plugins. We started mostly with security plugins. But slowly, slowly we’re developing also a number of plugins, which kind of like, a mix of both. Security and also user slash website management plugins.

[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. People who are listening to this podcast, we have a real wide range of an audience. The audience is really broad and deep. And the reason I mention that is because there’ll be a cohort of that audience who understand all the ins and outs of security. And there’ll be a whole load of other people who realize that security online is a thing, but don’t really have any understanding of what we’re talking about.

So perhaps that would be a good place to lay the groundwork on. Tell us a little bit about the state of WordPress security, if you like. We often hear about a plugin being a fix, or a firewall being a fix, or maybe you sign up for some kind of SaaS app and that’s the fix. But I’m sure that that probably isn’t the fix.

There’s probably a whole bunch of different security vulnerabilities that we need to be aware of, as well as different ways to fix those. So just paint the landscape of WordPress security, if you like.

[00:07:04] Robert Abela: Sure. To start off with, we can start with the WordPress Core. Many people think that WordPress is insecure in the Core. But yeah, if you ask me like 10, 12 years ago, I would’ve said yeah. But nowadays, I mean, WordPress in general, the Core, is a really robust, solid product. So WordPress is not an issue.

But of course WordPress is surrounded, is made up from a huge ecosystem of plugins and themes. And nowadays of course, there are a lot of different solutions. And most issues usually are either user problems, lack of awareness. Or vulnerabilities, issues in plugins. But yeah, in terms of security, like it’s usually a mix of tools. It’s a mix of services, tools, the plugins for example, or services. Or a mix of both. And also best practices.

You definitely, for example, if you have a bare bone WordPress, you need some plugins and services to implement some things and automate. Like add two factor authentication. Implement a firewall. Automate backups. Enforce some policies, for example. That’s what the software can give you, but you also need to follow some best practices. You know like, let’s say have some logs, an activity log. You need to keep an eye on those logs.

You need to make sure that the software is always up to date. And by the way when we talk software, many people look just at WordPress, but you need to also keep up to date your own laptop software up to date. Any software you use through the process, your laptop, servers, whatever, everything needs to be kept up to date, not just WordPress.

And of course one thing to keep in mind is, let’s say you harden WordPress the first time. Security is not a one stop fix. It’s not a one time fix. Because it’s secure maybe today. But as we all know, as businesses grow, as requirements change your website needs to adapt to these changes. So you might need to add new technology. Or you need to install any new plugin, or change something, or change the configuration on the server.

So with every change, or with any new vulnerability that is discovered, make sure that you adapt your security strategy basically. What we call like the four pillars of security. The idea is of course first to secure, harden WordPress. Then of course monitor. Keep an eye of course, on what’s happening. Test, just keep on testing whenever you add something new. Is the firewalls still working as it’s supposed to be? Things like that. Based on findings, you need to improve.

So as the website evolves, as your business evolves or your, whatever you are doing with the website, the scope of the website, and the requirements of your team. Security needs to evolve as well. Okay, install a plugin. You maybe use some services as well, a good mix. You have some best practice in place, but yeah, that’s just as of today.

[00:09:20] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a never-ending enterprise really, isn’t it? You are constantly going to have to be tweaking this and examining this because the nature of the software, which WordPress itself sits on top of, the OS if you like, that’s always changing. WordPress itself is changing. The configuration of plugins, themes, and so on that you’ve got is changing. And also the nature of the attacks, which are coming your way is changing. The long and the short of it is the whole thing is changing. And so I guess you need to adapt with that.

I just want to switch to the attackers themselves, because I always find this subject curious. What is in it for them? So these days we constantly see about the latest hack. You know, if you read tech journalism, you are seeing about SaaS platforms going down. You see about ransomware attacks. You see about people’s Bitcoin wallets being stolen and there’s just seemingly every which way that people can because mayhem, they do. But in a WordPress website, why are they doing it? What are the reasons that they’re doing it for? I guess we’ve come a long way from just so that they can deface your website.

[00:10:27] Robert Abela: I’ve been listening to this podcast. It’s about the Lazarus group. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. It’s from the BBC. Typically on the scale of attacks the motivation is mostly financial motivation. And okay, of course, like you don’t have any source of money or something on your website. This might not be the case. But these type of large scale attacks, they need a number of bots. Basically hacked websites, hacked servers, which they can use to ramp up their attacks basically.

Or of course, if you want to hide, if you’re hacking a website, you’re going to hide yourself. You don’t want to hack it from your own computer. So you hack a website, you hack another server and use that kind of like a stepping stone. So as long as you have an online presence, whether it’s WordPress or not you are a target.

That online presence, if it’s WordPress or not, any website or any device that is connected to the internet. It has resources. It has CPU power. It has memory. It has internet connectivity, bandwidth. So yeah, that’s a resource. Now, if it’s being hacked either to hack your website and deface website, or as a stepping stone to hack something else. But yeah, you are always target. So even if you have nothing of interest, even if you’re not doing, I don’t know, commerce to your website, and if you don’t have sensitive data, you are still a target.

[00:11:31] Nathan Wrigley: If you have an e-commerce website, obviously there’s a real motivation there. You know, possibly break into your website and figure out what kind of orders have been replaced and cause mayhem there. And maybe try some sort of social engineering attack to steal people’s credit card details.

But interestingly there you also just said just the resources itself, that’s enough. The fact that you have paid for a piece of a computer somewhere, a portion of a computer, the CPU and what have you. That’s enough for people because presumably they want to put their own software on the computer that you’ve paid for, and use it to do nefarious things.

Now, that button means spraying out emails to people who don’t wish to receive them. But what other things are they up to? So if they’re not defacing things, but they are wishing to take your machine over. What kind of things can they do from there, once they’ve got that bridge established?

[00:12:23] Robert Abela: They can do quite a lot. For example, there was this, going back to the Lazarus group, one of the smart hacks they’ve done. They targeted some bankers, some people who work in banks basically with a phishing attack.

Quite frankly, it was the good old trick, like hi, you have won an award. Click here to win via email. Uh, someone from all those thousands of employees in a bank, someone clicked. And malware was injected there. And that led to allowing them to control some ATMs and stuff like that.

But to get to there, when they managed to inject the malware in ATMs and of course control that, they wouldn’t control that malware, or launch the attack from their own servers. Because otherwise it’s very easy to track them back. They need some sort of proxies or stuff like that. So basically they’re going to use your website, which is hosted on a server. The resources of your website, of the server where your website is hosted to launch this attack.

And it’s not the first time actually, they have multiple proxies. So from their machine, they send commands to your hacked website, which sends commands to another hacked website, as in hacked server, and then it sends the comment to the actual victim. The resources you’re paying for, the server you’re paying for, is being used purely for them to hide themselves basically as a proxy.

[00:13:29] Nathan Wrigley: I guess one of the things that I hear sometimes is that people believe that because their website is of a small size, or may not be interesting, in inverted commas, that they therefore assume that the hackers won’t find it interesting. In other words, it goes a little bit like this, but my website’s small. You know, it’s about something really niche. Why would the hackers want to come after me?

And I think what you’ve just said speaks to that. It’s irrelevant. It’s not really a hacker. There isn’t an individual doing this. It’s an individual at some point who wrote a script, which then got downloaded and redistributed a thousand times over the internet and deployed by a thousand different people.

So you don’t need to look for an incentive. The incentive is there all the time. It’s not a person deliberately coming after you for a personal vendetta, usually. This is just people trying to gain some sort of bridgehead in the internet, on the internet, on servers somewhere so that they can because mayhem in ways that you cannot even imagine.

[00:14:31] Robert Abela: Yeah. In fact, even when you say, okay, I don’t know, I have a website about a hobby, some old museum somewhere, whatever. We don’t accept payments. Who would be interested in our website? From the outside it doesn’t apply, because when actually hackers are trying to find, or malicious users are trying to find vulnerable websites. They’re not just browsing one by one.

They have automated tools. They scan whole subnets, whole networks, you know. And they don’t even know or care whose website it is, or how it looks most of the time. Okay, this website has a vulnerability, we can exploit it. So of course we can run commands, you know, on the operating system or depending of course, what they want to do.

But yeah, as long as they get access. So yeah, they don’t just target your website, just scan whole subnets. So, your website happens to be one of them. So yeah, if you have a vulnerability, if you have, I don’t know, an outdated plugin for example that has an issue, and you’ve never updated it and the vulnerability is there and they can exploit it, then yeah. They don’t care whose website it is or how it looks, whatever. It just, it flags okay, this website, they get a flag, this website is vulnerable. Exploit the attack, take over, and that’s it.

[00:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: And I guess the other important part in that, is that this is not a personal thing. It’s very, very, very unlikely, unless you are some kind of nation state actor, that there’s going to be people sitting at computers designing software deliberately to get into your machine. This is just people spraying out bots all over the place, looking for vulnerabilities and then stumbling across them randomly, and then deploying the things that they’ve got to exploit, those vulnerabilities. So it’s not personal, and it’s very unlikely at the other end of that is a real human being. It’s just scripts written, who knows where and who knows when.

[00:16:05] Robert Abela: Exactly. No, in fact, I’m sure like the bigger companies, you know, like Facebook. I’m sure they have a good share of targeted attacks because when you’re so big, I mean they definitely have some haters. But no, let’s say the normal websites, the normal hobbyist websites, whatever, which is quite funny because usually the hobbyist websites are the ones that people think, oh, who will attack my website? But yeah, it’s just like another number.

So, it’s not personal, it’s nothing personal. And as you said, most probably not, most probably, like most of the things are automated. So yeah, there’s not one person doing something to you, it’s just the whole process and it’s all automated. So yeah, nothing personal indeed, yeah.

[00:16:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, which doesn’t make it any better unfortunately, even though it’s not personal. So let’s talk about the tech stack which our WordPress websites are sitting upon. Because again caveat emptor. I know that a lot of the people who are listening to this who are technical, this will be very obvious what we’re going to cover.

But there’s a proportion of the people who are listening to this who may very well not know that there is layers and layers of things making their website possible, and those themselves are vulnerable. Even though you may never interact with them. You may only go to your WordPress, log in over there. Type whatever it is that you need to type, save, publish, and then log out again.

That might be your only interaction with WordPress. But WordPress doesn’t sit in isolation. So what typically is the stack that it’s sitting on, and do we need to be concerned about all of the stack, or are there any pieces which are more concerning than others?

[00:17:30] Robert Abela: It really depends. First of all, your own computer. So if you’re accessing your WordPress website, even just to update. Your own computer needs to be up to date. So that’s part of the tech stack. In regards to the website, it depends like if you have managed hosting where you have access just to this website, the bulk of the work, you still have to take care of some things and updating your software, but the bulk of the work is done by the web host.

However, if you have a dedicated server or just any hosting where you just have to install WordPress, then of course because a typical, let’s say you have a dedicated server, you host everything yourself. The typical text tech stack, you have the web server, typically a Unix, Linux operating system. Then you have the web server, Apache, Nginx or something similar. You have also PHP, sort of like a framework, the language that WordPress is written in. You have MySQL the database server, that’s the most basic.

So you have PHP, Apache, the web server itself of course, and the database. And then of course it depends, like if you need to send emails, you’re going to have the SMTP server and stuff like that. So when it comes to securing that, let’s say that one. To be honest when you look at the tech stack software nowadays, it’s quite easy to keep secure as in like, as long as you configure it properly and securely. Like you read maybe a bit, I don’t know about the, the best practices, and of course keeping it up to date. Software in general is not a big issue.

The more time passes, I think the last few years we’re seeing a small shift, because usually it was always, okay exploiting this issue or exploiting this issue. But most of the cases vendors are quite responsive on their issues. The problem in the tech stack, it’s not actually any component in the tech stack, it’s the users. As in like, it could be even, you’re like, if you forgot to update a plugin or if you received a spam email or a phishing attack and you clicked on some untrusted link. Or downloaded something which you, you don’t know what it is, you know?

There are so many tools nowadays when it comes to keeping your software up to date. There are so many resources. Like, listen, let’s read the best practices on how to set up a secure Apache server. And there are also, of course, services. You can pay people, you can pay professionals who can do these things for you.

So the actual tech stack is, I wouldn’t say easy, because you need knowledge to do it, but yeah, it’s relatively easy if you know what you’re doing. You have the tools, you have everything you need to keep it secure.

The problem nowadays more weak passwords, phishing attacks, and stuff like that. Using public WiFi, using unpatched computers. Using public computers to access some things. Unfortunately the user has become the weakest link in the whole chain, you know?

[00:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: So you’ve got to really be careful what it is that you’re doing. What machine you’re using. Where you’re using that machine, and so on. I’m just wondering if there is, in your mind, any system which you would regard as pretty safe. I’m going to say a hundred percent safe, and then immediately withdraw that because I think we all know that’s not possible.

But is there a position you can get into where you can have done enough. You’ve raised your guard up so much that you can relax? Or is this more a story of constant vigilance, constant worry, constantly assuming the worst is going to happen tomorrow? Or is it possible to employ the services of a particular, say, SaaS company, or a professional who might look over things for you?

And be entirely happy that, okay, that’s now handled by somebody else. I’m entirely safe. Now I know that a hundred percent is off the table, but can we be confident that our sites are mostly safe if we take the right precautions?

[00:20:51] Robert Abela: Yes. I think nowadays with all the tools that there are and all the services even the web hosts themselves, they really up to their game the last few years, especially the managed ones. As you said, a hundred percent is, you’re never guaranteed. But yeah, there are so many tools. If you inform yourself and if you implement some best practices, you websites are relatively safe.

I mean, you should always take precaution steps. Like for example, backups, they’re very important. So if something happens, you can restore. Test those backups, of course, because many people miss that part. They take backup, like, have you ever tried to restore it? No.

So it is very important. because sometimes of course, it’s software as well and it can break. So the restore might not work or something has been corrupted. So that is extremely important. But yeah, from the tech stack point of view it’s pretty much covered. There are a lot of options nowadays.

Even like with a simple managed WordPress hosting, and installing a plugin or two, you’re pretty much covered, let’s say. What’s important is the best practice and the concept that listen, security is not one stop shop. I don’t think we should, one should be really paranoid to be honest. because as I said, we’re in a good position.

But it’s very important for people to keep in mind, especially as the team grows. Because if you’re on your own one thing, it’s relatively easy because you know, you have exactly full control between you and the web host. You have roughly full control of, and you know what’s happening. But as the team starts growing, especially nowadays, in the WordPress ecosystem it’s very common to have remote businesses.

You don’t have full control of your employees, as in like, not the employees themselves, but as in their machines and where they use them and how they use them. So I think what’s very important is of course to raise awareness, train them, train your team. Make them aware that, listen, use your laptop here, or have some sort of guidelines and make sure you can use as many possible tools, documentation, and training to make sure at least you can take care of that part.

Which is, in my opinion, is the hardest part to secure. Because of course, you don’t have full control of users, users machines. That is the most important, because as I said the tech stack, like of course things can happen, but as long as you keep software up to date and stuff like that, unless there’s a zero day exploit, you really unlucky whatever. Okay, it’s never a hundred percent secure, but you are very near that number, you know.

[00:22:57] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the tech stack and the maturity of it, do we often get really innovative and unique vulnerabilities in the tech stack that builds a WordPress website? Let’s say you’ve got, I don’t know, a server, Apache Nginx or whatever it may be.. Do we ever find a new, novel attack? Does that typically come across, I don’t know, once a year, once a decade, something like that?

So can we lower our guards a little bit or do we find, do you find, you’re the expert? Do you find that there are novel things that are uncovered by security researchers, which have been, maybe they’ve been exploited for a year or more, but kept very much under the radar, kept quiet. Is the landscape changing? Are there new and novel attacks happening all the time?

[00:23:40] Robert Abela: Not really, in terms of vulnerabilities. We’re still playing with the same, for example, SQL injection was discovered in the late nineties. The first decade of 2000 we started discovering other vulnerabilities, like cross size scripting, cross request forgery, you know, and the other ones.

When you discover a new type of vulnerability that I would say, of course, that is very innovative. But for the last 10 years, even if you look, there are some websites which keep kind of like an aggregate of the vulnerabilities that are found in plugins. It’s always the same, especially cross site scripting is very common.

By cross site scripting, it’s also very important to like every different types of cross site scripting, different type of vulnerabilities, have different type of severity. So if a plugin has a cross site scripting vulnerability, it’s not necessarily that one should panic, because I’m not saying, okay, just relax, take it easy.

But listen, some of the vulnerabilities, for example, are very, very hard or can be exploited in a very particular edge case. So it is very important to keep things up to date. But yeah, in terms of innovation, no. In terms of new vulnerabilities, not much.

What is really changing? I think the way malicious users are getting much smarter in the way they craft their attack. They’re still using the same exploits and same, same issues. Exploiting old software, old vulnerabilites. The good old SQL injection, cross my scripting. But the way they are approaching it, the way they are building, drafting their tech, it’s much more complex.

There’s a lot of intelligence behind it, like how they use a number of different vulnerabilities to build an attack. First you send an email. If the victim gets the bait basically, if they click something or whatever. And then if they click, for example, install some malware on the computer, which allows you then, for example, I don’t know, some sort of key logger, and then you see what they’re doing.

Maybe they are connecting to a website and they’re uploading something. So we’ve seen much more complex type of attacks where people are stringing a number of vulnerabilities together to successfully attack some particular target.

But in terms of innovation of new type of vulnerabilities, like new ways of exploiting software, we haven’t seen much, no. For the last 10 years, it’s been pretty much same old, same old kind of thing.

[00:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: Now I’m going to throw a spanner in the works here and ask you about AI. It’s all the rage at the moment for creating content and probably people in the WordPress space know that people have been able to create plugins, and create all sorts of things around the WordPress space.

Lots and lots of endeavors in WordPress using AI, and I’m wondering if this has started to become a trend amongst the hackers as well? Whether they’re using this technology to refine their processes? Possibly to go and look at the source code of things like WordPress or Linux kernel, or whatever it may be. Speeding up the process, finding new novel things. My question really boils down to, does AI and internet security, is that a point of concern, do you think, in the near future?

[00:26:31] Robert Abela: I think right now, not really. It’s still too early, but I think AI is a big changer in general, in every industry, every vertical of the internet industry. Having said that, AI is not a human, so it’s not necessarily coming up with something innovative.

It’s still, at the end of the day, it still has some sort of database where it gets information from. The difference is that nowadays, instead of using Google and browsing through search results, trying to find exactly what you need, okay, this website, no, it’s not here to click on the other one, go on that page.

Rather than going through that process of course, with AI, we’ve really accelerated that. We’ve really automated that. So nowadays, like with AI, especially if you know how to ask what you need, you’re going to get the answer much quicker. So things that usually would take you, let’s assume a malicious user wants to hack something, a target.

It used to take them days or weeks maybe to craft something and to think of something original and learn about something. Because of course you have to search for everything and read a bit more, and try this and try that. With AI, of course you’re accelerating this process. And by accelerating that process you’re achieving much quicker results.

And typically also, true AI, not because AI cannot come up with something new, because it’s always getting information from what there is. But I’m pretty sure it can, because of this fast process, I’m pretty sure it will lead slowly, slowly to also new innovations. In every aspect, content writing, security, security both in terms of attack and defense and every aspect of the internet.

[00:27:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I hadn’t really thought about that. I was thinking about that from the attacker side. But of course, the defense side also has the same tools to deploy, and I’m imagining that if you’re the vendor of a, of a security product, whether that’s a firewall or a plugin or whatever, you’re also going to be deploying the same tools to try and mitigate what the adversaries are doing.

[00:28:17] Robert Abela: The thing is that luckily both the attacker and the, let’s say the white hat vendor have access to the same tools. So yeah, if you use them wisely. Also, this thing is always a bit of a cat and mouse game. The malicious users do something, the vendors up their game, then they do something, then they up their game and stuff like that.

[00:28:36] Nathan Wrigley: I want to just turn our attention to a typical WordPress user. Perhaps somebody who really doesn’t know a great deal about this. They’re listening to this podcast because they’re curious about WordPress. They’ve got a site which they run, it’s their own. Maybe they’ve got a couple of sites.

They’re beginning that journey on creating their own freelance business or something like that. Do you have any guidance as to how often things ought to be done? Is this really a process of you really should be logging in every day, checking for updates, and while you’re at it, why not just switch automatic updates for Core and all the plugins that you’ve got on?

Or is this more of a look, once a week is fine. I’m sure there won’t be a hard and fast rule, but people who are just beginning their journey with WordPress, they probably do need concrete examples of how they should best handle this.

[00:29:18] Robert Abela: It really depends on the scale of the business and how much traffic your website is getting. And also the number of people working on the website. Because one person or two people from the same room, it’s totally different than being even two people from different locations. And how much the team is security savvy, not necessarily technical, but at least have some basic understanding.

But yeah, in general let’s say a typical startup where you are switching between kind of like a transitioning from a hobby to a part-time. I think as long as you take care of the obvious, install some plugins, add 2FA, add some logs, add a firewall, make sure that you have backups. Work with a solid web host.

As long as you take care of the basics, you should be pretty much covered, and yes, like everyone else, for example checking Google Analytics, or any type of analytics software for that matter. Yeah like, people are doing it for SEO, but it also helps keeping an eye.

Maybe there’s a spike of traffic coming from some unusual location. All these things can lead to something. Check your website every day. You know, like it’s very important, for example especially if you have a very small number of users. You are two or three users. I mean like once a week, maybe you should have some sort of checklist, you know, check how many users are on your website. Run some file integrated scans. You know, like some basic stuff.

Once a week is more than enough at that level. So yes. But what’s important, I think at that stage, especially if you are growing, it’s very important to draft policies and follow security best practices when the team is still very small.

Why? Because if you are not organized when the team is very small, it’ll be much harder, and you’ll have much bigger problems when the team is very big. It’ll be much harder to implement a change. Like, I don’t know, like we used to do something one way, and after one year, the team now is a hundred people.

It’s much more difficult to convince those hundred people, listen, we’re going to change this and we’re going to start doing it this way. And yeah, this can of course, irritate people because people tend to resist change, especially if it affects their productivity or if it’s too complicated.

So I think what matters is, especially as you’re starting, set up some policy, some guidelines, some best practice for yourself, have some sort of checklist. Yes, once a week or so. You can also do it almost once a month, but again, play it safe. Why not spend an hour every week, have a checklist, check how many users are there on your website, check some logs, check the traffic on the website, you know, check the list of plugins. check the files.

Especially, a file integrity monitor can tell you lot of things because if there is a file, typically when a website is hacked, there is a file that has changed. A file has been deleted, or a file has been modified, even an actual legitimate file, it has been modified. So yeah, that can tell you a lot.

Luckily nowadays, of course most of these systems, configure email alerts, you can configure some SMS and stuff like that. So of course you’re automating much and much more. But it’s still good to take a look. And also it’s very important because we, for example, we develop an activity log plugin, and some people are, okay, what should I look for in the logs? It’s very difficult to answer that question, because it truly depends on your business. Because, it’s very important for website owners to understand what’s running on their website and how it’s being used, and only then you can make informed decisions.

Okay, is this log, not just in WordPress, even the web server logs, even in analytics. Is this traffic normal or not? Because, if for example you are based in the UK and typically you get all the traffic from Germany. So by seeing a spike from traffic in Germany, that’s normal to you. But for someone who’s based in the UK but only has UK traffic, a spike of traffic in Germany is a problem for them.

So first what’s very important is to understand your website, have some basic checklists. The most basic stuff, once a week or so. Keep an eye on these things. Traffic, and logs usually, and also log into the website. Why not? You know, just go to the plugins page. Are these all the plugins that I installed? Are these all users that I had? That’s a really good step.

By setting those best practices and those checks once a week, as the team grows it’ll be easier to maybe add something new because of course the team is growing, so you need to add more policies or you need to add, secure something else, you know? So, yeah, that’s very important. It’s very important to keep an eye on things, just check how things are running.

But of course with managed web hosting, especially for WordPress things, most of these things are almost covered for you. Many web hosts have different packages. Many web hosts nowadays they have their own kind of like internal monitoring systems as well. We’ve noticed you have this plugin, which is outdated, or we’ve noticed this. So at least there is a lot going on for you already.

And that’s why I said even earlier, it’s good of course, to be aware, and to be conscious that, listen, these things can happen, but we don’t need to be stressed. If you’ve done your homework, if you do your own homework, and you follow best practices, you choose a good web host and stuff like that, then you are in a good place.

[00:33:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess it’s a good point to mention that the WordPress ecosystem, given its enormous size and reach in the website creation space, you’re in a pretty good spot because there has been so much effort poured into, not only making WordPress secure, but making the update system for plugins and themes trivially easy to switch on.

And I’m just wondering about that one actually. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on automatic updating. Personally I’ve, in most of the places where it’s possible, I have switched that on, and have had no negative consequences. You know, none of the plugin updates have destroyed anything in ways which would make me want to switch that off.

But that is an option which I know that a lot of people don’t make use of, and I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that. So in the WordPress admin, it’s possible to automate the whole process of updating. It’ll just do it on a regular cycle if it knows there’s a WordPress plugin update, it’ll just do it for you and hopefully everything will work out.

And obviously now we’ve got a safe mode built into WordPress not that long ago. So let’s just talk about that quickly. What do you think about automatically updating everything when possible?

[00:34:59] Robert Abela: Speaking about ourselves, we have automatic updates on minor version updates. Because we have like 4.0.1, 4.0.2. We allow that. because yeah, most cases, usually these updates are just small bug fixes here and there. The chances of something breaking, especially with a plugin update is with major version changes, because of course the vendor has implemented a new feature or drastically changed a feature and stuff like that. Of course, for the better.

But, especially for vendors, it’s very difficult. Let’s say you have a plugin, it’s installed onto a hundred thousand websites. It is very difficult to simulate all those a hundred thousand websites, and simulate upgrades. So of course we try our best to do as much as we can to test as much as we can in different scenarios. But it’s impossible.

So in terms of auto updates, for us and which is something I recommend, I would definitely enable them for minor version updates. In regards to major version upgrades, nowadays again, most hosting providers have the staging websites. Just run it on the staging website, literally, it only takes 10 minutes.

Run it on the staging website. Check the area on the website that is affected by that plugin. I don’t know if it’s an SEO plugin, for example, you check that the headers are still loading or the metadata is still loading. Or if, I don’t know, it’s the tables plugin, check that tables are still loading properly.

And yeah, if it works, update the live site as soon as possible. WordPress itself of course, as soon as you log into the dashboard, and you go to the plugins pages, you have that even, you don’t need to go to the plugins pages. You have that icon that you have updates. So it’s very difficult to miss updates. So that’s great.

But even if, let’s say you’re not logging into your website on a daily basis, there are many services, every vendor usually they have their own change log, you can subscribe to their newsletter. So yeah, whenever there’s an update, you’ll get an email or some sort of notification.

So it’s very important if you’re not logging into your website every day to see when there are updates. At least subscribe to the vendor’s newsletter or builds updates or something. So at least you get an email that, listen, we’ve released an update, especially if it’s a major update. If you have, of course, the automatic updates for minor version upgrades, especially if you have a big website.

Like an e-commerce website, you can have a good number of plugins, tons of plugins. At least you don’t have to do almost daily updates. For the major version updates, if it’s a relatively small website, you might get on with enabling, automatic updates on that as well. But yeah, do it on a staging website. It literally takes a few minutes. Just update the plugin on the staging, run a quick test, 15 minutes maximum and turn on updates on the live website. So yeah, definitely.

[00:37:16] Nathan Wrigley: It’s also the kind of thing that once you’ve done it a few times, it becomes kind of muscle memory and you can do that staging to updating plugin to, you can do that very trivially quickly and get on with your day if that’s not the main part of your business.

Just one last question. You talked earlier about members of staff and what have you. I’m just wondering if you’ve got any guidance, again possibly for the more inexperienced WordPress user, about the kind of roles that you might assign to people in WordPress. Obviously, if you are giving everybody the administrator role, you may well find yourself in a bit of trouble.

And also about the nature of cleansing out the users that you’ve got on your WordPress website on a regular basis. So, you know, if you’ve got a big team and you’re constantly churning through staff, that’s probably something you want to be thinking about as well, because that’s an attack that you really can’t avoid if you don’t make the effort. You know, if you’ve given somebody an administrator account and they’ve got bonafide access to get into the website and you don’t revoke it. Or you’ve given them too many permissions and they then get fired and you know, they fall out with you, there could be problems afoot there.

[00:38:19] Robert Abela: Yeah, indeed. Definitely one shouldn’t give admin roles, assign the admin role to everyone. In fact, as a best practice, I would say have an admin account, really difficult to use and that should only be used by you and only as back up. Because even you as a website administrator, you don’t need admin access whenever you log into the website.

If most of your work is still updating some posts, or maybe changing something from the theme. So no, admin roles shouldn’t be used that often. WordPress has a number of built-in roles. It depends again on the nature of the website, what you’re doing with it. For some people, those roles work.

But yeah, the fact that there’s this technology of roles is, it’s already good, because there are also a number of plugins which you can use to create different types of roles to assign multiple roles to users. And most plugins nowadays they either create their own roles on your WordPress website, or they have different types of functions where you can, okay, like, literally some plugins, you can say, okay, I created a new role for them and I want these people to do only these type of things on this plugin.

So the role control, and what people can do and cannot do, especially when you use a third party plugin to create your own custom roles and to assign different privileges, is very granular. Definitely no admin access for no people, quite frankly. But yeah, the rest, I definitely recommend using some sort of custom role editor so you can create your own custom roles as well if the default ones don’t work for you.

We always talk about the principle of least privilege. I was a systems engineer when I used to work for their companies and, the easiest way, I was like, yeah, give them admin access because it’ll work for sure. Of course. Unfortunately, it’s a very common practice. But no, the reality is you should, yes, start with the least possible.

And if they don’t work, see what else they need. Okay. What else do you need? I need to access this page from this plugin, and check. Contact the vendor from the plugin. Listen, do you have specific privileges for this? Or do we need this? Do we need this? And to build slowly. Yes, I understand that it hinders the productivity, kind of slows down things. But it only slows those things for a day or two. Or give them maybe a bit more access for a day or two until you check with the vendor and then reverse that access.

So always give the least possible. It’s also a question like of user accountability. Some compliance bodies actually have regulations about this. If someone shouldn’t be seeing certain customer data, regardless if you trust them or not, they shouldn’t be seeing it. Why are you giving them access kind of thing.

So, it’s very important to live by the kind of like principle of lease privilege when it comes to users. Give them the lease possible. Even for them, especially if they’re not tech savvy. This doesn’t have to do with someone being malicious, or even if they make a mistake, at least they make a mistake within their environment, their privileges. Not a bigger mistake.

Roles definitely should be used. And yeah, there are a lot of plugins. We’re lucky because there are a lot of plugins which allow you to create your own custom roles, assign different privileges for roles and stuff like that. Definitely roles are definitely things that should be used.

[00:41:05] Nathan Wrigley: This is a topic that we could probably talk about for days.

[00:41:08] Robert Abela: Yeah, roles on their own, yes.

[00:41:10] Nathan Wrigley: And more broadly about WordPress in general. You know, should we keep the REST API on, and are there a bunch of things that you would switch off by default. But unfortunately we’re kind of running out of time, so I’m going to leave those questions possibly for another episode.

Or another way of getting the answer might be, if people want to contact you, Robert, directly. Where can you be found? Do you hang out on social? Is there an email address that you prefer to mention? Where can we best find you, Robert?

[00:41:37] Robert Abela: Yes. Uh, our website is wpwhitesecurity.com but as I said, we are rebranding. So we are announcing the new name at WordCamp Europe. The new website will be melapress.com. m e l a press.com. So yeah, my email is very simple, robert at melapress.com or at WP White Security. I’m also on Twitter and stuff like that. But yeah, I think email is definitely one of the most efficient.

[00:41:58] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much, Robert. I really appreciate joining us on the podcast today. Thank you.

[00:42:02] Robert Abela: Thank you. Thank you very much.

On the podcast today we have Robert Abela.

Robert is the CEO and founder of MelaPress, formerly known as WP White Security. They make niche WordPress security and admin plugins. He has over 18 years experience in the IT and software industries, and has written numerous web security articles and white papers.

We all know that your website is potentially under attack 24 hours a day, 365 days of this year, but why is that, and what can we do to mitigate that risk?

Robert talks about the security of WordPress Core and how itâ€™s matured over the years. He feels that in most cases, itâ€™s not the Core of WordPress that you need to be concerned about, rather the array of plugins and themes which are added on top. The unique cocktail of software that you add to your site makes it challenging for security products to secure it.

That being said, Robert is optimistic that there are strategies you can adopt which will make your site less likely to fall prey to malicious actors or bots. Updating plugins on a regular basis, keeping fresh backups, and the monitoring of logs all play a vital role and are straightforward to do.

Robert is also at pains to point out that this is not a one click, or one time fix. Youâ€™re going to need to dedicate time and resources to your website security, and those resources and time will need to be increased as the importance and reach of your site grows. Evolution is the key here. What worked yesterday might not work so effectively tomorrow.

Another topic which we touch on is the automated nature of many of these attacks. Unless you are hosting a website of some importance, hackers are not trying to break your specific website. Theyâ€™re deploying automated attacks, trying to infect many websites at the same time. But why do they do this, what are the motivations of these bad actors? Robert explains that itâ€™s not personal, but that does not mean that you can ignore the threat.

We also chat about the many layers which go into making your website work. Typically youâ€™ve got a web server, a database, and often much more, and Robert explains why you need to be mindful of all these when drawing up your security posture.

Then of course thereâ€™s the users of your site, the people who youâ€™ve allowed to have legitimate access to the WordPress admin. If youâ€™re in a large company with a high churn of employees then youâ€™ll need to make sure that only people who need access have access, and that the permissions that theyâ€™re afforded are correct for the work they need to do.

If youâ€™re curious about how you can secure your WordPress website as it grows, this podcast is for you.

Useful links.

WP White Security

Melapress

14.06.2023
#78 â€“ Mike McAlister on Why Block Themes Are the Future

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, a journey inside creating a block-based theme.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you all your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

We released these podcast episodes every Wednesday, but next week there’s going to be a break. I’m going to be heading to WordCamp Europe in Athens to record some more interviews. And if you’re there, I do hope that our paths cross. Normal service will resume soon.

So on the podcast today we have Mike McAlister, and he’s here to talk about his experiences creating a block-based theme.

Mike is a veteran product developer and designer in the WordPress space. He founded and sold multiple WordPress products, like Array Themes and Atomic Blocks. Now he’s focused on the future of WordPress with his new product brand, Ollie.

Mike kicks off the podcast by telling us about his WordPress journey, and how WordPress blocks have renewed his passion for the platform. We get into some history and talk about the era when WordPress themes were extremely popular. Marketplaces like in Envato made it possible to sell themes and creates a career in ways hitherto unimagined.

Mike explains what the key differences are between a block-based theme and a classic theme. How it’s possible to create themes inside the editor and how you can do this without needing to know much code.

We talk about the fact that, if you are a coding expert, you could always create complex themes, but this fresh approach opens up the possibilities for those with less technical backgrounds. The experience in the editor might not be exactly what everyone wants, but it’s evolving quickly and maturing with every new release of WordPress.

The conversation moves onto why Mike is so confident that block-based themes are going to succeed. You don’t need to use one, and your trustee classic theme and the associated customizer, will work for the foreseeable future.

We then turn our attention to the technical hurdles that Mike has had to overcome. What new workflows and tools did he need to adopt and master to make his work possible? Mike’s been really focused on using WordPress core blocks to create his themes, digging into the weeds of what they can do and what their limitations are. It’s been a part of steady learning punctuated with minor setbacks when the editor and blocks are updated in unexpected ways. Thankfully, these bumps in the road are now relics of the past, as breaking changes have given way to stability.

We then talk about a specific theme that Mike has just released. It’s called Ollie, and it’s the focus of the rest of the podcast. How did Mike build Ollie, and what is he hoping to achieve with this new brand?

Patterns feature heavily in Ollie we talk about how it’s possible to alter the look and feel of your site quickly. Typography and colors are easy to change with the new suite of design tools which ship with WordPress.

If you’re wanting to develop block-based themes, or are just curious about how other developers are building them, this podcast is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Mike McAlister.

I am joined on the podcast today by Mike McAlister. Hello, Mike.

[00:04:51] Mike McAlister: Hello. Thanks for having me.

[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re very welcome. Mike is going to be talking to us today about block based themes, block patterns, blocks in general, I’m sure. And if you haven’t been in the WordPress space for any great length of time, you are about to learn about Mike’s pretty impressive history in the WordPress space.

So Mike, it’s a fairly generic question, but I hope you don’t mind us asking you at first, just to orientate the listeners. Would you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself and your history, coding, theming, and whatever kind of other work you’ve done in the WordPress space.

[00:05:24] Mike McAlister: Absolutely. Yeah, I’ve been around WordPress for some time now, probably since about 2010. 2009, 2010. So fairly early on. And I think I came upon WordPress like many folks, building client sites and looking for just a better way to do it. You know, when you’re in that world and you stumble upon WordPress, you’re like, whoa, light bulb moment. This is going to be a game changer.

So yeah, I started pretty early on using WordPress to build websites for clients. And then at some point, I started to see the commercial aspect of it, right? Instead of building one theme for one client, I could build one theme and maybe sell it to a thousand different clients.

And so I experimented pretty early on with, you know, I have a history in design and so that was my focus. I thought that could be a differentiator for me. I’ll make themes that are just beautifully crafted, really lightweight. Maybe they don’t do everything under the hood, but they do specific things very well.

And so Array was the first theme shop that I had. And I operated all over the place. I had themes on my own site. I had them on the Themeforest marketplaces. I was selling themes on wordpress.com. So I was kind of everywhere and growing. And then at one point blocks became a thing, and so I dipped into there and started experimenting with blocks, via the Atomic Blocks theme which grew really quickly, it was one of the first block themes out there. And I think it was, blocks were still a really new thing and people were trying to understand what they were and what the benefits could be.

And so having a plugin out there with all these examples in it, and kind of showing that, oh no, you can replace all kinds of stuff. Like short codes and all of these other archaic ways of building could be done with blocks now.

So I worked on that for a bit. And then in 2018 WP Engine acquired both the theme shop and the Atomic Blocks plugin. And worked there for four and a half years, and then just recently I have gone back into the freelance and entrepreneurial space.

[00:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed. That’s really, really interesting and it sounds to me at least anyway, as if you arrived on the WordPress scene, not only with the right products, but also at the right time. You kind of managed to hit that tidal wave just as it was creating out in the ocean somewhere.

And you had the product. Everybody was buying themes at that time. Became really, really popular. Do you consider yourself to have had a lucky break there, in the sense that, do you feel that that is something which can be repeated in the year 2023? Or do you think that block themes and just themes in general, the shine and the commercial prospects of that has dwindled a little bit?

[00:08:04] Mike McAlister: That early era was certainly something special. I think there was just so much attention focused on themes, and as this new shiny thing. And they unlocked a lot of capabilities for people. They were able to go from, trying to make their own sites. To making their own designs. To having these tried and tested templates.

And so that was a huge thing. And the rise of the Envato market at the time was a huge part of that success. Love it or hate it, at the time, that was a huge thing and proliferated WordPress themes out into the world, beyond our bubble. And so that I think was a huge deal at the time.

Now, whether or not now we can kind of replicate that is really tough to say, because since then the market has become quite saturated, in that there are so many different ways of building with WordPress. And you have things that are spinning off like Elementor going off into their own world.

They’re still kind of one foot in WordPress, one foot out. And we have all of these other. website builders that we didn’t have back then, other platforms. So there’s just so many different ways to build a website. WordPress is still massively popular, even if it’s slowly declining.

We still have such a huge footprint on the web that it, there’s a ton of potential So, I don’t think we’ll see the same wave we saw before. I do think though that this whole new world of the block paradigm and block themes. It is the biggest opportunity commercially in WordPress I think that we’ve seen in a very long time. It may be the biggest we see for a long time.

[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think we should probably stray into that right, the outset, if that’s okay. Because, there’s probably a proportion of people who are listening to this podcast who are very, very technical. They completely get what you mean by block based themes and the opportunity afforded there.

But equally, there may be a bunch of people who are listening to this who genuinely have no idea that there is such a thing as a block based theme. They’ve got a, what we would now call a classic theme, and it’s installed and it has been for a long time. And as far as they’re aware, there’s no change in their WordPress website. Things just carry on as normal.

But are you able to describe to us, I know this is a difficult question, and certainly trying to cram it into a portion of a WordPress podcast is a big ask. But are you able to give us a high level view on what a block theme is, and how it differs from a classic theme? Something which you might know, if you’ve got access to the customizer, you have a classic theme. If you don’t, you don’t. And so let’s take it from there. What are they and what do they promise?

[00:10:34] Mike McAlister: Absolutely. So, let’s first just do quick block refresher in general. So blocks, instead of throwing your content all into TinyMCE or the content area, and kind of making it mostly text-based, and throwing some other little elements in with things like short codes, like we used to do in the past. Blocks, they’re basically content elements. It could be anything from a button, to a paragraph, to an image gallery, to a slider.

And all of these things you add to the WordPress editor. And they could be used to build, you know, more beautiful content. They could be used to build page sections. They can be used to build a full page. And you put together enough blocks, and you can build an entire theme with it, right? So, WordPress comes with many blocks built in. And all of these things you use to build your website now.

So with that in mind, block themes are effectively entire WordPress themes that are built entirely with blocks. And the benefit of that is that it makes your website almost entirely editable by you, in the editor. So instead of having to, you know, if you want to change your header, instead of going into the code and opening up the code editor and tinkering there and saving and going back to your site. You can go into the site editor and WordPress, which is effectively a interface inside the WordPress admin, where you can create your header.

You can modify it. You can change the colors. You can add new links. You can change out your site logo. And all of that happens in the editor. It can be a no-code or low-code experience for you. So the benefit here is the customization, right? We can now get closer to the experience that you might have seen at something like a Squarespace or Wix where the interface and the experience is tailored around creation, and it’s more focused around that.

[00:12:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess if you are an expert themer and you’ve been creating themes for years, what it brings to the table, the way that you construct them is different. But you’ve always been able to achieve whatever it is that you wanted to achieve because you could write the code. But I suppose what this is bringing is the capability for non-technical people to be able to modify just any part of the site.

I guess the header is typically fairly constrained, you know, header, navigation, logo, that kind of thing is normally what we see. But perhaps a better example would be a footer. Because typically your footer would be controlled by the theme and you’d go into the customizer and modify whatever options were available to you.

Whereas now you can just build out rows, columns, put in images, put in contact forms, whatever you like, other navigation menus, anything. If you can imagine it as something that you can build in the block editor, that can then become your footer. You don’t need to dabble in any code at all. There’s a lot going on there, but you don’t need to be involved in that.

And so non-technical people can become involved in that process and, you know, enjoy creating different aspects, different parts of their theme. That being said, what are your thoughts on the state of the UI for editing themes at the moment? We’re in May 2023. Version 6.2 of WordPress is the current latest version.

And I think it’s fair to say that it’s not where it probably wants to be in the end, but how do you think about it? How do you think about the UI? You’ve probably been in there, you’ve ironed out all the kinks, and got over all the road bumps that were in the way. But for a typical user, a non-technical user, do you feel it’s delivered on the promise that it hoped to?

[00:14:09] Mike McAlister: I don’t think so yet. I talked to all kinds of WordPress users from novices to veterans. And the number one thing that always comes up is the UI the UX, the experience. And, you know, I get it because we’ve known WordPress for 20 years now. We’re celebrating a 20 year anniversary right now.

And it has been one way for a very long time. And even some of the big changes that came, like the customizer, they weren’t that big of a change, right? They were bolted on and they were additive and iterative. But the block editor and going into the site editor and full site editing, these kinds of things, it’s quite different.

It’s adding a lot to WordPress. It’s a lot of new context. It’s a lot of new paradigms. It’s a lot of new workflows, and I think that is a very difficult thing for people to figure out. Especially with the past few years where things have been shifting so much and people don’t know quite when to hop in. And then when they do, it doesn’t work exactly like they had anticipated.

Or some of the features are released as working prototypes. We’re kind of met with these things. And so I get the frustration when you hop in there and somebody’s telling you, oh, it’s way better, and you can do all this stuff now, and you’re, you install a block theme from dot org and it’s like half busted, and the styles don’t work and you don’t know your way around. So I get it. It can be a very frustrating experience.

I will say the past few releases I think have been a lot better. And they’re ironing out a lot of the kinks. The ground underneath the software isn’t moving as much from release to release. And if you follow along on some of the GitHub tickets or you stumble into some of those, there’s a great deal of discussion going on about the many shortcomings of the UX. And so it is something that’s always being worked on. And I think it’s important to just remember that.

It is never going to be easy to change, to drastically change, a piece of software that is being used for so many use cases, for so many people. We know it powers half the web and to make a leap into the block era like this, it was never going to be easy. It was never going to be comfortable.

We hope that it will be worth it in that, these kind of growing pains in this transition will give us a new era. It will refresh WordPress. It will make it viable for another 10, 20 years. It will give us the new tools to keep up with these other platforms that are maybe outperforming us. And so while the growing pains are there and the experience is a little rough, I do think that it is all for the greater good of the software.

[00:16:45] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s explore the sort of reverse of that, if you like. And I’m going to use a product that I have as an example. I use Gmail to do my emails. And I have this Chrome extension, and the Chrome extension alters the Gmail interface in a way, which allows me to be slightly more productive. I won’t get into the detail, but it does that.

And every couple of weeks something breaks, because Gmail alter some aspect of their interface. And the guy that makes the Chrome extension, he’s not in the loop of that. And the thing breaks and he has to contact all of his users and say, right on it. And gets it fixed and so on and so forth.

And I feel, as we’re going to discuss in the future, you are now really committed to having a proportion of your income come from block based themes, and yet at the same time, although you’ve got, you’ve got a voice there and you’ve definitely got skin in the game. You are reliant upon the technology stack that is WordPress and it’s in a constant state of flux.

You said it’s not quite there yet. I just wondered, and I don’t wish for you to become incendiary or anything like that. I wondered if you could highlight some of the grievances that you, well, not grievances, some of the things that you wish were better right now. Some of the areas where, if you could be in control of just fixing it by clicking your fingers, what would you amend?

[00:18:03] Mike McAlister: Ooh, that’s a, that’s a really good question. Although I’m just releasing a block theme now, I’ve been dipping into and exploring block themes for years now. And only until recently did I feel like, okay, this is ready enough to put something out there. Because I’ve run a product business before, and a WordPress theme business before and support is a huge part of that, right?

And in these early days of the block editor and block themes, with it being, you know, on a bit of shaky ground. Putting something out there I’ve seen it as like a support nightmare. I’m going to end up not just supporting my theme, I’m going to end up educating people on tons and tons of WordPress features, which I think that’s okay and great. And I think it’s actually a business model in itself.

You don’t want to take on the frustration of the users, and have them funnel that through to something that’s your product, right? And they look at something I’m making and say, this thing sucks, or whatever. When really it’s just they don’t know this new WordPress yet, or they haven’t had the time, or that the pitfalls and the UX hurdles are being kind of painted onto your product. So yeah, I think up until recently I’ve felt like, okay, this is, it’s still going to be a bit of a transition, but I think it’ll be less painful.

So that being said if I could snap my fingers and have one thing, well I’ve just recently written a post about responsive controls, which is another big hurdle. But I think even more than that, I would snap my fingers and bring together this UI UX in a way that makes a lot more sense.

I feel like we’re in two worlds here. I think we have many remnants of the old WordPress. In fact, if you’re not in the site editor, you maybe wouldn’t even know that there’s a new WordPress. You’re looking at the same sidebar, same posts, pages. All of that is the same and that’s great. That’s worked well for a long time.

But now we have our other foot in this whole new era of the site editor and block editor and blocks and block themes. And then when you’re in the site editor you can edit things live and do all this stuff. And so I feel like there are two entirely different WordPresses existing in WP admin. And it is, to me, not a great experience. I feel like if we’re going to go this route, I feel like it should be almost entirely wrapped around the site editor experience, and we’re able to do almost everything in there.

And that gives us an opportunity to maybe rethink, and this is, I know, grandiose and big ideas, and there’s probably a lot of people who are cringing at the thought of redoing a lot of WordPress. But I think that there is an argument to be made about kind of moving forward in a more bold and meaningful way. And tying that experience together. So that when you’re editing a page, it looks like you’re editing a page, and not like you’re editing a page with content field or something like that, you know? So the great unification of sorts.

[00:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That’s really fascinating. In terms of the skillset that you’ve had to adopt over the last period of time. When you decided, okay, I’m going to go all in on blocks. And it sounds like you’ve been doing this really, right from the beginning, which is fairly impressive. Very prescient of you.

What are the new interesting, perhaps difficult, things that you’ve had to learn? The new tooling that you’ve had to acquire? What has had to become part of workflow over the last few years, which is different from how it would’ve been five, six years ago?

[00:21:26] Mike McAlister: Yeah, it’s It’s quite fascinating actually, because I think those of us who are in WordPress a long time, you would typically think that the answer would be like, oh, I had to learn Webpack or React or whatever. And if you’re building blocks, that might be the case. When I’m talking about block themes, it’s not a technical skillset that I’ve had to pick up.

But literally just spending the time in WordPress and understanding how all these things work together. Learning fluently how to build with all of the core blocks, in a way that you can build a layout using columns and groups, and the alignment settings, and justification and the row block. It is a skill that has to be learned use all these things fluently, and to just know it like the back of your hand so that you can go and build out a pattern, a page, whatever it is.

And that did take, even for a WordPress veteran like me, quite a bit of time to get fluid with that stuff. But learning all of that stuff and then kind of dipping into block themes, that made that process a whole lot easier. Because block themes are just all of those things. It’s the row block. It’s the group block. It’s using the padding settings and building a design system with theme json.

So that becomes a skillset in itself. And that’s where I spent so much time. And I think that’s why when I released this Ollie theme that we’ll talk about, I think a lot of people were kind of like blown away. Like, oh, you can do all this with this new stuff. And it’s all core and native features.

But it took me a long time to pull all that stuff together and to be able to present it and a package that was like, oh, okay, this is coherent and well made and well designed and it actually works.

[00:23:07] Nathan Wrigley: How much does the sand shift beneath your feet? So you mentioned earlier about getting skilled with the interface and using the group block and managing it to make these pixel perfect, really beautiful layouts which we’ll get onto in a moment. How steady has that process been?

Or have you noticed that your designs from, well, let’s not say month to month, maybe half a year to half a year. Are there things which come along in the core blocks, changes which are made in the core blocks, which upset what you’ve managed to lay out in this perfect way? Or has the progress been steady away? Everything looks the same today as it did a year ago.

[00:23:43] Mike McAlister: At this point, it’s very steady. The core blocks, the group blocks and things like this, buttons. These are not changing in any major way. There are little additions being made, but they’re iterative, and they’re backwards compatible as far as I’ve seen. There might be every once in a while, the spacing’s a little off or something like that and usually gets fixed pretty good.

But I think with the amount of people using the Gutenberg plugin, where a lot of these big features are tried and tested and workshopped. I think there’s a good amount of eyeballs on these features there. That definitely helps, by the time it gets to core, it’s been vetted, it’s been worked out.

People actually build with Gutenberg enabled. So I think there’s that. And so these days, when creating a theme, I didn’t have any major issues with the fundamentals.

[00:24:31] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. I’m going to direct everybody listening to this podcast. Maybe just pause and go to this URL. The URL is olliewp.com. It is, as you might expect, o l l i e w p .com and have a little poke around. Have a look at what Mike has built, and what’s on offer. But just tell us about the theme itself. I’ve had a little bit of a play.

I downloaded it. Currently, we can get onto this and the reasons for moment, it’s on, available on GitHub. You download it from there, and I installed it on a local install and had a play. Tell us a little bit, what’s the thinking here? Are you trying to make one theme that anybody can use? Do you have a particular niche in mind? What’s going on with Ollie?

[00:25:13] Mike McAlister: I think Ollie started as an experiment for myself. I used it as an opportunity to, like I was saying, to learn all of these features. And one of the best ways to learn them is to build a block theme. Because it forces you to use all these different things, like patterns and global styles, and theme json. All of these features that make up a good block theme.

So, I started it as an experiment to learn, and then along the way, you know, as a product minded person, and somebody who’s had a theme shop before, I thought, no, there is some commercial value here. I don’t know what it is yet. But I thought on top of it being a potential pivot for me to do, I just saw it as an opportunity to dip back into WordPress in a more meaningful way, in the product space.

And I like creating things that people can learn from. I like putting things together in a package that you can hand off to somebody or send them the repo and they can see, and pick through the code and learn. And so that was the kind of intent behind Ollie. And right now it is, it’s just one theme with a bunch of beautiful patterns in it that you can use to quickly build out pages.

I’m just using this early phase of Ollie to see what people think. How are people building with block themes? Are they building block themes? I think there’s so much unknown about this space because it’s so new, I’m just kind of sitting back and just learning and listening and watching people.

Do they want more patterns? Do they want pre-made sites with block themes? There’s so many questions that I have. I’m using it as an opportunity to effectively ask these questions and learn.

[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: The thing that really struck me, I should add at this point that I saw this from an article in the WP Tavern, which Sarah Gooding wrote on April 26th, 2023. I’ll link to that in the show notes. The thing that struck me immediately was the patterns. And I saw screenshots of the patterns and I thought, wow, they look great.

And there was a video that I think she put together, scrolling through some of the patterns and thought actually that’s new, that’s interesting. They are right on the money for me. They look how I wish I could do things. And so downloaded the theme and really discovered that you really have gone to town with the patterns. I don’t know what the number is. It certainly looks like it’s more than 50 or 60 or something like that.

That feels like where a lot of your endeavors have gone. So you’ve categorized them, obviously now in the site editor you can you click on the patterns button and then subcategories come down. And then a nice thumbnail appears, and you can enlarge those if you wish, on a big modal, which takes up the whole screen and so on.

You’ll see straight away that the effort in building a typical website, brochure site for somebody has been taken away. So that’s my question. Did you approach this with patterns in mind? Like this is going to be a repository of great patterns and the rest hopefully will build itself, if you know what I mean.

[00:27:56] Mike McAlister: Yeah, absolutely. I knew right away patterns were and are going to be a huge deal. Way back, late 2019, I was even playing with this rudimentary idea of what patterns could be with my friend John Paris. We experimented and prototyped out this idea of sections and layouts in WordPress. And it was effectively what would become patterns. This idea that you have pre-designed sections of your site, that you can click together like Lego pieces and make full layouts.

I’ve always looked at patterns as a huge opportunity because it takes the pain out of building websites or even just sections. If I’m able to put together a beautifully designed hero section, or a featured section with blocks and make it look great and hand it over to you. You can throw that on your page. You don’t have to mess with the design. You just tweak the colors if you want, and change the content. And then you go about your business.

We’ve removed the pain of even you having to build your own blocks or your own patterns. And hopefully that is the paradigm that we go with. Hopefully people latch onto this idea that maybe I don’t have to tinker with every single part of my website. Maybe just going with these beautiful designs, changing the content, changing the color, and then focusing on my content, and focusing on my audience and focusing on my following. And I think the patterns are going to be a huge deal for sure.

[00:29:21] Nathan Wrigley: Truly I think the designs are absolutely fabulous. They are categorized into posts, texts, call to action, cards, features, heroes, pages, prices and testimonials. Who knows, maybe that will be expanded over time. But in each of those there’s in some cases a handful and in many cases multiple dozens really of different patterns that you can select.

And if you’ve never had the experience of doing this in a theme, you just pick on one that you like, and you just click on the icon and there it is. It’s now the next part of your website. And you can then amend it, you can change it.

Give us a bit of an insight into what people can do in terms of saving things. So let’s imagine that they’re using yours as sort of boiler plate and they’re going to click things in, but they want to amend the colors. Yours is fairly opinionated. It’s nice dark black, and there’s this lovely kind of blue color, which dominates everywhere. But obviously that might not fit with everybody.

Is it fairly straightforward, again for inexperienced users, to save those and modify them and keep their own modifications with this new site editing interface?

[00:30:25] Mike McAlister: Absolutely. That’s kind of the beautiful part about this, right? Is that you can go into one of your preexisting pages and click to add one of the patterns I’ve designed, and put it on your page. Or you can throw a full layout, which I’ve included a few full layouts, like home, about, and features, and things like this.

You throw it onto your page. You customize it how you want. You can change the content inline. You can change the colors on the page if you want. Or you can go to the global styles in the site editor, and you can change that bluish purple color that I’ve chosen to whatever color you want, your brand color. And instead of going through and changing it in every little pattern, it will change that color on every single pattern I’ve included in this theme.

So you don’t have to go change the colors anywhere. It will literally propagate that color throughout the whole site. Because this whole thing is a live design system, right? It’s effectively a design system that is tied into every aspect of WordPress. So when you’re in the site editor, when you’re in posts, when you’re in pages, all of these styles travel with these patterns.

Even typography, you don’t like the font? You can change the font. It’ll propagate through the whole thing because that’s how this is all wired up. So yeah, so if you want to go in and change a page, all you do is, you go in there, add a pattern, save it. Save it just like you would any other page. And it’s good to go.

[00:31:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is increasingly becoming a really compelling system. It just requires people like you to get as many people over that hump as possible and experiencing it. But I can only say if you download it, have a go. Within minutes I suspect that you’ll have something that you are very, very happy with and that you can modify.

In terms of the patterns of themselves, is that an area that you’ve explored? Or would like to explore commercially? So okay, I know you’ve got Ollie, but have you given any thought to the commercial possibilities of just patterns, simply patterns? Not bound to any theme. Just a downloadable set of patterns. And obviously you’re a very, very credible designer, we can see that. That you could then give to people, sell to people, so that they can download them into any site no matter what block-based theme they’re using.

[00:32:34] Mike McAlister: I always knew patterns were going to be a big deal. But I think, after just releasing Ollie to GitHub and seeing it get picked up by a few news outlets and some people on YouTube, were making videos about it. I think the number one thing everyone always raves about is the patterns. And maybe if they’ve explored patterns before on wordpress.org or used other themes that have patterns.

I don’t know if they’re just kind of underwhelming typically. But I think I did spend a great deal of time making sure these patterns were making a statement. They are saying, no you can do this in WordPress. I wanted to prove that I can design something as good, if not better, than what we had before. And I’ll do it all with blocks, native blocks. Not one custom blocks in there. These are all just core blocks, and they’re going to be beautiful, and they’ll be fully responsive and fully customizable.

And so, I think that’s what people see. And when they see these patterns and how they all cohesively fit together. You can pop these onto a page in any different order and they kind of just fit together and that’s part of the overall design system. But yeah, so I see patterns as a huge opportunity and I wasn’t sure commercially. And still I don’t know. I’m using this opportunity to ask a lot of questions.

But I think the first few weeks, the response has been largely very positive about patterns. And so I’m definitely curious about that. And I think there’s opportunities to do more advanced patterns, and maybe use some pro blocks to make patterns even more appealing. So yeah, pro patterns is definitely something I’m exploring

[00:34:07] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned that you’d spent a lot of time learning the core blocks, and you also just mentioned that everything that comes with Ollie is based around a core block. Was that a straightforward experience? Or did you find that there are certain limitations in what you could achieve based upon the capabilities of core blocks? Or would you say basically you can implement almost any design you wish with core block? Certainly looks like you’ve managed to achieve that.

[00:34:34] Mike McAlister: Sometimes I’d have an idea of what I wanted to do, and couldn’t quite do it. But I think if you get clever, you can get really close, right? For example, I would love if WordPress had a icon block. A core icon block that we could tie into. I don’t want to have to make my own, because there’s a bunch out there.

And I also, you know, in terms of the ease of distribution and giving customers designs right out of the box. I don’t want them to have to install a plugin to do it. And icons are so prolific. I would just hope that we could have that in core. Well, we can’t have that yet. And so, when doing simple things like wanting to add an icon here for people to see like, kinda like a placeholder for an image or an icon.

I used the HTML star, right? And I use that in ratings, you know, in design, like if you want to put a rating there, I put like five HTML stars, and I use it on feature sections. So, clever little things like that. It’s giving people enough to understand, oh this is what this is meant to be. This is the design. Oh, I might put my own icon here. Or even things like cleverly using the rows and group blocks to get things aligned how you want. Grouping of blocks to do unique things with them, spacing wise. It’s just a lot of clever usage of what’s there.

And I think part of that does come from tinkering enough. And if you really want to get that design out of your head and on to the page, you’ll figure it out. But it might take, it might take some tinkering.

[00:36:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’m on the install that I have at the moment and I’m on the star rating. You’ve got five stars, and I can see that they’re using paragraph blocks. And then elsewhere you’re using the social icons block to display those social icons. And I guess that’s the experience you would want, is just pick an icon, much like you do in the social icons block and make it more straightforward. That’s really interesting.

Why GitHub? Why not the WordPress repo? Was there some sort of decision there? Again, I should emphasize it, at this moment in time, if you want to grab this theme, you’re going to be heading over to GitHub and downloading it. Why there and not in the repo? Is there a decision behind that?

[00:36:36] Mike McAlister: No philosophical decision. I think it will be on the repo soon actually. Like I said, with these block themes, there’s so much to learn and I wanted to put it out there. You know, it worked great for me when I was building it and making it. But I wanted to get it out there and get people using it to understand if there was any major shortcomings or just catch any early usability patterns that I was seeing. Any issues like that and see like, oh, actually people don’t love these patterns.

Or, is there something about the workflow that I could improve before releasing it to a wider audience? So, I just mostly wanted to iron out all the kinks and GitHub was just the obvious place to do that. But to be honest a lot of the quirks that people have brought up with the theme on GitHub and the GitHub issues and stuff, are largely just Core issues. Just usability, preferences and workflow preferences and things like that.

I haven’t uncovered any major issues and so I feel like what I’m going to do is kind of wrap it up. It’s already fully tested and gone through the theme check and everything. So it’s pretty much ready to go. And I think I’ll do that in the next week or two.

[00:37:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. In that case, by the time this podcast airs, this question will be somewhat moot. But anyway, worth, asking I think. I noticed as I was moving around on the site, olliewp.com. I noticed buried somewhere was referenced to Ollie Cloud, and that got me thinking, okay, in that case, is Ollie something bigger than simply this one theme?

And so that’s where I’m going to take the conversation next. Is Ollie, in the same way that you had Array Themes and you had Atomic Blocks. Is Ollie something bigger for you, Mike? Is that a direction that you’re going to take it in? Are you now hoping to, sort of, have a bunch of things wrapped around in the Ollie branding?

[00:38:22] Mike McAlister: I think so. I wasn’t sure about that initially. Again, this just kind of started as a experimental WordPress theme. But I don’t know the product creator in me, the entrepreneur in me, always tries to see things from that sphere as well. And so as I’m looking at the WordPress ecosystem, and I’m exploring what is this thing like now? It’s been a while since I’ve had a product out there.

I do see all kinds of opportunities, and I’m still learning what they are. But I also have my own opinionated ideas about how we could wrap up this new, all these new capabilities, and deliver a new experience. A premium experience with some of this stuff. And so, on the Ollie WP website I had, I do have a box at the bottom about Ollie Cloud. And the idea there, I think is it could be Ollie Cloud, it could be Ollie Pro. I don’t know. I’m really just gathering feedback and seeing what people want, as I mentioned.

But the idea is that all of these new features, these theme assets, patterns and theme json files and all that stuff. They’re all very lightweight, and very movable, and very modular, and they can kind of plug and play in to WordPress. And I don’t know, I think there’s an interesting idea about the experience about how we build sites these days.

Should you have to start from scratch on every site? And should we still be copying and pasting themes around like it’s the mid two thousands? And is there a better way of doing that? Is there a better way of pulling in a site template?

There’s a lot of interesting things there and I think, another thing I’m learning, and I think we’ve seen just generally is that, I don’t know, I think users are maybe a little fatigued with that in WordPress. Starting with a blank slate and being like, ugh, I have to find a theme and then I have to maybe try out a few themes, and then I don’t know if I need to pay for one, and then I need a form block, and then all of a sudden I need a buy a contact form.

And then there’s a bunch of upsells for contact forms. And I don’t know. All that stuff to me, after all these years on WordPress, feels kind of icky. Uh, I guess. And I think customers and users want experiences and solutions more than they want individual themes and plugins. So a premium offering or a premium experience is something I’m interested in. What kind of experience can we do differently that delivers the same result, but takes all of the pain building on WordPress?

[00:40:46] Nathan Wrigley: It kind of feels as if you may be repeating history for yourself here in that, you know, 2010. Array themes, we mentioned you were right there at the beginning of that tidal wave. Maybe with a fair wind, the same thing may happen again here? You may well have discovered that seam of gold, just as it’s starting to take off. Because all the chatter that I’m listening to at the moment is very much related to blocks and exploring patterns, blocks, block based themes, and how you can maybe tie those three things together.

And pro blocks, which bring additional functionality. You know, areas where Core perhaps doesn’t cut it. I’m thinking, in my case, one that just keeps coming into my head is a superior navigation block, that does a whole load of styling and what have you. And who knows what’s going to be around in two or three years time? But there do seem to be companies who are straying into this and dabbling with it and trying, like you are, I guess, to figure out what the landscape may look like.

[00:41:43] Mike McAlister: Yeah, I’m just as unsure I think as anybody about where this thing goes. But I’ve never been afraid to try and put in the work to get something going and see where it goes. Like I said at the top, I think there’s an opportunity here that we’ve not seen in a long time in WordPress and may never see again.

And if these are the early days of the new generation of WordPress, I’m certainly going to try and throw my hat into the ring and craft a new experience, and maybe rebrand WordPress, and help outside folks see WordPress in a new light. Because I think that’s a huge part of this new reboot. Is that WordPress maybe hasn’t been traditionally like, quote unquote cool, to a lot of web folks.

It’s certainly very popular and very prolific, but we maybe haven’t attracted the best talent and the best coverage in the wider web world. So, I look at it as an opportunity to rebrand that and maybe grab another cohort of the web that we haven’t had yet. And I think part of that is new products, and different products, and better looking products, and better experiences, and taking some of the pain out of WordPress that we’ve traditionally had.

[00:42:57] Nathan Wrigley: If somebody listening to this is inspired about block themes in general, because that’s been the broad tenor of what we’ve talked about. Do you have any names to drop or resources that you’ve used, that enabled you to learn this kind of stuff? And if you do mention anything, I will endeavor to link it into the show notes.

I don’t mean like a laundry list of hundreds of things, but a couple of things which you thought, actually, for those that are exploring this, this is a really great resource. This is a really profoundly interesting person and so on.

[00:43:24] Mike McAlister: Yeah. First I would start, I’m somebody who I need to work from examples. I need to see the code and I need to see the, a working thing to get inspired and know how to do things. So, on that note you mentioned that Ollie is on GitHub. It will remain there. This version of Ollie that I’m putting out is always going to be free. And always going to be on GitHub. So it is a great resource for picking through the code, especially theme json, where I think there’s so, so much you can do in there, but it is hard to understand what you can do when you’re kind of looking at it from the outside.

So if you’re curious, start there, because I’ve wired this thing together. I think how it should be, or largely how it should be at this moment in time. And so it’ll give you a great headstart and great understanding of how all these things tie together. So start there.

And in terms of people, I actually, on my Twitter list or on my Twitter page, I have a list of WordPressers. And on that list is a great many folks who are a lot of voices in this stuff. WordPress Core folks like Nick Diego and Rich Tabor, and Carolina Nymark. These people spent a great deal of their time in WordPress, and listening to WordPress conversations, and taking part in the GitHub conversations. So I would check out that list. I can actually send it over to Nathan as well if he wants to include it?

[00:44:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’d be great. I will in some way copy and paste it into the show notes or somehow link to it. But yeah, that’s really helpful. Thank you so much.

[00:44:50] Mike McAlister: Twitter is, love it or hate it. It is where traditionally the WordPress community has hung out, and so it still is the case, even though some people are coming and going. It still is where a lot of conversation happens on WordPress and WordPress development and what’s new. And so it is a good place even if you just want to read and follow along. It is a good place to see those conversations.

[00:45:13] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to whatever it is that you send me, Mike. Thank you for that. Okay, just one final question. It’s more about people finding you really. If somebody’s listened to this and their interest has been peaked. What are the the best ways, it sounds like it might be Twitter, but it may not be. What are the best ways to get in touch with you, Mike?

[00:45:32] Mike McAlister: Yeah, I’m most active on Twitter. Like I said, I think that’s kind of where our community is still thriving. And so, yeah, I’m on Twitter largely. My personal account is @mikemcalister. I do a great deal of tweeting about WordPress and design and the intersection of all these different things.

And then, there’s a dedicated Twitter account for Ollie as well. You can follow that, that’s @buildwithollie. I’m also writing on the Ollie WP blog fairly regularly. So this is another place where I’m able to share my learnings of all of this stuff with block themes and WordPress in general. And, I’m writing some long form content, some short tips and tricks and, that’s all the time I have to hang out.

[00:46:17] Nathan Wrigley: You have other important things to by the sounds of it. Mike, really appreciate you chatting to us today. Thank you so much, and every success with Ollie, whatever direction you take with that.

[00:46:28] Mike McAlister: Thank you so much. I love chatting about this stuff and this was a great form for that, so thank you.

On the podcast today we have Mike McAlister, and heâ€™s here today to talk about his experiences creating a block-based theme.

Mike is a veteran product developer and designer in the WordPress space. He’s founded and sold multiple WordPress products like Array Themes and Atomic Blocks. Now heâ€™s focused on the future of WordPress with his new product brand, Ollie.

Mike kicks off the podcast by telling us about his WordPress journey, and how WordPress blocks have renewed his passion for the platform.

We get into some history, and talk about the era when WordPress themes were extremely popular. Marketplaces like Envato made it possible to sell themes and create a career in ways hitherto unimagined.

Mike explains what the key differences are between a block-based theme and a classic theme. How itâ€™s possible to create themes inside the editor, and how you can do this without needing to know much code. We talk about the fact that, if youâ€™re a coding expert, you could always create complex themes, but this fresh approach opens up the possibilities for those with less technical backgrounds. The experience in the editor might not be exactly what everyone wants, but itâ€™s evolving quickly and maturing with every new release of WordPress.

The conversation moves onto why Mike is so confident that block-based themes are going to succeed. You donâ€™t need to use one, and your trusty classic theme and the associated Customizer will work for the foreseeable future.

We then turn our attention to the technical hurdles that Mike has had to overcome. What new workflows and tools did he need to adopt and master to make his work possible? Mikeâ€™s been really focussed on using WordPress Core Blocks to create his themes, digging into the weeds of what they can do and what their limitations are. Itâ€™s been a path of steady learning, punctuated with minor setbacks when the editor and blocks are updated in unexpected ways. Thankfully, these bumps in the road are now relics of the past, as breaking changes have given way to stability.

We then talk about a specific theme that Mike has just released. Itâ€™s called Ollie, and itâ€™s the focus of the rest of the podcast. How did Mike build Ollie, and what is he hoping to achieve with this new brand?

Patterns feature heavily in Ollie and we talk about how itâ€™s possible to alter the look and feel of your site quickly. Typography and colours are easy to change with the new suite of design tools which ship with WordPress.

If youâ€™re wanting to develop block-based themes, or are just curious about how other developers are building them, this podcast is for you.

Useful links.

Array Themes on Themeforest

Atomic Blocks

OllieWP website

Ollie GitHub repo

WordPressers Twitter list mentioned by Mike

Mike’s Twitter

31.05.2023
WordPress; 20th Anniversary, a Mini Series. Episode 2 With Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft and Tammie Lister.
Transcript

Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the 20th anniversary of WordPress.

Today is a bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s the second of two episodes all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft Tammie Lister and David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

They cover a lot of ground, and it’s fascinating to hear their WordPress stories from the past two decades.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you David Bisset, Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft and Tammie Lister.

David Bisset: We have so much to talk about. We have 20 years of WordPress. We gotta condense in the next 60 or so minutes. Um, for those listening or, um, heaven and forbid if we can use AI to clean up my face. We will be putting this on YouTube maybe hopefully soon. Uh, for video perhaps. We’ll have to figure that out.

I only promise these people audio broadcast, so I have to see if I have to have them sign another contract. My name is David Bisset. Um, I have been talking to people on the 20th anniversary of WordPress, and I’ve been asking ’em a bunch of different questions, and today we have four more interesting people from the WordPress community and me to talk about some particular th and don’t worry, the, the, the, the humor gets self-deprecating, but it goes up from there.
The next 90 minutes, you know, it’s gonna be fantastic. I have four people here that are fantastic contr, uh, contributors and representatives of the WordPress community. Um, I’m gonna let them introduce themselves and then we’re gonna start getting into some particular areas of WordPress history that I think they’re gonna love to share some memories, and hopefully you can relate.
The first is Mihir. Hello Mihir. How you doing?

Meher Bala: Hey everyone. Hi. Uh, my name is me. I’m from Mumbai, India. Uh, I’m a front end developer and a codeable expert. I’ve been using WordPress since last 10 years.

David Bisset: Oh, good. I thought you were gonna say last week. No. All right. 10 years. Wow. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Meher Bala: I don’t know.
I think it’s more than 10 years because I quit my normal nine to five job, eight, eight years back, so it has to be more than that. Just giving 10 plus years.

David Bisset: That’s okay. It’s okay to round.

Meher Bala: I joined the community quite late because I didn’t know there was a community existing, especially my local and then the global.
So it’s been fun from the time I joined.

David Bisset: You’re not going anywhere, are you? You sound like this is Oh, I’m fine. I’m still up on Okay. It sounds like you’re about to send off here and I don’t want this to be that type of podcast. All right.

Meher Bala: No, no, definitely no. All right. I’m here for sure.

David Bisset: Okay, well good. It’s glad to have you. Thank you very much for, uh, coming. Have we ever met before?

Meher Bala: No, I have not met you. I’ve seen all your tweets. I love your

David Bisset: Okay. We can stop there. Alright, we, Robert, Robert, uh, you’re up next?

Robert Windisch: Yeah. I take over before, uh, David like sings in under the screen.

David Bisset: Quickly, quickly, Robert.

Robert Windisch: So yeah. My name is Robert. I am, um, uh, c o of Insight at WordPress agency. I’m in WordPress since 1.52. So for me it’s very e very easy. I’m so old. I can name the release I came in, which was in 2005. Um, and, and people go like, no, you were older. No, no, no, no, no. I’m a late bloomer. Like, I came in like two years already when everybody, when the, the server were already set up, the, the forums was there and I just came in, swooped up and was like, Hey, is can I help with developer stuff? And they got, and the community, German community was like, you can develop here a server admin access. So I just, uh, um, grab a hammer and then like cleaning pipes in the WordPress server community.

David Bisset: All right. Well, good, good to have you on board, Robert. All right, Tammie. Hello. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So I am Tammie. Uh, I’ve. Uh, I had to check how long, which was quite a thing apparently. Um, according to my profile, 2006. Mm-hmm. Uh, I think I, I came because I was torturing a cms, like everybody back in the day, and someone showed me that there was a better way with WordPress.
Um, I think I might have been a bit before that because I was kind of doing it. Um, so that was on wordpress.org and themes brought me to WordPress. So, and since then I’ve been, uh, doing various core contributions. Um, and that’s me.

David Bisset: Yeah. Well, well, if anybody’s been word WordPress, any measure of time, I have seen you in some way, shape, or form.
Ah, Simon, bring it home. Hi. Bring it home.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Hi, I’m Simon. I started using WordPress in 2008, exactly 15 years ago. Um, I started with like, Easy front end development stuff. Worked my way a bit to the back end and at some point graduated from developing stuff myself. And now I am a product owner at Group One. Um, and I spent like the last 10 years organizing meetups and, and wood camps and stuff like that. So I really love that part of our community. Um, and I’m looking forward to at least the next 10 years of that.

David Bisset: Oh good. You, you’re okay. Well exercise and eat, eat a good diet and we’ll see. Uh, well thank you all and again, I’m David, if you’ve probably already know. Um, I work, uh, I’m employed at Awesome Automotive. I run a project called WP r WP Charitable or Charitables, the products for non-for-profit organizations. It’s been a recently acquired and I’m a project manager there. I’ve been, uh, I’ve experienced with, uh, work camps. I’ve been. With Word Camp Miami started in 2008, and I think I was around and since, um, WordPress 1.5, whenever that was. Um, that came out with, with I think, uh, themes and pages and that sort of thing. So I’ve been with, with WordPress for a while. This is not gonna be about me today. This is because I’ve talked enough in the past episodes, um, of that. So I want, I want to feel, um, we’re gonna go around. We’re gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get your picks in terms of the categories we’ve selected, but this is an open conversation. So as soon as the, the initial person gets their, gets their words out of their mouth, you’re feel free to have a discussion and I’ll, uh, I’ll poke up accordingly. So, Mihir, um, Let’s start with you. Uh, let’s talk about, one of the things that we wanted to, wanted to talk, and this is gonna be a little bit different than if you’re, if you’re listening right now, you’ve listened to the others. These are slightly different topics and categories I wanted to touch on here, cuz these, cuz I wanted to get some, there’s so much to cover for WordPress’s. 20th, 20th anniversary in 20 years. There’s so much to cover. So I wanted to make sure we, we, on some of the shows and some of the people I talked to, we, we kind of varied our discussion points.

So first thing we wanted to cover was a memorable design or refresh in WordPress history. Now, some people ask me, well, does this mean this? And does this mean that, um, does this mean project or does this mean that I, when I ask these questions, they’re open for interpretation. So I am not looking, I am looking for something within a scope. But wherever you read that question, you can go from there. So what Mihir, what was your. Memorable design or refresh and WordPress history?

Meher Bala: Uh, my memorable was 1.3. Uh, one was having a multisite built in the co. Mm-hmm. And one was a 20, uh, 10th heme, which was most stylish, more simple and very readable to normal users who, you know, what, just wanna run the WordPress as a blog because blogging had just begun and everyone was using WordPress. So for me it was, 3.0.

David Bisset: Yeah. Uh, I was a big multi-site fan back in the day, and I remember he had to download two versions of WordPress. Yes. Uh, and that was, and that’s, but that was, um, and see that was the, what was the theme again? What was the year 2010?

Meher Bala: 2010 was it? Uh, 2010 was a theme. The year was, uh, 2010.

David Bisset: Right. That makes sense. I was trying to, I was trying to pull up what it looked like, cuz I’m drawing a blank. Remember we were talking about, um,

Meher Bala: it’s the white banner on top.

David Bisset: Oh, there it is. Yeah. I remem Oh yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. That was with the trees in the road. Yes. Is the default picture. Yeah. And it’s kind of hard to describe audibly, but if you just do WordPress 10,000 theme in Google images, you get all the clones appearing and there is some, there was a little bit of styling there, but it was mostly what blogs, what the typical stylish, simple blogs were back then. It was like a large hero image or a large full width image. And then you had your two columns, right?

Meher Bala: Yes. It was something new for a lot of people.

David Bisset: Well before that, not too much before that. I don’t know if there was another word. I, I forget when WordPress year theme started, was this the first one?

Tammie Lister: That was the first default theme? That was the first, that was second one. No, that was the first official default theme. Mr.

Simon Kraft: Well, there was Kubrick before that.

David Bisset: No, I see. Dang. I lost a bet. Years. Yeah, because yeah, I was, I, I should have said that’s the first default theme that was named after years because we had Kubrick for like four or five years before that. Oh yeah. So this is kind of memorable because this

Tammie Lister: is the first default, the one that started the default years
David Bisset: because we got so sick and tired of looking at that, uh, Corick theme. No, I mean, it was nice and pretty, but I mean, it’s like my kids, I can only look at ’em so much before I need something new, new, new to glance at.
So, but yeah, it was perfect. But, alright, so I think that’s pretty memorable. Nice. Round number 3.0, multi-site, no more Kubrick, first year theme. I agree. That’s a pretty good design moment in WordPress history. Um, let’s, uh, so Robert, what’s your, yeah, what’s your, what’s your big, uh, design moment that you wanna share?

Robert Windisch: So, so first, Mihir taking multisite from me, like, uh, we have a conversation next, next word camp like, and from me by the way.

David Bisset: So is that your, was that gonna be your pick?

Robert Windisch: No. Yeah. Uh, I’m the multi side person. Yes.

David Bisset: Oh. Oh, see, we already have our first

Meher Bala: right after three, so.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that’s totally, it’s, it’s, you, you are the first one. Um, and I am, I shying away from other things because I want, I know Tammie wants to, wants to mention that that one thing that end ends with a number, probably this, the design refreshed, but like, I, I give Tammie the, um, the, oh, no. Okay. I can take it. I can take it. Okay.

David Bisset: See, you try to, you try to be a nice human being. Well, well,

Robert Windisch: yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because like, I, I’m the second one, so, um, but I have, like, you are welcome to that one. Yeah. But that’s my, would be my second pick. So, um, so I would, with the, with the biggest like, design, uh, um, like seismic shift from like, uh, from, from the, from the feeling was when the, when the menu went from the top to the left. Like that. That was like that. I have no idea when this was. Like, I’m very bad. Right? Like it was eight ago.

David Bisset: Menu went from the top. You mean the admin making

Robert Windisch: the WordPress menu was in the top third

David Bisset: one? Yes, it was. Cuz I remember in one five it was, but I, I can’t, I can’t remember now. You’re gonna have to make me look things up.

Robert Windisch: I, I would guess, but I’ve, I’ve, I’m bad with like, because it’s, so we’re currently talking about like between like which dinosaur were alive when this happens. So that’s why it’s, it’s so, it’s so far off. And I will simply say like, uh, the biggest, like design wise for the future, for the user interface was really when the, when the top menu, which was not like, it could not scale because you had, uh, determined like link in the menu. We experienced that in the WordPress org menu also that we have a problem with, with link there. So, so that was for me, like a, a, a big, um, like design visible decision that, um, was, was made and then, Like, it’s now the current, the current way of the WordPress backend.

David Bisset: Okay. For now, I’ll, we’ll, I’ll, I’ll guess that it was around 2.0 cuz I remember it being in one five and it was pretty, and I started using one five, but very quickly after I started using it. Like, I don’t remember the top stuff match for very long, so I mean, I’ll be, I’ll be Googling to fill that in, but, okay. Well, we’re gonna, we’re, we’re gonna put 2.0 as a placeholder, but That’s right. It’s, and just fortunately, I mean, we think the sidebar is a bit of a mess today. Although the stuff that we had, just imagine if it was a top-down navigation menu in the admin.

Robert Windisch: Yeah. All the, all the, uh, like upsell things now in the top menu bar, that would be like, lovely. What would it be?

David Bisset: Why, how would that work? You, we all the plugin authors have to add like a second navigation, second dropdown. It’s like a mega menu.

Simon Kraft: We just, we’ll just like break and add another line, and you have a huge block on top of every Diamond page.

David Bisset: Tammie’s miming all of the facial expressions as we’re talking here. That’s fine. All right, okay, well, Tammie, now it’s your turn. Robert, I’m gonna get back to you on a version number on that exactly, because

Meher Bala: I think version number’s, uh, 2014.

David Bisset: Okay. That’s a year. That’s close. That we’re, we’re, we’re getting closer now. So 2014 is the next clue. 2014, the menu came inside. So that’s four years after the 2010 theme. I know I can do math, but I mean, that would mean it would be greater than WordPress.

Robert Windisch: No, no, no, no. The the menu, the, the, the, the, it was was already decide when the, when the other thing that I want to mention later, uh, um, come, come.

David Bisset: No, don’t ruin it. Don’t worry, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. All I know is that I was. Yeah, all I know is that, um, there’s probably dirt younger than the version number that we’re gonna find, but anyway. All right, Tammie, time, time to go from miming to audio and sharing your, uh, the biggest or most memorable design moment. And this should be right up your alley

Tammie Lister: 2005 and it’s Kubrick. And the reason is, if you speak to most people that got their visuals or, or some front end work in WebPress, uh, have been around for a while, they got their start because of Kubrick. That was one of the themes that got them into it. Or they started tinkering around with themes. Um, it was one of those themes that you like cut your teeth on, you learnt with, so that, I know we were kinda saying it was around for a while, but honestly it’s what. Most of us learn how to theme from. So for me, I think it’s the most memorable design. Um, mainly for cuz of the gradient. If you think of Kubrick, you see the gradient. So that’s the one for me. It’s gotta be Kubrick.

David Bisset: Well, for me personally, I may have mentioned this on another episode, um, but Kubrick wasn’t just another design or even a design that stayed for a long time. It was when WordPress was really starting to get popular for blogs. Yeah. And I think visually speaking, at least for me, that whenever you ha if you wanna get a couple of screenshots or photos or memories Yeah. Of just how, when blogging got popular, Um, yeah.

Tammie Lister: Would, and I set the tone. Yeah. So many people just were never color gradient or had that big header and that header format stayed for a very long time. The big headers. We’ve only just very recently stopped having big headers in our designs and kind of started moving away from the big header design and realizing you don’t have to have that in every design, so,

David Bisset: well, you know, what they say about big headers.
What’s that?

Tammie Lister: Um, for, for me, I feel that you, you can’t really include this list without saying that because it feels quite seminal to Yeah. What you learn and at the front end, the code level, because we really learn how to create themes from it as well. Oh yeah.

David Bisset: Iconic. Iconic, very good choice. So, yeah, we’ve had, um, WordPress 3.0, our mystery WordPress 2.0 theme that we’re gonna go to do, and, uh, Kubrick 2005. So, uh, Simon, what I, can you share with us what your memorable, uh, design. Moment is in our WordPress history. So far we’ve, we’ve, and I’m, so far, I’m glad we have stayed in the past, but are you gonna, are you gonna be there with us, Simon, or are you edging a little closer to the future? Like pick something from the future? Um, no, I mean, I meant far past.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Okay. I, I think mine is not that, that long ago. Well, it should be like 10 years. Um, Robert already, um, alluded to it. Um, I pick MP six, the, the redesign of the word presentment interface. Um,

David Bisset: see, you hear that Si Simon. That means I can Google it and get a year versus Roberts description

Simon Kraft: it should be what? Press 3.8.

David Bisset: Well, I’m not gonna fact check-

Robert Windisch: just keep in mind the new redesign of the interface.
Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. It, it’s just 10 years old. That’s, that’s still good. Um, and that was was a point where I really started. Loving the way the WordPress back end looks, because before that it was, it was cool, it was nice, it was usable.
Uh, but with that, it felt like really fresh and still to a certain degree does, uh, today. And I think there were a couple of smaller, um, redesigns, I think WordPress 5.7 at the standardization of, of colors or something it was called, where we had a bit more contrast, a bit more unified set of colors, which is also very nice. I came to really love that. But that’s the interface on the web that I interact with, like every single day of every year, ever since. Uh, so that’s, that’s quite cool.

David Bisset: I, it looks like, to me, the, I mean, I think this plugin was around a while before it actually officially came out in the WordPress police, because I’m finding posts from 2013. Um, and do you remember why it was called MP six? I mean, must stand for something

Robert Windisch: Tammie doesn’t know. Nobody knows here.

David Bisset: Yeah. I’m looking at,

Tammie Lister: I think it was a project name.

David Bisset: It had to be Matt, think it was, it had to be probably Matt or who, or I forget the original designer or the original project creator cuz I’m, cuz this was nine years ago.

Tammie Lister: It was a group, group of people who created it and got together.
It was one of the first projects where a group of people got together and created it and kind of worked on it. Um, it was kind of the first attempt at that, um, to get kind of designed, done collectively, I guess.

David Bisset: Yeah. Was that the first, what do you call them? Um, project plug-ins. No, that’s not the right word. Um, feature. I’m not even sure. Feature plug-ins turns back then. Yeah. Cuz this, would this been considered plugins or anything? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the term didn’t exist, but it was, I think it was probably one of the first quote unquote feature plugins. Right. Yeah, I mean without that we’d still be looking at the uh, um, now if I can find a screenshot between Robert’s Pick and Simon’s Pick for the WordPress admin where the, it was side navigation, but it’s still an before MP six. Man, I can’t remember it.

Robert Windisch: People, people will not, people will not like if you show them MP six, it looks very like the current, um, interface. So that’s why, um, oh yeah, we don’t change anything. Just need to like the pre, the pre MP six phase, because that was the new redesign, as I always, I cannot, I cannot emphasize nothing. That was how new this was for, this was for the WordPress people, and we are like, finally someone is investing in the WordPress Pega interface. So that was really like a, a, a jump in in, in, um, in user, in, in, um, user interface, um, and, and usability of WordPress.

David Bisset: It had a bunch of new dash icons, remember, da remember Dash icons. Um mm-hmm. For those of us who know what those are a redesigned widgets page by Sean Andrews from his Widgets project. If, uh, P six included that. Wow. I didn’t, I totally forgot about the widgets project. Improvements to the customizer color schemes. Is this, is this when we got our color schemes like Ectoplasm or some, I wonder if that’s Yep.

Tammie’s shaking her head vigorously guess. And a new midnight color scheme. So that’s, thank you, Debbie. Thank you Sarah from 2013 for helping us remind that. Well, that sounds fantastic. So we have stayed. We have stayed pretty, pretty well pre 2015 pre Gutenberg. That’s a i I applaud you all for the biggest, most memorable design moments, not being part of, uh, anywhere beyond the 5.0 release of WordPress.

Thank you. So just to, just to rehash here, Mihir, uh, WordPress, uh, 3.0 multi-site and the first year themed theme. Um, yes, Robert, uh, we’re still gonna hunt for a version specific for that, I assure you. But when the, but we’re talking about when the big jump made from moving navigation from the top to the left hand side.

Uh, we’re gonna guess that’s 2.0 WordPress for now. Kubrick, who could forget Kubrick? We didn’t. Tammie thought that was, and that probably one of the most fundamental images and thumbnails representing the blog when blog blogs went. We’re in its heyday when movable type was, was starting to fade and WordPress jumped on the scene, how iconic.

And then MP six, Simon picked that. And that of course is just, you know, we still have that with us today. And that’s been, it’s been, been probably, it’ll probably around 10 years. So, Fantastic. Well, uh, from design-wise, I really don’t have much to, to say in this department. Um, I, I think we’re, I think the early version of WordPress that introduced pages was great, but that’s not really much of a design feature.

That’s just, I think it did open it up for a little bit more design. Um, I, if I had to pick something, I, I don’t know if this would be my most memorable, but I use it every day. It is the redesign of the WordPress site, um, wordpress.org. Um, a lot of people don’t remember how that looked way, way, way, way back then.

Um, with, and then it was all split out into various groups, uh, various categories as we have them today, you know, core and design and plugins and, and all of that. Um, I don’t know, maybe I’m, maybe this is an old person talking, but it was really, really clunky and really plain back in the early days. And now with the learn.wordpress.org and the redesign stuff’s, it’s happening.

It’s looking so much more professional and grown up maybe is the, is the best word I can describe it in. But anyway, that’s, that’s just me. And maybe for, I will share some, if I can find some old screenshots of that, which I couldn’t initially, um, I would love to, love to share them with you. So let’s move on to our next category.

Mihir, you are up again. So we are talking about the most notable enhancement to WordPress core that isn’t Gutenberg related. So I definitely, so I definitely put that. That, that qualifier in there, because I think that would be way too easy. Um, we in way too broad. Um, and when I say most notable enhancement to WordPress core, that means this is, um, it, it had to appear in WordPress core at some point.

Maybe it’s something that’s not there anymore or maybe something that it was acquired or merged into WordPress core. Didn’t have to start there, but it was something, a most notable enhancement to WordPress core. And I had some people say, well, what do you mean by enhancement? Do you mean coding wise or design wise?

Again, this is up to your interpretation. As long as you don’t say the G word, we will be Okay. Mihir. So go ahead. What is your most notable enhancement to WordPress Core? We had no guten, guten free.

Meher Bala: Mine is the events, uh, widget on a dashboard.

David Bisset: I’m sorry, say that again. My, my ears exploded. What was that?

Meher Bala: The event widget.

David Bisset: Oh, the event widget, yes. Ooh. This is why I like talking to people that are above the age of 18, cuz that’s all I have in my house for, for like a week, every week. The events widget. Oh, tell us, tell us a little bit about that in case people have have forgotten about that.

Meher Bala: So, uh, whenever there’s any, uh, meetup happening or WordPress happening, uh, in your locality, the events are displayed there.

And in our local, what I noticed is once the widget came out, a lot of new people who didn’t know the community started, you know, attending meetups, started interacting with the community. So we had a few different people at every meetup. So that’s something which is memor, which is.

David Bisset: That for me is an amazing pick. I never would’ve thought of that. And apparently you did.

Meher Bala: I see the community grow even with that. So for me, that’s still in the mind more than Gooden book.

David Bisset: That’s amazing because not only does it serve, did it serve a purp? I I, I can’t remember if this is when people realize meetup.com was crap. I can’t remember exactly when. Uh, sorry. Meet, sorry, or sorry to our sponsor meetup.com by the way. Um, I love you. Uh, so mom, uh, who works there? So, meetup.com was probably the only way WordPress people were fighting each other at the time. I do you have a, do you know when that, I guess we’re gonna have to find out when that came about cuz I have no idea.

Simon Kraft: That was WordPress 4.8.

David Bisset: And do you have a year for that? No. Oh, well, now that we know a version number, hello. Welcome to a podcast, but we’re doing our research live on the air. Thank you. 2017. 2017 or something like that.
Robert Windisch: Welcome. Welcome to a normal community conversation, by the way, we don’t, we don’t run around and no version numbers and years.
We just go like, do you remember this feature? Oh my God. That’s it.
David Bisset: You get what you pay for the hallway track. People are getting what they

Tammie Lister: for when someone get, gets their phone out and starts tapping and then finds it, and then you go, oh yes,

David Bisset: someone’s rolling their eyes right now and starting a letter.
Dear David, oh, well

Tammie Lister: I can’t believe they didn’t know that.

David Bisset: David Professional in quotes, uh, we have that before that 2017. The reason why I was wanting a year is because that is before I think Slack and where Press Slack, I believe.

Robert Windisch: No, no, no. Slack was, slack was uh, in civil already. Slack was there.

David Bisset: So, yeah. Okay, so. I don’t wanna pinpoint it, I guess. Yeah. Cuz 20, I remember a community summit when they made the announcement, but 20, that could have been as early as 2015. So if that widget came out in 2017, there was still ways. I guess the two top ways you would know about WordPress community would be meetup.com was still probably the biggest way there.
And then maybe if you were on WordPress Slack at the time. Right.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, but meetup media.com was the, we, we, so we decided on media.com because I remember the conversation we had internally be, Hey, let’s build this. And like, people who know project management was, was like, um, you know, that we want to do democratizing publishing, not democratizing events here.

So, so that’s why luckily we decided to simply give meetup.com money and let they run all of this. And we simply like hooked the meet, hooked the Meetup API into their system and was simply like, um, doing, let them do all the work.
David Bisset: Oh, I was talking, when I talk about meetup.com, I talk about the interface on meetup.com because my experience with it was, I was running meetups through meetup.com and creating the meetups, um, even searching for meetups, and I’m, I’m sure it got better over time.

I think Amaz, coincidentally enough, is when Weber, when there was that single. Page for the WordPress meetups. Like you said, they, I think there was some, some deal with the, uh, with, um, with, I don’t know. I would, I’m gonna guess WordPress Foundation on this was, was involved or something, but before a while you would just have random spots of communities on meetup.org.

Which org, which was hard to find. That’s the experience I remember cuz I was running one of those meetups, or two of them actually for a while. And then there came a time where everything was under one umbrella. Organizational wise, I think it had a dedicated page and probably, I’m guessing at that time is where the widget would probably start pulling that kind of information.

Right. Cuz it’s all centralized Meetup. It’s probably, it’s probably, um, like a meetup organization or something like that. So apologies for me getting it a little confused. I think it did get better, but I, I remember once we had that widget, I pointed people toward the widget and we would have meetups where I said, how many people found us through the widget and we always had one or

two people at our meetups raise their hand. So I think that’s an amazing pick. Does any, did, doesn’t, does any, I I’m seeing a few people nod. So is that your experience as well, Simon?

Simon Kraft: Yeah. I think our meetup in, in Germany, multiple meetups in Germany, like grew tenfold or something in the year following the, the, this update with 4.8. So that’s really huge for the meetup community.

David Bisset: Yeah. So not only do we get a nice new widget on the dashboard, which doesn’t come by that often, but it had an impact on the community. So I think that’s a really cool pick. Really appreciate you take us down me memory lane and my apologies to meetup.com. Um, Robert. I believe you’re up next. Um, so again, just in case, uh, people have nodded off here listening to us

Robert Windisch: totally like, yeah, totally fine. I can bring up something that is nothing with five. Oh, that is a feature that influenced many people and that, uh, everybody goes like, yeah,

David Bisset: just I said Guttenberg related. Now if there’s anything else in five that wasn’t,

Robert Windisch: no. Not even close. No, no. I’m, I’m still, I’m still in a very old feature. I’m still in three, 3.0. I’m talking about, menus.

David Bisset: Menus. Oh, you mean like creating menus?

Robert Windisch: Before that you needed to have pages and pages needed to have redirect because you needed to get some structure. And then the only thing to have a high, high cultural, uh, a structure where you have like a parents and chil uh, children was with pages. And that was like when people like fumbled their menu structure together with external links. And then you had a drag and drop in the WordPress back and with menus.

David Bisset: You. Wow. That act. Wow. I can’t remember that o That was wor that was 3.0. Yeah.

Robert Windisch: Wow. That was merged from Wu. Seems the WCI feature of menus were merged in the WordPress core

David Bisset: wow. That’s so hard to believe. Looking back on that now, 3.0, not so, not only P 3.0 had multi-site and, and, and the new theme it had, it had the menu stuff too. That’s amazing that, that would’ve been so barbaric. It’s probably the reason why my webs

Robert Windisch: no difference with me. No promise with me with features and breakfast.

David Bisset: Uh, that’s so barbaric. It’s like, for a long time it’s like, why do all these WordPress sites don’t have barely have any menus on ’em until this date? Co. I remember Cooper, I don’t, I might explain why my early Cooper Gays, I don’t see many, I don’t see many menus. They were on the, they were on the sidebar. A lot of the links for websites. Yeah, I re I don’t know,

Tammie Lister: it was all a widget or, or kind of lists

Robert Windisch: and No, that the link, the link, the link feature where you could have like defined what’s,

Tammie Lister: that’s what it was. Cause that’s all we had. You didn’t have anything else. And then when you had early menus, you had to do those walker things. The, you only knew a few knew special magic words and more wizard. That was because it was really, really difficult.

David Bisset: Oh wow. Okay. Well, yeah, definitely notable enhancement menus. Where could we be without menus? It’s like a, it’s like a car without, I dunno, a steering wheel or something. All right, Tammie. Uh, notable enhancement to WordPress core and no good. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: I think I’m back at 3.0, but I want that checked custom post types is where I’m going. Uh, I feel like we’re just settling on that release, but it’s one of those releases where we just kind of, it feels like it grew up or we got the features, which then meant the, not just people could write logs or, or use, you could then pivot and grow and extend.

That’s really what that release felt about. And custom post types, if you think about everyone that’s made a product or everyone that’s used in an agency or anyone’s done anything with WordPress, they wouldn’t have probably done that if it hadn’t been for a custom post type. So it kind of was there, or, or at least that concept.

So, and even Emberg has the, the G word, I’m sorry, but that has the roots in that kind of thinking. So yeah, custom post types is the thing for me. That’s, it’s,
David Bisset: that’s, it’s, it’s. It’s really what started to make WordPress more than a blog. Like everybody’s, yeah. But then

Tammie Lister: you could, like ex you could make it yours and you could take it your your direction and you could build on top of it. You know, we now think about like headless and doing everything you want and all that. That would not been impossible if we hadn’t started thinking about custom post types, which now sounds really like simple. Right? Um, but it’s not that back then that was radical thinking. Yes.

David Bisset: So yeah, you could start making. And history would rather us not learn this lesson too deeply. But I mean, you, you could make a like WordPress into any sort of application you wanted to. Yeah. Yeah. Not that you should, but I mean, you could. Right. And there was, and there was already custom post types.

Tammie Lister: It wasn’t just these pages with, with Kubrick, but it was just this flat file. You, you, I mean, as we’ve just heard, you had navigation and, and then you had these different things. You had so much in 3.0. 3.0 was basically like Christmas.

David Bisset: Yeah. I mean, how much brain matter had this. How much brain matter was scraped off the floor at the Word camp announcement for 3.0. You know, it’s like our minds were blown so much. Just stop it. Yeah, stop it. It’s all, it’s already dead. Uh,

Tammie Lister: yeah, but if you think back then about the upgrade paths of 3.0 as well, cuz back then it was very different as well. Let’s say we don’t have releases that are that significant now because so many things happen then it’s kind of mind blowing.

David Bisset: Yes. It’s like you, you went out, you went to, you went to, you went to the customer saying, let’s upgrade you where this is the customer. No. Really? No. Yeah. Let’s, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s, let’s go nuts. Just cup take. All right, Batman. So, all right Simon. So we’ve got an events widget, we’ve got menus, we’ve got custom post types.

Uh, I don’t wanna put any pressure on you here, but, um, do you have something he’s gonna say entering text into a box? For the win, Alex,
Simon Kraft: and that, that was exactly what I was going for. Now, actually, in the first round, all my picks and the backups and their backups were picked by everyone else.

David Bisset: But this time I, I said to come, I said To come with a sat.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. And, but this time, every single one of my, of my picks is still in the race. And that makes it a bit hard. And I’m going for the, I think most insignificant one of them, because it’s no longer in core. And that’s something we don’t do that often. Oh, no.

David Bisset: Um, oh, no, I think I know what it is. It’s post formats. Yes.

Simon Kraft: Um, I, I really loved that feature back in the day. Uh, as I said, I was

David Bisset: te Tell us a little bit about post formats, Simon.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. I, I, I was, I was building a lot of themes back then and post formats basically had the idea that you cannot only post a post. So not just a blob of text, but also. Oh, I have lists somewhere here so I don’t have to bumble around like an idiot.

Um, something that was called a site, like a, a small kind of update kind of post. You had a galleries, links, uh, images, quotes, a status while reading that. I’m not so sure how that compares to a site. Um, video, audio and chat. And they’re gone now. They were introduced in 3.1. Um, but they were like, that was a really fun way of, of styling different kinds of content in blocks.

David Bisset: I remember Matt talking about it on stage, by the way, and I mean, I’m that old.

Robert Windisch: I’m so happy that they are gone. I’m so happy that they, I’m not, I’m not at all.

David Bisset: Robert. Robert, Robert. They’re some confusing for people. Robert, we, we’ll get to, we’ll get to your negative emotions, but let’s, I’ll, I’m sorry Simon, I interrupted. Go ahead. You were telling us about this wonderful feature.

Simon Kraft: It was so wonderful and at some point, I’m not sure when. It was removed from Core. I think there’s still a way around that. You can still technically use it in some capacity, but it’s not an ongoing core.

Tammie Lister: I mean, still you can also use a block now you could use a block and, and have it as a, that’s not the same. Yeah. I mean, no, you could sign it.

David Bisset: Well, it was introduced in 3.1, it says here. So it almost made like we were writing an, we were writing high back then as a WordPress. People we’re like, oh man, 3.0 is so awesome. What’s next? What’s next? Oh, this post format stuff. Oh man, we gotta do this. And then, and then crickets. Why, why do you all think that post formats didn’t make it?

Simon Kraft: I think, uh, blogging is not that relevant anymore. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Unfortunately. So I think that’s, that’s one of the things is like, It’s very in the blogging sphere, I think it works just for blogging or not for a particular type of blogging even. Mm-hmm. Um, and there was a, you know, if you think about, what was it?

Timelines, it was a big thing back then. I went kind of wanna bring them back, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, and like listening to, and I’m doing and status updates. It was kind of in a time before we used social media as well, so people were using their blog to post and syndicate everything on there. And people just started doing that in other places rather than their blog.

Not saying they’re not gonna come back with, uh, the world as it is and owning your own content. But I think that because it was very particular, and then WordPress was starting to become about more broad in its terms. I think that’s the thing when we moved to plugins being about particular things rather than the interface.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, I just want to pick on my like, negative thing that I said I, I just wanted, like in terms of the user, for the user, it was very complicated to like decide while writing. And, uh, if we are emphasizing on like for the majority of users and have it very lean, mean, uh, interface, then it’s like going like, okay, what of these seven things, is that what you currently want to do?

And or nine or whatever it was. And it was not extendable, so it was Oh my God. So that’s why it was very, for the user, not that, that’s why I’m saying like, uh, um, it was not easy to understand and they just want to publish and then we are going like, please do this checkbox and otherwise you cannot like, start the car.
So that’s why I was like, um, really against, uh, the, the post format because they were against the, the, the, the directory of WordPress having like becoming easier to use for people. Yeah. And, and as much as I love the feature, I think that’s a valid reason to, to remove it.

Meher Bala: Because even a lot of my clients. They want, they choose a, uh, post type, and they expected some result, something else came up. So a lot of people were confused. Users.

David Bisset: I could see that. S all right, so I have here events, widget menus, custom post types, and r i p to post post formats, although I think it’s in the code somewhere, it’s, and, um, you, you can up to this point, right?

They wouldn’t just outright kill it. They hit it and it’s still in there somewhere. And it’s just one of those few things in WordPress that had a lot of, uh, fanfare. And again, it just, for one reason or another, it just kind of fizzled a little bit. And the, and so anyway, um, so I’m, I’m gonna throw in mine.

So, believe it or not, there is something that was once popular. And I don’t know if post formats, you could say it was popular, but I, I like to think it was at least it had a little bit of, uh, runway. There was something early on in WordPress that was popular, that was used quite a bit. And then inversion 3.5, I think at 3.5.
Feel free to correct me, uh, future Self that, um, it, it disappeared. Um, I’m talking about something in the admin. I’m talking about Something was, started very on in WordPress and in fact, it was part of blogging culture for a long time that if you had a blog on your website in the sidebar, I’m looking to see if peopleare starting to think about this.

You had a list of other people’s blogs that you could l that you would link to, and that was called drum roll. Please think I broke my table. Um, blog roll. That was called a blog roll, but in the WordPress backend, does anybody remember what menu that was? No. Okay. Links. I’m All right. Thanks for reading it.

Links. Sorry, there was a links menu. No, no, that’s right. I made, so it was the links. So I don’t know if this was in WordPress from day one. I like to think like pretty soon in WordPress it was, I couldn’t find when it was actually officially added, but I’m pretty sure I could have, I put my mind to it. But link management phase out of WordPress, from what I can see around WordPress, 3.5, um, supposedly wordpress.com added them back or something along those lines.
I’m not sure if they’re still there. Um, so when WordPress 3.5 links was gone, and, you know, by the time it was gone, nobody was using it. Very few people were using it. Um, it, because I remember when it was gone, it was like one of those things that like, it was, it was getting old and crusty anyway. And it had, it would needed to be taken out to the refuge, trash bin, dumpster, whatever you kids are calling it these days.

But I remember using that as one of the first things when I started with WordPress 1.5. Cuz blog rolls were a thing, you would like link the top. Like you people were reading your blog, they wanted something similar to, and you needed something on the sidebar. And believe it or not, um, when people stopped using that, they kind of went over to menus.

Um, like a menu widget or something, I think was, some people wanted to continue that. But yeah, the links management system blog rolls in the early days of blogging. Those were things, you know. Um, so anyway, um, r i p to R one links management. So that was for me. All right. Lastly,

Robert Windisch: can I jump, can I jump in?

David Bisset: Can you link to something? Sure.

Robert Windisch: Yeah. Yeah. I, um, I cannot like, because it was also hard for me to pick something and, um, uh, Simon, do you do the other thing? Um, yeah. Okay. So, um, uh, one of the, one of the things that, um, was very, was very, very important, but it’s not like really visible to see this to people, um, is for me the, uh, the rest api.

Um, because, um, if we talk about like what we are currently like doing with all the, the word we cannot mention here because it’s a, it is a, it’s a history show.

David Bisset: The he who cannot be named yes.

Robert Windisch: But without the rests api, many things currently would not be possible because that’s the foundation and like the, um, the sheer energy to put this into WordPress against all arts against, like, why do we need this?
It’s not a visible feature. And when everybody was like, but we need a rest api, XML L P C is not gonna make it. We need to have the future to really communicate with the WordPress backend, and this needs to be in WordPress. We really, really need this. And then we got it like, um, some base features in there, and now we have it like as the foundation of, we cannot name it here.
Uh, we have this, uh, foundation that if you would disable that you would like have a really a timeish and jump back in a time with the features that we are currently having.

David Bisset: Yeah. Yeah. The rest

Simon Kraft: and probably the next, next iteration of the WordPress interface, like WP admin. Is, I guess, very likely to also be based on the rest api.
David Bisset: So here are some runner-ups. Just thought I’d throw ’em out there real quick. Auto updates, I’m,

Simon Kraft: that was the one that Robert meant, uh, I, I should mention. Yeah, uh, we discussed that earlier. Um, all updates were introduced in 3.7 and changed, I guess, WordPress forever. Because since then, every WordPress website is updated, at least patched, uh, to its new version, which is really cool.
And until recently we, we also kept like all the, I dunno, what was the last version of, of 3.7 still supported like

Robert Windisch: 30, something like that. 30 or 30 something. Yeah.
Simon Kraft: So it was really crazy that all these old versions are still still maintained to a degree.

David Bisset: Mihir, did you? I, I had, I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry. I wanted to get Mihir. Mihir was shaking her head like a bo, like a bobblehead doll. Um, there, did you grasp auto updates because, uh, Mihir as well as everyone else, I think, because I know there was a lot of controverts in the beginning about WordPress back then. Smaller market share than it does now. Were you comfortable with auto updates, Mihir, in your, in, in your, um, decade?

Uh, well, I’m sorry you weren’t a decade before, but how were you comfortable? Were you comfortable with WordPress updates? Initially,

Meher Bala: no, because a lot of, uh, sites broke. That was because of the theme and the plugins. But as yours past auto updating WordPress is good because at least people have reduced saying that WordPress is not secure.
Yeah. When it is auto updated people, okay. Find that fine. And WordPress is secure, what we add to it with a theme or plugin. There is some vulnerability over there.

David Bisset: So you, you, so you, you got warm to it. What were you saying, Tammie? Yes.

Tammie Lister: Uh, I was gonna take in a different direction, so I’m checking wherever we are done on order updates.

David Bisset: Oh yeah. Well, uh, yeah. The other two I only wanted to mention in, in, in passing was the customizer. Um, that’s kind of, we’re getting, we’re kind of seeing that maybe in the rear view mirror a little bit. For a while though, that was the true no-code interface to customizing a theme, um, of, in core anyway. And la lastly was the, um, uh, let’s see.

I pasted a u URL in this URL does not make sense. There is also smaller things too that maybe doesn’t play to, I wouldn’t say. A huge part, but we had things like site health, um, import exporting, WordPress, um, in from core with the plugins, that sort of thing. So lots of little things. Uh, and
Tammie Lister: I had one from 2012, which was, uh, something that’s gonna get redesigned or reworked mm-hmm.

Uh, in this cycle or this phase, which is the new media management happened in 2012, which sounds a long time ago for it.

David Bisset: Yeah. I, I can’t remember what it was like before then. I think you had to draw something and mail it to your WordPress blog,

Tammie Lister: be glad that you don’t remember it. It was, it, it was a big thing. And I think that, and even you could have picked like the old way we used to do revisions, which even now you look at revisions and you think, oh, that’s quite dated. The old way was even more dated back in the day. Um, and why I kind of thought of those ones was because they looked dated to us now, but. We are redoing them now.

And I kind of think that that’s kind of interesting to think of. Like the cycle of like every 10 or so years is kind of when we kind of redo things, which kind of is kind Oh, that’s healthy.

David Bisset: It’s a project. Hey, well we’re an open source. If we can get to the 10 year mark, that’s a win, right? Uh, pretty healthy actually.
To, just to wrap, just to wrap this section up. Um, completely forgot about revisions. Um, not that I used them too often, but, um, that and the little thing when the slider came in. Yes.

Tammie Lister: From when we first got the sliding,

David Bisset: I’m not sure if I took to the slider very quickly because I’m like, it’s kinda like going to the eye doctor, does a look better to you?
Or B, I worked on that A or B, no, it had nothing to do with the design. It had me trying to keep in my head what, and then the side by side stuff, I think, uh, wa was, was a lot better. But revisions has saved more people’s butts probably than, than one would remember. Oh. Because I, uh, that an auto save. Um, for a while, I don’t think, I don’t remember when, but I know WordPress, when it started, did not autos save your posts as you were typing them.

And I remember Matt said, standing on stage saying, no, now your power can go out or whatever. And you’ve got that post and revisions, incl. And, and that also for me, blended into later revisions where, uh, you, you’re, there’s a previous revision. Are you sure you want to edit this or do you wanna look at that or go back to it?

Tammie Lister: But I think back then revisions was, um, Yeah, I think I always kind of forget the words, but it was when we were trying to make things look real, I think skew morphic or something. It was like when you were trying to make like apple, uh, you’re trying to make things look real or those kind of design things.

And I think unfortunately it did inherit a little bit from that. Um, so I think now we would go a lot more, um, streamlined. Uh, design has come on a little bit. Uh, it’s more information based. It’s more how you are gonna process. It’s more kind of quick. If you look at the way GitHub and all those kind of interfaces are now, you know, we’ve learned.

But back then we were trying to solve a problem that hadn’t really been. Kind of comprehended. We were trying to visualize issues that we hadn’t. So it was kind of really interesting to think of like, going back to it now with everything we know about the complications of those. And now we know that people probably do want to extend those, probably do wanna export them, probably do find them useful as well.

David Bisset: We may see a little bit of a change in this department with phase three, with the, um, multi-user stuff too.

Tammie Lister: Oh, I think we’re gonna see a complete change in that way, at least I hope we do, because honestly, that’s not gonna scale.
David Bisset: Yeah. You think? Yeah, I would. Yeah. I, I always get, I get, my daughter says, I’m trying to edit up, posting your site and it says, you’re still in there.

Can you close a tab? And I’m like, I, or I can kick you out. I’m like, fine. You’re your mother’s daughter anyway, so. Alright, so we have one last category here. Um, Mihir, you are up first. Now this category is how I described this. And I’m getting them, I’m getting these, these are getting wordier as we go along, but okay, so this is a memorable community moment or community initiative or community Cause that wasn’t a WordPress release and you’re saying, well, why did David put not a WordPress release?

Um, well, because there have been a couple of memorable WordPress releases focused on who was releasing, who is contributing, all great things. But we’ve got a lot of that feedback in the, in the past about, oh, it was, it was, um, you know, the WordPress releases, especially the ones where, um, the underrepresented groups took over forward word press release.

Great. That that could be counted as a community moment. Fantastic. But everybody says that when they first think of one. So I wanted us to be a little bit more tougher, no word press releases, but anything else is open game in terms of a community moment initiative or a cause. So, Mihir, I would love to hear what you’ve got to say about this.

Meher Bala: So, For me, when I joined the community, I always, uh, like the very few women who participated and when I used to go to work camps, also the women were fewer. So I just started, you know, gathering all the women and started taking group fit pictures and it became a thing, like if I was there in Word Camp, it was, you know, I had to do a group with them because everyone got excited, new people added.

So pre pandemic, each word camp I went to, I had, I mandatory went on stage in the lunch break and decided a time place where, you know, everyone will get together. I heard a few things, but I said, this is helping encourage other women. So I don’t see any problems, so why not? And I used to put on, put on Twitter as well.

David Bisset: So, so, so you organ Yeah. It’s kinda encouraging someone else. What’s that?

Meher Bala: It’s kind of encouraging another woman to be a part of the community.

David Bisset: Absolutely. Um, so like selfies, but good, but selfies representing under underrepresented groups. I, I, they’re there. Yeah. The WordPress, I mean, you can talk about this all, all day. And this is not exclusive to the WordPress community, it’s tech in general, right. We’re always used to that. I have a daughter who is growing up and she kind of grew up in the WordPress community more or less for the last 10 years, you know, with the word camp exposure and everything. And you know, today we kind of take some of the efforts to make people feel welcome for granted a little bit.

Um, there’s still obviously a lot that needs to be done in the community, but back in the early days it was, um, You know, especially if someone, someone relates to an someone who relates to a subject or a con or a conference, they love seeing people that represent them on stage or representing them organizing an event.

Right. And maybe it’s not apples to apples. Exactly. But you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like, especially, um, especially if, just think if you’re a young woman, I can’t, but I have a daughter, so, you know, I’ve seen her reactions and, um, it’s, she, she can connect so well with when people, when women were speaking at meetups.
So just imagine like back then we just, you know, their focus wasn’t there cuz we were just happy to have meetups in ward camps, period. And then once we started getting people to speak, then we kind of, like some people especially, started to notice a pattern and that had to be brought to a lot of people’s attention.

So that kind of, we kind of evolved into a way where, yes, okay, now we’ve got the ba, we’ve got some basics down, but now we’ve got a lot of improving to do because if we want this community to grow and be decent human beings, we should try to make things as as. And you know what that does for me as an organizer, I was focused on speaker stuff, but there were so many people at the work camps like you, Mihir, we’re doing these, um, side, I don’t want to use the wrong term because they’re important, but um, Site events, right?

Or something like that. But I mean that respectfully in terms of like, yeah, let’s, let’s take a, let’s get this certain group together and take a photo or let’s, or, or have this, um, mini meetup or like an after dinner thing at WordPress meetups and that sort of thing. Or even now online, you know, there’s various, um, communities out there that exist for particular kinds of groups.

Um, black Press and so forth that, um, that I, at least I’m familiar with. So I think that was a fantastic idea. I don’t know if anybody else is familiar with anything else or wants to jump in, but I think putting down a moment in terms of, now I don’t know how to word this exactly, so maybe you can gimme a term.
I can put in the show notes. I have women’s selfies written down here just because that’s how my brain works and I don’t wanna be canceled later. WordPress, sorry. If you can gimme another term. That’s what I got. What’s that? Women in WordPress. You got it. I will quote you on that.
Tammie Lister: Have you seen that? It’s possible to not just see one of you though, as well, which is what you are identifying.

You are, you are saying that there’s more than one of you and there’s more than one possibility of you as well, which is really, really important. Um, seeing all the different possibilities that you could do in all the different areas, I think that’s important for whoever you are as well. So I love that. I think that’s amazing.
David Bisset: And more of it, and in the WordPress leadership roles too. So many are women. My family, women are the hardest working ones. Anyway. Okay, we got that on tape. All right, good. All right. Just, just made just a little insurance from, from my wife later. Um, alright Robert, let’s talk, let’s talk a favorite community moment. Or cause Okay. Something along those lines.

Robert Windisch: So my, my job, uh, my day job is to challenge processes. Now, let’s see if I, if I come, if, if I have a runner up. So I just want to see if it’s like how close I am to the things that are not allowed. Okay. Uh, my, uh, favorite or my, like most re uh, community moment is when the, when the whole room at the, at the state of world guest.

Um, the point was when met stopped the release cycle, so when, when the, uh, before like, uh, before the, um, um, five oh release, um, like we had this like every three months we had to release and then, um, this was like, it not going to, it was not gonna cutting it because the, the changes we needed to do, um, were really, were too big.

So we cannot, we, like I heard from so many core people that was not, um, um, Like was, was not gonna like cut it in a few months back to just get it in. So my question is, does counting of a re uh, like starting a release cycle counts. So because, um, that was like, I, we were in the room and was like, yeah, and now that’s why we, uh, need to explain.

Matt explained that and that’s why we stopped the release cycle now and everyone was like, what the hell just happened for me? That was like, he dropped the mic amenable

David Bisset: moment. I think he dropped the mic too. I can’t remember. Uh, when was that?

Robert Windisch: Um, 2017, like, uh, weekend as Tammie, because she was uh, um, uh, design, I think Design team rep after that. Yeah. And like Matt was simply,

Tammie Lister: it would’ve, I think it would’ve been, well it would’ve been 4.9, but we didn’t do that. Uh, and so yeah, it was four, 5.0. Then we. Had a pause, ended it. So yeah, I think it was 17. I dunno the year exactly. 17. There’s many years. 17, 18 blended into each other during that time.

David Bisset: But there was a 4.9. There was a 4.9, wasn’t there?

Simon Kraft: It were many 4.9 s.

Tammie Lister: It would’ve been like 5.0. It was after 4.9. It would’ve been. So,

David Bisset: so it’s kinda like 3.0, sorry. It’s kinda like walking toward a, walking halfway toward a wall and then walking halfway toward a wall. There’s 4.9, there’s 4.99, 4.9 9, 9, 4 0.99, nine, oh, not 5.0 yet very

Tammie Lister: long. 4.9 release,

Robert Windisch: Yeah. But the, the, the beauty was really that, that there was no release. So there was like, we will have a release when we have a release and like there wasn’t release in between where we like fixed small stuff because we still needed to do while like Tammie and other people were like, okay.

How, what are we doing? How do we, like, what is the goal here? And, and that’s why it was really for me, like it sh it, it really, uh, in this, in this moment, in this room at the Word camp us, you really could, like, you could feel a needle drop in the room because like, it was something that never happened before, because like you could, uh, um, um, you can set your watch to Roberto releases.

Mm-hmm. And then we simply stopped doing that while deciding that we, like, stop doing it because it doesn’t make any sense. So it was really, really weird and really good because it, it helped us to make this leap that we not talking about right now, but it, it helped us to really, uh, prepare for that.

Tammie Lister: It was also a stop and help was also kind of part of it.
It was a stop and this is how you can get involved. I think that was kind of the other bit like once everyone kind of gets over that Uber stopped, it was, and then here’s how you can get involved. So it kind of had that double um, or this, that was my, my through the haze of time impact, um, was it brings about the, okay, now I can get involved cuz people do like a release circle.

Right. Um, so consistency. Now I get involved and now I can do that. And it, it did get us to 5.0, it absolutely got us to it. And without that we would not have had the 5.0. You know, there’s no point in releasing something there. We are radically different from what we were, but there’s no point in releasing something that would’ve been half-baked. It wouldn’t have worked.

David Bisset: Yeah. So we have actually done that once in our, at least once in our WordPress history. Right. Yeah, I, I, I don’t know if we’ll see a moment like that again, at least anytime soon. It seems like Gutenberg phases seem to be planned out, or at least not like that drama ish type of thing.

Right. It’s not, it wasn’t a press release Rob Robert’s. Right. I remember. I remember saying Matt, Matt said it, and I think a few people had to change their pants. It was that kind of a moment where you just kind of expected like, this is all, this is all we’ve known, you know? And that’s funny because, you know, fast forward to a few days before working at us and, and, uh, you know, me in a hotel room, super caffeinated trying to finish something as Matt is in a chat room saying 5.0, it’s coming out now, whether we like it or not, it’s coming out, you know.

Anyway. I better stop with the analogies. It was ready. Oh, it was, it was, it was ready. Kind of kinda like I’m on top of this, uh, on a heel skiing and somebody says, oh, you’re ready, you’re ready. And slowly pushing me off the ledge. It’s, it was that type of ready. Oh yeah, it was ready. It was ready. Um, I just did, you know, just, just thinking my life flashing before my eyes right before it came out though. Um, let’s see, Tammie, I think your next, um, community initiative, cause whatever,

Tammie Lister: I’m going to take you back to 2014 to, I don’t wanna go Miami and the first ever kids workshop.

David Bisset: Ah, you actually snagged something.

Tammie Lister: Oh. Cause that fell. I still have. Really fond memories of it. It kind of felt really incredible to, it wasn’t even really that organized. It wasn’t really that.

David Bisset: Thanks Tammie, really appreciate it. It was that big in,

Tammie Lister: I’m sorry, but there’s no, like back then we were David all over initiative. I’m sorry. We weren’t, we weren’t trying to do we, we were just gonna be doing the event. We weren’t gonna necessarily try and do anything bigger with it.

And I think it planted a good seed that maybe took a bit of time before anything else happened, but that was absolutely fine. Um, and it was really important for just to start that. I think it’s both important for representation, but also important for an open source project doesn’t work with older people only working on it.

So for me it was incredibly special if I think of the people that were in that room as well, who were passing on. Many of them are still involved, contributing, in fact, all of them that I can think of. And it was just really special for me. Yeah. Yeah.

David Bisset: Um, that, now, just to be clear, for someone who was about to write that email to us, this is not the first kid’s camp ever in a work camp.
It was the one Tammie attended? No, it was a kid’s workshop. Workshop. It was a, well, I don’t like to use the word kids and work very close to each other because people get sensitive about that.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. It was 2014. It was no like kids camp or anything like that. It was, it was just, I, I don’t think it was that long, either, we weren’t doing it for or anything like that.

David Bisset: Kids don’t exactly have long attention spans. So, yeah, that’s under we,

Tammie Lister: no, it was, it was nothing official. It was no official kids camp. It was nothing. And it, it was, it was long time ago, so there was no kind of officialness of it. Um, but no, it was, I think we got them set up on a blog and we got them to customizing a theme and writing their first post.
That was as far as we got. That was our goal for the day.

David Bisset: Some people vowed never have children after that. Our younger, uh, younger volunteers look, well, I mean, I, I, it was there at Miami because I was at Phoenix and saw something very similar. I think it was a one day event at Phoenix. I saw there, I was there watching the kids.

Which nowaday, it sounds creepy when you say, are you here? Do you have any kids? No, I’m just watching them seeing how they do things. All right. Sarah, security and, uh, but I was watching how they did it in Phoenix, and this was, I don’t know, maybe it’s 2 20 12 or 2013 or something like that. And then, yeah, that’s when we started doing in Miami and now it, now there’s lots of kids’ camps.

There’s a whole kids’. Section now of learning and, and people in charge of that type of thing now. And there’s probably gonna be something at, uh, us, I know there’s something at Europe coming up, uh, which is fantastic. So it’s exploded. And then when we did our 10th anniversary word pr, our 10th anniversary were Camp Miami.

It is prog, it progressed to a point where we had the kids, I forget what the ages were, I’ll be gonna say like seven to 11 or seven to 12, seven to 13. That age group doing what you said, more or less. But then we kind of took the pe, the teenagers, 14 to like high school level. And then we had a day where we taught them WordPress.

And then a day after, like we taught them WordPress and how to build a store in WooCommerce. Then the next day we taught them s e how to market it.

Tammie Lister: Wow. I think it was also back then we were being very experimental with what could a word count be? Remember the day of rest and all the different kind of buddy camps and different things.

Oh, yes. I think we were just kind of experimenting with different formats as well. Yeah, exactly. We were just, uh, I think that was part of it as well as like, how can we start? And it’s great to kind of think about that as well. So I think that was kind of amazing.

David Bisset: Fantastic. Memories. Still one of my mentions. So Simon, um, let’s, let’s cover, let’s cover the, um, anything from a community moment standpoint that stood out for you.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll stay in the, um, event space, I guess.

David Bisset: Oh, he’s, he’s choked up. This is a, this is gonna be so good.

Simon Kraft: Um, and I just noticed that we’ll stay in the 2013 ish, uh, kind of timeframe.
David Bisset: It’s the WordPress 3.0 3.0 of years, right? Yeah.

Simon Kraft: Um, because in, I think it was early October, 2013, uh, we had the first word Kim Europe in, in Liden and it was such a stupid idea, um, back then and still.

David Bisset: Wait, let me, let me write that down, Simon. Yeah. Stupid. Okay, go ahead Simon. Just wanna make sure I got this cuz

Simon Kraft: it’s just the, the kind of stupid idea that hold on and exploded into the kind of mega event that what computer is today. And it was totally different back then, but the idea to bring like a whole continent together and have a joint event, um, It was beautiful and also it was a nice event.
Um, I have to say that, um,

David Bisset: possibly the first regional event, although I don’t know if Word Camp Asia or it’s forced in existence. What’s that?

Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. Oh, it really was. And uh, there was no word can be asked before that, at least. No, no official one.

Robert Windisch: There was none. There was just the, just San Francisco, the global one as, as we European call that. Yeah. And I think it’s,

Simon Kraft: it’s some, sorry.

Tammie Lister: No, you go. As it was the first, and it was done in an incredibly short time. Uh mm-hmm. I don’t think anyone ever realizes how short a time it was done in the end as well.

David Bisset: Somebody only had a few people, only had one change of clothes was that quick.

Tammie Lister: But yeah. And, uh, so as, as someone that was involved in it, I, um, it was one of those things that I, I think you, I.
Rarely get to experience, but the venue was incredible. Mm-hmm. I plus one that mm-hmm. That was one of those venues. Um, we, several of us had gone to a conference before in that venue and got to see that venue and it’s was one of those venues that I would love to use again for something. It’s just a great venue.

David Bisset: It really also symbol started to formulate the idea that we could have larger word camps and the community had matured to that point where we could bring in a larger event and we could coordinate across multiple countries for that sort of thing. Um, before that, um, you all you had was cities or I think in a few places or, you know, general regions like Word Camp Southeast or Midwest or something, some direction in the us.

Um, but that was a very memorable moment in terms of community history. Cuz again, I don’t know, I, I think, I don’t know when Japan. I know Word Camp Japans have been very, very long standing, but, but for Europe it was, it was got a lot of attention and I think rightly so. So I’m, I’m really good for that cuz it kind of set the, it set the pattern for all for, for camp us a bit.

It set a precedent for, um, the scene. There’s War Camp Asia and there’s probably, I feel like I’m leaving somebody out. I think there’s one on the books and I just can’t remember what region is now gonna be. I know they want to have a war camp, Africa War Camp

Robert Windisch: Nordic. You had a WordCamp Nordic regions in, in, in Europe.
Mm-hmm.

David Bisset: Yeah. And you know, who knows in 30 years War Camp Mars. So anyway, that, I think that’s a pretty, pretty, pretty good thing to put a pin on in terms of the community there. Now I, uh, I could, as, as much as I like my, uh, work camp Miami, there really was nothing. Uh, there’s, there’s nothing that equals that level.

So I’m gonna leave that out because I’m biased anyway, I do wanna put together. You mentioned two things, um, from a community, uh, cause or initiative standpoint. One was reco, and I may have mentioned this in the past episode, so listener, I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but it’s also when we talk about the community, recognizing those that we no longer have in our community.

Um, so I thought, uh, one thing that stood out to me, that representative was the Kim Marshall’s Memorial scholarship. Um, and you know, and because a lot of the old, old timers remember her, um, I remember her at Work Camp San Francisco. Um, But also like all those other people that, you know, our community, the older community gets, people get old.

Um, that’s, that’s life, uh, currently. So people will leave the community, uh, in that manner. Not, you know, not, not, not drama wise. I’m never coming back community, but people pass away or people have, uh, accidents and that sort of thing. So it is that, that kind of represents to me, not just the scholarship itself, which is a great initiative on its own, but it’s a recognition of, you know, we have important people that we want to remember the WordPress community, whether it’s in the form of scholarship or honoring them on social media every year, seeing their names and releases.

I know there’s a couple of people, and I am really, really bad at remembering his name right now, but he created a plugin. He was race, he was into a race car driving. I remember him in a race car. What’s that? Wipo? Yeah, VI, right. But what was his name though? Yeah. What was the name I, I’m gonna kill my why was 0 0 7?

Yes. The user name. Yeah, but I’m talking about his real name and I’m frustrated with myself. I can’t remember it, but I remember when he passed away, I forget what plug-in he did. I guess I’ll have, I’ll include that in

Simon Kraft: Shownotes, but he did the regenerate thumbnails plugin and his Alex,

David Bisset: yeah. Oh, okay. So we, we remember ’em by reputation, but it’s all of those people that do these plugins and Alex Mills. There you go. I’m horrible at remembering names, but yes,

Robert Windisch: I’m googling ju just like,

David Bisset: oh, I don’t judge. Just keep your hands here. So we have Kim Parcels, we have Alex Mills, all of these people that, that are involved, that with the community that, that we, that we’ve taken their plug-in, we’ve taken their plug-ins and their work and they’re, you know, and it’s in WordPress core now to our popular plug-in now.

And the other, the other thing I wanted to point out as a community initiative or, or moments was the Wampoo itself has, and, and I see one behind, um, Tammie, hopefully she knows it’s there. And we have so many, it’s incorporated, like every word camp now has a wpu. Um, it was also a lot of the kids’ stuff had wpu involved as a cartoon character and, you know, that was part of the kids’ camp stuff.

And, um, I’m sharing a link with you all right now. One of the, one of the coolest swag moments I ever had was, um, for, I don’t know which, where Camp Miami was, but we came out with these UNO cards, with wpu s on them, and. I put it on his open source on GitHub and be, this is the community angle, like a couple of work camps from like the other side of the world.

I think from, I think from India or Indonesia, I believe it was somewhere in that general area. They pinged us and said, can we use these? I said, yes, they’re open source. So what they did was they just changed the design a little bit. Like they, they put the work camp logo on it and made it, maybe translated it a little bit in their language, but now people are saying, oh, those are cool cards.

And like, you know, I have a little bit of pride. I said, yes, those, I, those are cool when we thought of them over in Work Camp Miami. But I am, so I’m even more happy to see people repurposing swag like that. And I thought the Wampoo, um, was an original great idea and I’m glad that, um, um, Matt kind of adopted that as part of the unofficial slash. Unofficial. I’ll say unofficial mascot cuz I’m not seeing it on official.

Robert Windisch: Unofficial. Official. It’s the official term for the, it’s unofficial official.

David Bisset: Just think of all the pins, all the badges, all the shirts. I don’t know if you ever saw the Work Camp Wpu shirt from Work Camp Miami that had the face,

Tammie Lister: there was an actual physical wapuu.

David Bisset: Yes. The one walking around there.
wapuu became physical. I was wandering around. It was the best work camp Miami 2019. I know the people that were in that suit. It was like a walking Cheeto, but it was so worth to see a walking wapuu around.

But yeah, it’s just, think of all the swag and like the MAs, the just the very thought of a mascot, um, itself. Not a logo, but a mascot I thought really helped shape the WordPress community was a great community moment. So anyway, thumbs up to all those people. I have one to, what’s that?

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I have one to add. I think the sustainability initiative, which is a newer one. I think that’s just getting started. But I think. And gathering momentum and finding out what it means. But as someone that’s organized a word camp before and tried to do it, sustainability when we in Brighton, um, I think it’s really good from that app. But I also think it’s really good from just the impact as a project that we leave and like the technology, I think it talking about like trying to be around as a project for a while, we kind of have to be aware of all those aspects.

So I think that initiative deserves a kind of mm-hmm. Call out because it crosses so many of our areas and it doesn’t necessarily get and so much kind of eyeballs I think.

David Bisset: Yeah. Make sure to throw that in the show notes by the way, cuz. We’ve shared so much here today. And, and, uh, no, I’ll include everything that you’ve mentioned. Everything you thought of, throw it in the show notes. I’ll do a array matching thing so we don’t get duplicates. Um, all right, so I, we’ve covered kind of the categories and we’ve covered a lot of stuff and I’m really happy cuz a lot of stuff we’ve talked about here today is, is not been mentioned in depth in my other conversations.

So that’s fantastic. I got exactly what I wanted out of you all. But, so what I wanted to do is I wanted to go around one last time and see if there’s any random thoughts that appeared in your head about anything else. Sky’s the limit. In terms of, in terms of any moments. Um, you know, I was gonna say good, bad and ugly, but let’s just, we’ll, let’s just keep it or good or bad because I don’t have time to cover ugly.

Um, Mihir, um, what have we left out here? What did we not mention that you think could, could be mentioned real briefly?

Meher Bala: Uh, recently Michelle has created a side WP speakers.

David Bisset: Ah, yeah.

Meher Bala: So this. I see this helping the organizers with finding out, uh, speakers in their areas or n nearby do not go and approach them. So that is one thing which just came across my mind right

David Bisset: now. Yeah. Kudos to her for that initiative. She does so much now, the job things on Wednesdays and all her, all her community work, which we don’t have time to go into here. That’s fantastic. Yes. So speakers of speakers project. My, um, Robert, anything we might have, we haven’t touched on at all briefly?

Robert Windisch: Yeah. Um, so small thing, um, the time when W P C L I became a make project, Because it was a project outside. And, uh, it’s really like if, if people like, cause the people who work, um, professional with WordPress sites and like on local, on local, um, machines and like automating stuff like the W P C L, I be becoming like a, a real make project with all the um, good and bad things around it. It was really, really good for the project and for Daba P c I to jump the simply make sure it stays around

David Bisset: wp I, yeah, develop. If, if you’re a developer and you’re not familiar with that, slap your face twice and get reading in the documentation. Tammie, what have we not mentioned here at all?

Tammie Lister: This is almost like project management, but I’m gonna say in core, when started to have more organization core meetings and recognizing roles for releases, I think that that started to allow people to see where they could be part of it.

Um, and. Gave enough order to those meetings that someone could follow along, you know, you can follow the agenda. Um, so those kind of things. Having enough project management, uh, so that someone could belong. So just being able to have a call. We didn’t do that. We didn’t have calls for releases and Oh, yeah.

And people being part of it and, and having like, Hey, would you like to have these roles? And people been able to step up and have those roles, that’s really important. And it’s not that far, but we’ve had that. So I think that is really, really important for us. Yeah.

David Bisset: You take that stuff for granted sometimes, not realizing how you do, it’s never been, and

Tammie Lister: it’s not just like tech, it’s like documentation and it’s growing.
Right. The options that people can step up and be part of. So yeah, I think that,

David Bisset: and that’s what some people that have come into the WordPress community in the last couple of years, they haven’t known a time before that. It’s kind of like

Tammie Lister: no. And Core Chats used to be a lot, there used to be a lot to be part of and try and follow and keep up with. Um, and it would put off a lot of people. So this is an incredibly welcoming, so yeah, more inclusive.

David Bisset: It’s trying to explain what a V H S tape is to my daughter today. Yes. That was, there were times before digital media. So Simon, what? And one or two things briefly. We may not have covered that. Yeah. Could see.
I can see your gears turning. Sorry.

Simon Kraft: No, no. I have something, uh,

David Bisset: stuck in your teeth . Oh, um, oh, I’m sorry. I thought I could read, I thought I could read people. God, what else? You got anything in the tank?

Simon Kraft: I would like to give a shine a light on a make team that I think has its work a bit undervalued sometimes. Um, the accessibility team. Uh, you do like a really great job speaking of inclusivity, um, in making sure that more people can use WordPress, and I think that’s part of democratized publishing. So they do very, very important work.

David Bisset: Yeah, I can’t argue with that. I, I am always amazed at the new, it’s especially so much harder now with all the more complex technologies, especially in the admin, right?

And that’s still a work in progress. I think all the initiatives that we’re doing today, you know, ev moving forward, I, I want, I wanna, I wanna see more attention to them, um, because a lot of accessibility needs that kind of attention and just like performance or anything else. And so many times accessibility is, is not a first brain thought type of a thing.

So I really think that deserves a real good shout out as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got three random things left. I, we’ve talked about acquisitions in the previous. Shows, but I always thought the Tumblr acquisition really stood out to me in terms of a potential that it has for WordPress moving forward that isn’t WordPress.

Um, Gutenberg is supposed to transcend WordPress. Maybe, maybe that’s, uh, Matt’s made that comment a couple of times, so it’s interesting to see where that might go. Um, P two. Speaking of things that, like some, somebody just said, does he need to do at the restroom? No. The letter p and two. Is a, if you don’t know what that is, Google it.

But because, but when, when, when Tammie said something about the structure of, of, of backend WordPress organization, um, it is a blog that Matt and Matt actually talked about this a number of times, and I think they have a new version called oh two. Um, I’m not sure if that’s out yet in terms of a, like a plugin or a theme you can download. I think, I, I can’t remember. All I remember is it was, Cutting more cutting edge in them. But we used to,

Robert Windisch: it’s a hosted version on wordpress.com. Yes. The

David Bisset: hosted version version. It’s like halfway. It was halfway. They’re like, you can’t get it, but you can. You can get it because it’s hosted this place. So if you don’t know what those are, just go ahead and Google ’em.

But P two was fundamental to the organization of a lot of WordPress stuff, even it as it exists today. So like as early as last year, I remember like Word camps, having a P two doc with people organizing writing notes in there. And Matt was always a big, big fan of P two in terms of like, you know, because it’s basically more or less a block for teams, right?

A big, big, big use at automatic. And I’m pretty sure it still does. And finally, I have elevator advertising at work camps, and we’ll just leave it at that. So thank you very much for everybody. Um, Mission here wasn’t to cover everything. That’s impossible. But I wanted to cover things from your brains, cuz all you I respect and are unique and I you brought the game today.

Thank you very much. I greatly appreciate it. So, um, let’s go around and then do your, do your, let’s, let’s say we’re people, I was gonna say do your closing remarks, but this isn’t a talk. Um, where can people find you, uh, on social if they want to cont if they wanna follow you, because these days we, we, it’s, who knows? It’s social blog, whatever you want to, whatever you wanna share. But here you go first.

Meher Bala: Uh, I’m on Twitter, me, I’m on LinkedIn and my website meher.com.

David Bisset: Yes. And we’ll also put these in the show notes too, so I don’t have to worry about spelling everything out cuz I can’t spell. It was very nice to have you, um, Robert, um, the, yeah, if, if, uh, yeah, go ahead.
I was gonna say, where can we buy that hat? But I don’t think that exists anymore.

Robert Windisch: That’s very like with pins or without. Um, so it’s, uh, it’s nubis on, on Twitter and otherwise it’s nubi it on the WordPress profile.

David Bisset: Thank you very much, Robert. It’s good to see you in the hat again. And, um, if you ever wanna sneak into a Word camp, just don’t wear the hat and people won’t recognize you. Um, Tammie, uh, where can we find you?
Tammie Lister: You can find me at karmatosed on all the things.

David Bisset: Yes. Pretty much still and don’t What about, yeah, well, we’ll just put show notes. Just that. And well, people will find you again. You also have a, um, you also have you started a new blog recently too, or am I, I have now next slab.

Include that in show notes as well, because we’ve been, I’ve been reading, I’m, I, I, I’ll, I, I be ashamed to admit, I don’t know when you started it, but I’ve been picking up the last couple of posts, so they’ve been very insightful. It’s only been a couple of weeks. Thank I’m so God. I put myself out there and it will work.
I’m sorry, go ahead. Yeah,

Tammie Lister: I’m just starting to write just generally about where could WebPress go in the now and the next. Oh yeah.

David Bisset: Okay. I’ll throw that into show notes as well. Just some thoughts. Yeah. Well, you’ve always had some good thoughts. I think it’s worth sharing. Simon, where can people be finding you?

Simon Kraft: I think the easiest is https://simon.blog/ . Yeah. Yeah. I was an early adopter.

David Bisset: Um, you don’t have to rub it in, but Okay.

Simon Kraft: And I think I’ll link to basically all the other things from there. So I won’t try and, uh, spell out my masteron username and domain thingy.

David Bisset: Sorry. Please don’t, because it sets off my Amazon Echo for some reason when you start saying master on things. Nope, we’re good. All right. We’re fine. Uh, yes. Yeah, Simon Dolo. Wow. And you’ve got an English translation too. Oh, that’s great. Last crappy Twitter in beds, please. Ooh, I’d like to read that one. All right. So Simon Dolo for you. So, um, just if you’re hearing this and you wanna follow me, um, best place to go would be either david bis.com or David bi.social.

But thank you all for coming. Your time is precious. Greatly appreciate it. And, uh, we will talk later. Thank you.

Simon Kraft: Thank you. All right.

Today is a little bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s an episode all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft and Tammie Lister, with David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

They cover a lot of ground, and it’s fascinating to hear their WordPress stories from the past two decades.

Notes from David Bisset:

To honor WordPressâ€™s 20th anniversary I locked myself in a room with four wonderful community members to talk about some highlights in itâ€™s history.

Primary topics include:
- a memorable design or refresh in WordPress’ history
- the most notable enhancement to WordPress core (that wasnâ€™t Gutenberg related)
- a memorable community moment or cause
There’s also lots of ‘forgotten’ history and features also come up in the discussion. So, regardless of how long youâ€™ve been involved with WordPress, youâ€™ll learn and maybe have your memories jogged!

Discussion subjects and links:

Robert Windisch
25.05.2023
#77 â€“ Mario Santos and Luis Herranz on What the Interactivity API Is and How You Can Use It

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox has a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes and in this case, how you can start to make your sites more interactive.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Mario Santos and Luis Herranz. They both work for Automattic but are sponsored to work full-time in WordPress.

The main focus of their work is the block developer experience, and they are part of the group of contributors that worked on the Interactivity API proposal.

The Interactivity API is the main focus of the podcast today, and if you’re working with blocks and dynamically displaying data, this is sure to be of interest to you.

We start out the podcast today with the usual introductions, and get to know Mario and Luis. And then we learn what the Interactivity API is and what it can do.

The conversation is framed around a blog post written by Mario entitled, The interactivity API, a better developer experience in building interactive blocks.

In this Mario shows examples of what website interactivity is. In short, it’s the ability for content to be amended on the fly without a page refresh. Of course, this is nothing new on the web. We’ve been seeing this for years in WordPress sites and elsewhere. But now you’re going to be able to create interactivity in a standard way across the different blocks on your site.

The project hopes to absorb complexity and make the creation of interactive objects fairly trivial. Mario and Luis talk about examples of where the API might be used, and how it can be implemented.

We also discussed the fact that in the past developers have gone their own way to make their sites interactive. It all works, but it means that no two implementations are the same. This causes issues if the project is taken over by another developer. But it’s also a drain on resources.

Mario and Luis make the point that having a standard way of creating interactivity will benefit everyone in the long run. We get into the weeds a little and talk about the approach the team took when building the API. They decided to use directives and we find out why this was, and what benefit it brings over other possible solutions.

The project is still experimental, and they’re looking for people to test and report back on what they find to move the interactivity API forwards.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to. WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Mario Santos and Luis Herranz.

I am joined on the podcast today by Luis Herranz and Mario Santos. Hello.

[00:04:15] Luis Herranz: Hey, hello Nathan.

[00:04:16] Mario Santos: Thanks for inviting us.

[00:04:18] Nathan Wrigley: You’re so welcome. We had an introduction on Slack from Anne McCarthy, who listeners to the podcast may very well have heard of, and she wanted me to chat to these two about the Interactivity API, so we’re going to get onto that. It’s a brand new project. Could be very interesting if you’re a developer implementing it, but also if you’re an implementer of WordPress websites and not a developer, you’ll be interested in the outcomes of it.

Before we do that, the usual questions at the beginning. I’m going to go to Luis first, if that’s all right. Would you mind just giving us your backstory, how you’ve come to be on a WordPress podcast, how long you’ve been working with WordPress, who you work for as much or as little as you wish.

[00:04:57] Luis Herranz: Okay, thank you. I started creating websites with WordPress 2010, I think, maybe nine, I don’t know, a long time ago. And I wanted to start a company in 2013, with Pablo Postigo. And we thought, okay, we wanted to create native apps for different companies, like services and so on.

And we knew WordPress, so we basically started with what was later known as headless WordPress, but back in 2013. And since then we iterated, we created a team. We got some investment and we started doing things on top of WordPress. Mostly in headless. First with native applications. Then we moved to just web have applications, but still on headless. Very focused on React.

And in 2019 we launched a open source framework for headless WordPress, powered by React. So we were very focused on developer experience and performance.

And in 2021, that company, Frontity was acquired by Automattic, so we could become like full-time contributors and focus on, well, basically what the Interactivity API proposal is today. Bringing some of those user experiences, what are possible with other solutions, to WordPress itself, on top of full site editing, or block themes.

[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. That’s really interesting. I appreciate your nice history there. Thank you. And we’ll ask the same question this time of Mario. So Mario, backstory please.

[00:06:41] Mario Santos: Thank you. Actually, my story is really similar to Luis. Well first, when I finished the degree, I studied industrial engineer, but I didn’t want to be an engineer. So I started trying different things, and while I got my first job, I created a store in WordPress with WooCommerce. And then, that is when I started to learn about WordPress and all those things.

And later, based on that, I joined Frontity. I don’t remember exactly the year, 2015 maybe. And from there I really learned what was WordPress because we started going to meetups to WordCamps, and we started to, well at least I started to learn from the community.

From there the story is mostly the same as Luis. We were working on headless mainly. We were working with WordPress. And at some point, we were acquired by Automattic, and now I’m a sponsored contributor, working full-time. And as Luis said, we are focused on the developer experience, and the Interactivity API that we are going to talk about is part of it.

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much for that. So the Interactivity API, I’m going to link in the show notes to a post which you can find. Now the post you’re going to be looking at is on the make.wordpress.org website. It’s written by Mario. It was on the 30th of March, 2023 that came out, and it’s entitled, Proposal, The Interactivity API, A Better Developer Experience in Building Interactive Blocks.

Now, if at any point during this podcast you become a little bit confused or you wish to have some more background, I would recommend pausing and going and reading what is an incredibly lengthy and detailed post, with actually a boatload of interaction and comments as well. It’s really heartening to see so many people chipping in, and giving their thoughts on this Interactivity API.

But I guess the best place to kick this conversation off simply asking, what is it? What is the Interactivity API? What does it do? Why does WordPress need such a thing?

[00:08:47] Mario Santos: I can start with this one. So, the Interactivity API is what we are proposing. The group of contributors that are working on that. It’s basically a new standard system to easily add front end interactivity to your blocks. Until now, most of the Gutenberg APIs have been focused on the block editor side, and there was unintentional gap on the front end.

So block developers could choose whatever they want. They could choose any Javascript framework, or other solutions. And the Interactivity API aims to cover that gap. Creating this standard.

So imagine functionalities like, like this post or e-commerce functionalities like add to cart, or the checkout, the instant search, page transitions, the comments form, without a page reload. So those are the user experiences that the Interactivity API aims to cover.

In a way that is real easy to build them, and block developers don’t have to deal with complex scaffolding or external tools. And it’s important to note also that it’s completely familiar and compatible with PHP and the block ecosystem. So overall, that’s what the Interactivity API is. Basically a standard to easily create any interactive experience that your users want.

[00:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: Luis, anything to add?

[00:10:09] Luis Herranz: No, it’s really filling that gap, or even that opportunity of absorbing as much complexity from the developers. Standardizing everything in a single solution, and making sure that it’s performant, and so on.

So yeah, there’s some advancement in web development in other places, mostly in the Javascript ecosystem and WordPress has never been opinionated in the front end, so this is kind of the first time for WordPress.

But yeah, we think that it’s an opportunity as well to absorb a lot of complexity for the developers, and to enable some of the user experiences that were not possible with WordPress before.

[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: Now we have some show notes, and we’ve got a list of questions that we’re potentially going to run through, but I’m going to skip to the end, more or less of the list of our questions. Because one of the things I think to do at the beginning would be to provide listeners concrete examples of how this might be used.

So do you have any examples that you think would demonstrate clearly the kind of things that the Interactivity API is touching on? I’ll just mention one. Which is the very first thing you’re going to see more or less when you open up Mario’s article, and it’s a video. It’s pretty short, two minutes long. And it demonstrates something a little bit like Netflix, where you’ve got, a view of three or four different video thumbnails. There’s a bunch of different movies there.

And the intention is that you would like to preserve your favorites. And so there’s a little heart icon, which is lodged in the top left of the thumbnails for each video. And as you click on that thumbnail, the heart becomes colored in. It goes from gray to red. But also in a different part of the UI, in the right hand of the view, the menu, traditional place for the menu, there’s a little total which goes up from two to three to four, and if you remove the hearts, it goes back down to two and so on and so forth.

So that’s one example of how you might use this. It’s able to do things on the page without needing to do page refreshes. And the idea is that this will be a standard way of doing it in blocks. And I wonder if you could give us some other examples. You mentioned WooCommerce and things like that. But let’s go into that a little bit. Some examples of where this might be useful for developers and end users to know.

[00:12:35] Mario Santos: Yeah, so basically the use case is anything that is interactive and requires Javascript should be able to be done with the Interactivity API in an easy way. So imagine like a slide show or light boxes in the image. So when you click on it, it zooms, and when you click out or scroll, it goes out. Some models like search, subscription, quizzes, e-commerce integrations, like you just have mentioned.

And one of the features that is enabled by having a standard is the client site navigation that basically is navigating through different pages of your WordPress site without triggering a page reload.

It’s important to know that this is something that is going to be enabled by the Interactivity API, but it’s going to be completely optional. So if you don’t need it, you don’t have to use it. But it powers other features like you can see in the movie, that we are paginating between the different pages. We are in the query loop. You have the pagination block, and you can go through the page one to the page two without page reload.

And for example, well, in the movies demo, we are showing that you can play the trailer and you can keep navigating and the video doesn’t stop. So those kind of user experiences that, for example, in this podcast you could be listening to this podcast in WP Tavern, and you could navigate to the articles.

So, maybe you can be reading an article while you are listening to the podcast in the same way. And the podcast will keep playing. Those kind of user experiences are enabled by client side navigation. And you can also find in the movies the instant search that you start typing and the list of results is automatically updated.

Infinite scroll could also work. Client size submissions like the comments form right now, in typical WordPress sites, when you submit a new comment, it triggers a page load. So this could be done directly in the client. So those are the kind of user experiences that we are talking about. And yeah, I think it’s important that this is totally compatible with the current block templating system. So whatever you change in the editor is going to keep working.

[00:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: That’s great, yeah. Luis, anything to add?

[00:14:57] Luis Herranz: I would add that I really like that demo. Because it’s a demo that we didn’t come up with. It was a demo that existed before. There is a version of that demo created with all the major Javascript frameworks out there. So there is one for React using Next, Vue using Nuxt, Svelte, Quick, Astro and so on.

So, you can compare now the WordPress version with the other Javascript frameworks, out there. I’m super happy to say that it really, in terms of user experience now with Interactivity API, you can provide the same user experience than the others. And this demo was created to show these type of complex or great user experiences.

With WordPress, now with the Interactivity API, you’re able to create that type of user experience, but leveraging the server side and the block editor. So the other Javascript frameworks version is 100% code, where this movies demo version of WordPress is done with Gutenberg and everything is a block, and you can go and change wherever you want. Which we think it’s really powerful.

And there’s yet another thing there, in comparing with the other frameworks, and it’s that if you look at the performance is a top performer there. It’s only 13 kilobytes of Javascript. Only a new experimental mode of Solid is able to be as performant as that one. So yeah, I’m really happy about enabling those user experiences, but with full compatibility with the Block editor and block themes, and with such performance.

[00:16:44] Nathan Wrigley: It’s true to say, I guess, that if you go to that demo, you will not be seeing anything that you haven’t seen somewhere else online. You’ve seen the ability to like things, and you’ve seen infinite scroll before, and you’ve seen elsewhere online the ability to paginate without a full page refresh, and you’ve seen comments being added, again without having to submit a new page and so on and so forth.

But this is creating a standard inside of WordPress. Why did you feel it was important to do this? Why not just leave developers to do their own thing? Again, we’ve seen WordPress websites implementing this. You know, I’ve been to countless WordPress websites where I’ve seen these features.

Clearly somebody’s dealt with it before and implemented it in their own way. I guess you’re just trying to make it so that everybody can build on top of the work that you are doing, rather than everybody going off in their own way and implementing a completely different solution based upon, well, however they wish to do it?

[00:17:43] Luis Herranz: Yes. It’s about absorbing complexity. So, definitely anything you can imagine, it’s possible with WordPress. The thing is how easy is to do it. And with this kind of standard, our hope is that those user experiences are not only easy, but also working practically out of the box.

[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: I’m guessing that this standard is going to be something that you are aiming at developers. Presumably the developers will then make it fairly straightforward for end users to interact with blocks and what have you, to make this available to them. But how would the standard actually work? What is going on in the background? How are developers going to implement this?

[00:18:25] Mario Santos: If I can add one note to the why this standard, is I think it’s also important to note apart from what Luis says, is that it absorbs a lot of complexity. In an ecosystem like WordPress where there are a lot of plugins interacting with other plugins and those kind of experiences that we have.

It’s important that following a standard enables things like block communication. For example, we can see what we were talking about in the demo that you are liking a movie and it’s updating another block, in another place. So if different blocks, created by different block developers, in different plugins are not using the same approach, it’s really difficult to be able to communicate those blocks. And having a standard solves that. And yeah, that composability and compatibility to nest the structures of different interactive blocks is possible thanks to a standard.

[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay, so you’re really opening it up so that any block developer can implement this so that, I don’t know, a different block developer can hook into the exact same standards so that two completely separate blocks, created by completely separate individuals can have interaction via the Interactivity API, right?

[00:19:42] Mario Santos: Yeah, that’s it.

[00:19:43] Luis Herranz: And they also use this, the same code, the same framework. Because if each block developer starts choosing their own framework, maybe some developers like React, some developers like Vue, some developers like Svelte or whatever comes next. Then WordPress sites could end up loading a lot of unnecessary Javascript.

So yeah, it’s important. Now that sites are, are a mix of blocks from different developers, these blocks are like small units. Yeah, it’s important to agree on a single kind of solution.

[00:20:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good point. Okay, so how is it actually going to work then? You mentioned in the article, and I think one of you mentioned it just a moment ago, that you’re trying to make it so that people are familiar with PHP, don’t necessarily have to get into the whole space of learning React or what have you. I’m not entirely clear on what the position is there, but is the intention to make this as simple as possible for people who are steeped in WordPress’s PHP history.

[00:20:44] Mario Santos: Yes. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to everyone. So yeah, that’s included. And yes, we said this is compatible with PHP, and it has been designed to be block first and PHP friendly. So yeah, it’s should be easy.

And going back to the question, how this standard work. Basically a system based on directives. I’m not sure, for those who are not familiar with directives, they are a way to extend HTML. They are custom HTML attributes that tell the Interactivity API to attach a specified behavior to a DOM element, or even transform it. So for those familiar with Alpine. it’s really similar, but it has been designed to work with WordPress.

[00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: I know it’s potentially a bit on the technical side, but you talked about the CSS nature of things there. I’m wondering if you can give an example of how that might be implemented. What would you actually be doing, declaring those directives?

[00:21:47] Mario Santos: Okay, in order to create an interactive block using Interactivity API, you have to add directives to your markup. So you have some HTML, so you add custom attributes that are directives, and they call an action that is defined in Javascript in the view.js file of your block.

[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: What is the benefit of doing it in that way? You mentioned that you want it to be available to everybody. Is this the kind of thing that, obviously experienced developers can probably pick this up in a heartbeat, but are you trying to get people, how do we describe this, who are less experienced say. Is this going to be something that you could pretty quickly learn even if your developer chops are not all that impressive?

[00:22:29] Luis Herranz: Yes. The initial goal for this proposal is more enabling user experiences for WordPress that were not possible before, or were very difficult to do before. We also have a focus on developer experience, but that’s something that we think we can also keep improving over time.

This doesn’t have to be like the final API of creating blocks. We can work, keep working on simplifying things over time. For example, right now none of these touches like the editor part. So if you are creating a block, the edit is just, is still done in the same way that it is done today using a React component. But maybe in the future we can explore how we can kind of extend these directives also to the editor and if it makes sense to unify and simplify the templating for both use cases. But is not the main goal of this proposal at this moment right now.

[00:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: When you were making decisions about this, and you decided to go with directives instead of things like using React or something. Was there quite a lot of toing and froing? Was there a lot of soul searching, what the best way to do it was? Or was it just fairly straightforward from the very beginning that using directives was the way you were going to do it? How long did the conversation take before you settled on this? is it fair to say that everybody’s on board with this? This seems to be the way to do it.

[00:23:58] Mario Santos: We believe so. I mean, we have researched a lot of alternatives. Actually, as we mentioned, we come from Frontity, that it was a React framework. React was like the first alternative we had in mind, but we defined as a list of requirements and we started researching different possibilities, and at the end we come up with the solution to be the only one that it was the only one fully compatible with WordPress.

Just to explain this a bit better. As directives are custom attributes that we have in the HTML, we are using the HTML as the templating system. And this comes with many benefits, for example, were not possible with React. As HTML is the templating system, the service rendering is supported by default, for example.

That is something really important in WordPress, or WordPress, APIs like WordPress hooks, that we are used to WordPress hooks in plugins, to extend some functionality, or translations. Those things, with directives using the HTML as the templating system work out of the box. And we can keep using those APIs to even extend the directives.

And I think this was one of the main blockers to not use React. This system, the service rendering is supported, and the WordPress API are supportive as well. That using other approaches can get tricky or even impossible, I would say.

[00:25:32] Luis Herranz: Yes. I think we spent like a year or so researching this. And at first we tried with Javascript, JSX, or even JS templates like Vue or Svelte, and so on. But yeah, I think that that direction, things start getting like super complex. And once we switched to using HTML as the templating language, it was like boom. Like everything works out of the box. Everything is like super simple. Everything is compatible. So yeah, it was like seeing the light a little bit.

[00:26:04] Nathan Wrigley: if I’m a current block developer, there’s obviously now going to be this conflict of, do I carry on with what I’ve been doing so far? I’ve got some kind of interactive component in my blocks. Do I carry on with what I’ve been doing up until this point? Or do I flip over and start using the Interactivity API?

You’ve obviously just mentioned some reasons why that could be the case. But I’m wondering if there is anything else buried in there. In other words, what’s the use case to switch? There’ll be a bit of retooling, you might have to rewrite a whole bunch of stuff that you’ve already rewritten.

Do you think the benefit’s going to be in there purely for people who are creating new things? Or do you think there’s going to be a benefit for people who already have existing things out there in the real world, to go and rewrite what they’re doing using the Interactivity API?

[00:26:54] Luis Herranz: Of course, as everything in WordPress, this is optional. Even though we want it to become a standard. It’s optional. But there’s going to be some kind of sitewide experiences that can only be enabled if all the blocks use this language, or this standard. So yeah, our hope is that there’s not going to be any reason for new blocks to not use this.

Because it absorbs a lot of complexity and it works out the box with all these things. But there’s also going to be some benefit on migrating existing blocks to this system if you want to make your blocks compatible with these new user experiences. And also, get rid of all the complexity that you have to deal with in terms of bundling and performance and things like that.

[00:27:42] Mario Santos: And actually it can also improve the user experiences, beause due to this complexity, we have seen many cases of blocks using React in the front end, but having issues with the server side rendering or not having server side rendering at all. So it could be a good approach to migrate to the Interactivity API, because it’s going to be easier to improve their blocks to support server side rendering, hooks, or other user experiences. There may be cases that they could benefit from that as well.

[00:28:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the intention would be for a slow but steady migration over to using the Interactivity API, to the point where it just doesn’t make sense to use anything else. One of you, I can’t remember which one of you it was, mentioned performance implications there. I’m just wondering if you could dwell on that a little bit. Have you, in your testing so far, really noticed this? Has it speeded things up, made less use of resources and so on.

[00:28:39] Mario Santos: Yes. We’ve been testing and we want to test everything better and we will keep testing it in real sites. But it’s something that we had in mind from the beginning, that it has to be as performant as possible. And that’s why the runtime code is so small. It’s around 10 kilobytes. And yes, Luis before compared with other Javascript frameworks is performing pretty well.

I think we did mention this, but it’s using React under the system. So that’s why it is so small. And yeah, it is actually performant and we are looking for other ways of optimizing it. For example, we want to only send the directives that are needed by the blocks that are in the page. Or we want to send the scripts so they don’t block the page rendering.

Or for example, we are also exploring the possibility of the scripts, so they are only load when they are in the view port. So, yeah, overall I would say it’s performant. It’s been designed to be performant. The code is relatively small, and we are still looking for ways to optimize it even more.

[00:29:51] Luis Herranz: Yeah, I think that’s important. It’s not only performant today, but you have the guarantee that it’s going to be performant in the future, in the terms of you don’t have to, as a block developer, you don’t have to deal with performance in that sense anymore. Because that’s absorbed now by, well will be, hopefully absorbed by WordPress at some point.

And then if there’s something new in the web platform that can be leveraged to increase the performance and so on, it will be done in the WordPress side. So your block will just benefit from that, from just adopting this standard.

[00:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: In the article that you wrote, Mario, the first word is the word proposal. Which implies that this is a work in progress, shall we say. And I’m just wondering how far down the path of usability you would say you’ve got. In other words, can developers begin using this out of the box? Have you seen real world examples of people using this?

And have you had some interest from developers who perhaps haven’t implemented it, but certainly want to get on board? Because I’m guessing the more yes’s we can answer to that question, the more likely it is that other people will say, okay, yeah, let’s take a, let’s take a look at this. So, can you use it, and have people been using it?.

[00:31:08] Mario Santos: I would say, yes, you can use it, but we remind that this is still experimental, although we included the proposal word there. This is still experimental, very likely to change. So the APIs that we are using right now, that are used for example in the movies demo site, we are confident that they work, but maybe the syntax change.

So we haven’t promoted it yet to be used too much. There are people experimenting with it and giving feedback. For example, there’s an ongoing experiment in WooCommerce to replicate some of their blocks using directives. But there’s nothing in production yet because, as I said, this is still experimental.

There are some missing functionalities that may break your site, and it doesn’t have any documentation yet. So, I would say you can use it at your own risk because it’s experimental. We would love people to test it. To give feedback. We want to understand better if it’s easy to use the blockers that people may face.

Just to to clarify. In order to be able to use it, we are working on repository in GitHub. It’s a plugin that you can install, and from there you can create your own interactive blocks. Or if you prefer, there’s also the repository for the movies, with some examples that you can take a look and modify or whatever you want to do.

[00:32:34] Nathan Wrigley: Are those repositories linked from Mario’s article on make.wordpress.org?

[00:32:40] Mario Santos: Yes.

[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so perfect. So if you want to find those, you can just go to the article, which is going to be in the show notes and you can find them all there. Now you’re both working at Automattic, and although it was only about 30 minutes ago that you gave me your bio, I wasn’t quite sure.

I know that you’re both sponsored full-time in WordPress. Is this project, the Interactivity API, is this a focus for both of you at the moment? In other words, are you being asked to implement this, full-time, part-time? Are you tasked with making this happen?

[00:33:12] Luis Herranz: Yes, we are. But we are not the only ones. It’s a large group of contributors. But yes. It was part of when we stopped developing Frontity the headless framework, and joined Automattic, it was precisely to focus on this. And we thought it made a lot of sense. Yeah, and thanks to Automattic for sponsoring us to be able to work on this for WordPress.

[00:33:40] Mario Santos: One note on this, as you said, there are more contributors working on this Interactivity API, and yeah, we are part of a bigger group that is working on the whole developer experience of Gutenberg. So this is just a project to improve the front end interactive parts of your blocks, but there are ongoing efforts to improve the whole developer experience.

[00:34:04] Luis Herranz: Yeah, and maybe it’s a good moment to say that if anyone is interested in this topic, just come to the repository and so on. And contact us and join us.

[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was going to ask about exactly that. How open are you to contributions? Presumably any people that you can get interested in this, the more the merrier.

[00:34:24] Luis Herranz: A hundred percent open. We need people. We need people testing these. We need people using it. We need people giving feedback. Sharing different ideas. The most exposure, the better. How do you say that?

[00:34:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly that. So I guess really if this podcast serves to do anything, it would be exactly that. It would be to encourage people to go over. Read the post on make.wordpress.org, and if you’re interested and you think that you can help, then certainly it looks like your help would be most welcome. Testing, getting involved.

In terms of what’s coming, you mentioned that there are things which you desire to have. So I guess that’s a roadmap question. What is on the roadmap? What do you want to have in there that is not in there? Don’t worry about timeframes. It might be a year off, two years off, six months, doesn’t really matter. What are you hoping that it will do that it currently is unable to do?

[00:35:16] Mario Santos: Basically finish the Interactivity API, because it’s not finished. But, for example, our initial idea is to create the list of core directives that covers, I don’t know, 90% of the use cases, most of the use cases. Although then developers can create their custom directives.

So for example, that list is not finished yet. We still have to ensure that the APIs work for most of the use cases. We have to finish. And our idea for this is to, at some point, include it as experimental in Gutenberg. Start testing it in real core blocks, for example. Doing some experiments there.

Ensure that those user experiences are easy to create with the Interactivity API. Start receiving more feedback. So yeah, the idea is that. Keep experimenting. Keep developing the API. Receive feedback of users using it. And I think that’s it.

[00:36:16] Luis Herranz: It’s going to be important the moment when we add, we added as experimental API in Gutenberg. Because that’s going to increase the exposure by, I don’t know, ten fold.

tenfold.

[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: One of you mentioned before we click record that you are going to be giving a presentation at WordCamp Europe around the Interactivity API. By good coincidence, this podcast episode is going out just prior to that. So it may be that people listening to this are very soon going to be getting in the car train or a plane to head to Athens. Which one of you is giving that talk and what is it that you’re going to be covering exactly?

[00:36:51] Luis Herranz: That would be me, Luis. I hope Mario helps.

[00:36:55] Mario Santos: Yeah, I will help.

[00:36:57] Luis Herranz: It’s going to be a workshop. I don’t know if it’s a two hour workshop or two hour and a half workshop. It’s going to be hands-on. A step by step introduction to the Interactivity API and creating some interactive blocks and user experiences.

[00:37:12] Nathan Wrigley: So very much a hands-on experience. You are going to be teaching people and hopefully getting them to learn in real time. Do you know if any of that gets recorded and put on WordPress TV?

[00:37:22] Luis Herranz: I don’t know if workshops are recorded or not. Presentations are, yes. I don’t know.

[00:37:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. So you can very much be seen at WordCamp Europe, in Athens. Hopefully both Luis and Mario are going to be there. Head over to the workshop and say hi, and get involved. If people want to reach out to either of you, be that on social media or email or whatever works best. Maybe we can go to Luis first. Can you give us some details of where people could get in touch with you, specifically around this topic?

[00:37:53] Luis Herranz: Sure. I actually started like, I left Twitter for a while and I’m back from last week or so. I’m going to try to answer any question that people may have about the Interactivity API and to share the progress there at my personal account, which is @luisherranz, like my name and surname in Twitter.

[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much, and Mario, where can we reach you?

[00:38:14] Mario Santos: I would say Twitter as well. I’m not actively tweeting, but if someone writes to me, I will answer for sure. Handle is @santosguillamot. It’s a bit difficult, so maybe it’s better to include the link?

[00:38:28] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to it in the show notes because yeah, that might be the best way of doing it.

[00:38:33] Luis Herranz: And probably I would say come by the Block Interactivity Experiments repository. So in GitHub, WordPress slash block interactivity experiments. And then there’s, open a issue, open a discussion. Yeah.

[00:38:47] Mario Santos: And if people don’t use Twitter, I think they can reach both of us also in WordPress Slack, if they prefer to do so.

[00:38:55] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to both of those things as well. I will include both of your Twitter handles and both of your Slacks, plus all of the links to anything that we mentioned during the course of the podcast. So yeah, an interesting discussion about the Interactivity API. I know it’s not just the pair of you, but Luis and Mario, much appreciation for taking on this work, which hopefully in the near future will be improving, not only the performance, but the interactivity of our WordPress websites. Thanks very much for joining me today.

[00:39:21] Mario Santos: Thank you a lot for inviting.

[00:39:23] Luis Herranz: Thanks, Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Mario Santos and Luis Herranz. They both work for Automattic, but are sponsored to work full-time in WordPress. The main focus of their work is the block developer experience, and they are part of the group of contributors that worked on the Interactivity API proposal.

The Interactivity API is the main focus of the podcast today, and if you’re working with blocks and dynamically displaying data, this is sure to be of interest to you.

We start out the podcast with the usual introductions and get to know Mario and Luis, and then we learn what the Interactivity API is, and what it can do.

The conversation is framed around a blog post written by Mario entitled The Interactivity API, a Better Developer Experience in Building Interactive Blocks. In this, Mario shows examples of what website interactivity is. In short, itâ€™s the ability for content to be amended on-the-fly without a page refresh.

Of course, this is nothing new on the web, weâ€™ve been seeing this for years in WordPress sites and elsewhere, but now youâ€™re going to be able to create interactivity in a standard way across the different blocks on your site. The project hopes to absorb complexity and make the creation of interactive objects fairly trivial. Mario and Luis talk about examples of where the API might be used and how it can be implemented.

We also discuss the fact that in the past developers have gone their own way to make their sites interactive. It all works, but it means that no two implementations are the same. This causes issues if the project is taken over by another developer, but itâ€™s also a drain on resources. Mario and Luis make the point that having a standard way of creating interactivity will benefit everyone in the long run.

We get into the weeds a little and talk about the approach the team took when building the API. They decided to use directives, and we find out why this was and what benefit it brings over other possible solutions.

The project is still experimental, and theyâ€™re looking for people to test and report back on what they find to move the Interactivity API forwards.

Useful links.

Frontity

Proposal: The Interactivity API â€“ A better developer experience in building interactive blocks

Interactivity API GitHib repo

Repo for the movies demo

Luis’ workshop at WordCamp Europe 2023

Luis’ Twitter

Mario’s Twitter

Block Interactivity Experiments repo

24.05.2023
WordPressâ€™ 20th Anniversary, a Mini Series. Episode 1 With Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens and Jess Frick.
Transcript

Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the 20th anniversary of WordPress.

Today is a little bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s an episode all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens and Jess Frick, with David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

They cover many topics, and it’s great to hear so many varied opinions about what’s been of importance in the evolution of WordPress.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you, David Bisset, Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens, and Jess Frick.â€Š

David Bisset: Well, welcome everyone. Uh, thanks for coming. This is the one of a few podcasts to celebrate the 20th anniversary birthday, christening, whatever it is you want to call it, of WordPress. Uh, yes. 20 years old. That’s it’s, it’s just barely attending college at this point. Isn’t that great? We have four sweet people with me here that I wanna introduce tonight.

We are going to do a, kind of like a news draft. So we are going to pick the favorite WordPress moments of a couple of categories, and we are going to pick them so that if, um, So if somebody picks something that, that, that the another person had on their list, that person that comes after them is gonna pick something different.

So you’re gonna hear unique things coming out of every one of our guests this evening. So let’s, let’s start our introductions. By the way, random.org picked our, picked the order. This is going in so that I am not playing favorites. Aruba, you are first on our panel. Tell us about yourself. Hi everyone.

Aurooba Ahmed: I’m excited to be here with all these lovely people.

I’m Aruba, I’m a WordPress developer. I build plug-ins, websites, all that kind of good stuff. And I’m up here in, uh, by the Rockies in Calgary, Canada,

David Bisset: the Rockies. All right. Next on our list is Sarah Gooding. Hello, Sarah. How you doing?

Sarah Gooding: Hi, David. Thanks for inviting me. Um, I’m Sarah Gooding. I’m the editor at WP Tavern.

I’ve been there, it will be 10 years in September. Um, I live in Florida. I moved there two years ago, um, during the pandemic when my husband’s job changed and we moved down here and yeah, still love WordPress. After 20 years

David Bisset: you’re well working. Yeah. You know what, um, Aruba, how long, when did you first, uh, get into WordPress?

Aurooba Ahmed: Um, I would, I think it was 20, it was 2008 or 2009.

David Bisset: Okay. So about, about the same time as me. So I don’t know, somebody will do the math in the second. Sarah, how about you?

Sarah Gooding: I think it was around 2006 for me, but that was maybe just like trying it out. Okay. So like, um, when I started working in WordPress, it was 2008, 2009, so that’s when I started in years.

Yeah. Making websites for clients and. Things like that.

David Bisset: So, uh, yeah. So like, so Jess, you are up next. Can you tell us in your introduction to how long, at the end, how long you’ve been with WordPress? Absolutely.

Jess Frick: Uh, I’m Jess Frick. Thank you for having me, David. Um, I am director of operations for Pressable, and I have been playing with WordPress since 2008, working professionally in it since 2010.

David Bisset: Wow. It’s 2010, so we are, so it’s the oldest I, I’m per, well, I’ll introduce myself a second. Maestro. Yeah, you’re up, you’re, you’re, you’re fourth, uh, in the order. It’s chosen by random.org. So why don’t you introduce yourself, sir.

Maestro Stevens: This is random.org that you keep pointing to.

David Bisset: Yes, I am not. Thank you, David.

Maestro Stevens: Yeah. Uh, my name is Maro Stevens. Um, I guess I am the preemie, the youngest person on this panel when it comes to WordPress. I started my, um, Uh, WordPress Journal in 2018.

David Bisset: Maestro, can you put yourself a little bit closer to the mic?

Can you hear me? Can you hear me better now?

A little bit better, right? Guys?

Girls? Mm-hmm. People. Humans. Yes. Okay, go ahead, Maestro. I’m sorry. So, yes,

Maestro Stevens: I started in 2018. Um, so I guess I’m the youngest person on the panel when it comes to WordPress and uh, I’m an agency owner of the Iconic Expressions.

David Bisset: Great. Well, yes, young, young Whippers now, but, but that, that does give us a perspective though, cuz us old timers like to, like, to remember the, the good old days.

So we need, we need some young blood. Um, so let, oh, that makes me fifth in the, in the rotation. In case you don’t know me, um, consider yourself very fortunate, but for those who may want to learn more about me, I’m David Bisset um, I’ve been worth, I think I’ve been with WordPress since about 2006 or 2007 ish.

Um, 2008 is when I founded with some help. Where? Camp Miami. So I was with about WordPress for about a year and a half prior to that. So that’s kind of like how I do the math. Uh, I currently work at Awesome Automotive. I currently had a project, uh, WP Charitable, um, which was required by Awesome Automotive last year, but it’s a, but for the longest time I have been a freelancer.

I’ve been a employee, uh, employee and owner of a number of companies. Um, also a member of, uh, uh, post status. So I’ve been doing, I do, I’ve done a whole bunch of things. So that is our panel for this evening. Um, so why don’t we get started? And again, we are looking at the last 20 years of WordPress. So when, so that is certainly a lot of history to cover.

And of course some of you are gonna be aiming for certain years and others will be aiming for others. So I’m gonna be very surprised tonight if any of us snags someone else’s picks in terms of news. And what we have this evening is that we actually have three categories that we are going to try to cover this evening.

And, um, I kind of, I usually don’t like to give categories or, or, or themes per round. If we have time after these three, we’re gonna do arou, uh, I’ll bring out your dead or, or, or whatever is left in our pockets type of a thing. But I thought with 20 years of WordPress, That is so, um, that is so broad to cover that I, it was almost impossible probably to, I wanted to make it a little bit competitive, so I kind of narrowed little things down to at least three categories.

So the first category that we’re gonna cover is a, a memorable WordPress release or something within a WordPress release, any WordPress release. Then that was our first thing that we wanted to cover. So, Aruba, let’s start with you, um, category WordPress releases. So what, what was your pick for your memorable WordPress release in the last 20 years?

Aurooba Ahmed: That would be Thelonious WordPress 3.0, which was really the first WordPress release that I paid attention to when I first started using WordPress. And it made a big splash in the world of blogging. I remember there was this really big blog called A Beautiful Mess. They came out with this course called Blog Love Design, and it was all about like using the new 2010 theme, which is when those, you know, 2010, those style of theming for default themes started.

Oh. And using that to customize it and uh, create something really cool and you could now create custom menus for the very first time. And multi-site was merged. I mean, it was a really, really intense release that paved the way for a lot of what we think of WordPress, like core default. Of course WordPress has this sort of features, you know, but before that it didn’t have them.

David Bisset: I totally forgot about multi, uh, multi-site. Um, and I, and I didn’t know that three cuz remember prior to that, um, it was two separate products, which was kind of weird. Yeah. Right. If you wanted WordPress, it’s weird, you wanted to download WordPress, fine. But if you wanted to download WordPress M U.

That was a separate download

Aurooba Ahmed: and it was like a whole thing to try to set it up. And with WordPress 3.0 it became a lot easier to make the switch if you ever wanted to turn a single site installation. It’s, it was still a process, but way easier with WordPress 3.0.

David Bisset: Who remembers, who remembers WordPress when that came out?

Jess?

Jess Frick: Oh yeah. Aruba skunked me on the first one.

David Bisset: Oh really? Yes. You got sniped. Really? You were gonna pick three? Pick 3.0 Wow.

Jess Frick: It’s literally the first one on my list.

Aurooba Ahmed: Oh. Milestone release. Yes.

Jess Frick: Incredible taste

David Bisset: and, and a nice round number too, which for WordPress you can’t always guarantee. Right now there’s another round number that I’m not gonna talk about that, that’s probably pretty significant too, but, okay.

So Aruba Robot, WordPress 3.0 is your, is your first pick what in a snipe right out of the gate. So congratulations on that. Alright, so Sarah, you’re up next, me and, um, your memorable WordPress release.

Sarah Gooding: I think probably one of the most memorable ones for me was 5.0

David Bisset: and that’s the other one.

Sarah Gooding: Yeah. Um, 5.0 is such a, a big release.

Um, Especially leading up to it, all the agencies and freelancers are trying to get their themes and plugins ready so that they’d be ready to go with the, you know, with the latest and greatest that WordPress had to offer. And it was such a, it was a big leap. Um, and then the, the timing of the release was like right at WordCamp us, and I think it missed some of its, its dates and so they had previously identified, um, like, if we missed this date, we’re gonna push it to January so that we’re not doing the release while everyone’s traveling.

But then, um, Matt switched it, I guess at the last minute. He’s like, no, we’re going for it. And yeah, there was this up, there was just, you know, a, a huge outcry with, you know, people who were frustrated and they’re like, why do we have to push it so hard? And it was just, it was like, It was like giving birth.

I think, you know, it was, you’re, you’re just going through this process and it was, of course, it’s gonna be difficult at times. And, you know, eventually everybody’s on board and everyone’s working together, um, releasing their tutorials, their open source stuff to help people, you know, get on board with the block editor because it was, it’s probably the, the largest technical leap that our communities had to navigate of, of all time, I think I would say.

And, um, it was an exci, it was really exciting time. I mean, I was, every day there was, there were articles to write about what people were thinking and feeling at the time, and there was a lot of frustration, but also it was, uh, it was just something that needed to happen because our editor had been, had been looking dated for so long and we needed to make that big jump.

So I think that’s probably one of the most reme memorable ones for me in, in recent memory.

David Bisset: Yeah. I’m gonna go on, on a limb. For me personally, say that was probably the most controversial WordPress release. Period. Yes. I, I worked for a plug-in company at the time and I was literally making changes to our plug-ins release to get into the repo in the ho in my hotel room.

So I’ll just kinda leave it at that in terms of how much stress that, uh, and I think a lot of people were doing pretty much the same thing. So I have to say that I think, uh, the number one most stressful word press release was for me, 5.0. Uh, I can’t imagine it was probably stressful for Matt and everyone else too.

Most controversial though, I think, at the very least for, for that. And I think it’s still 5.0 down to this day. You just remember the, the nu the version numbers just branded into the My brain, so 5.0. All right. Great. So now it’s gonna get interesting. Sarah. Swipe my number two. So Jess, um, can you think of a enough it literal second one.

Poor Jess.

Jess Frick: I just wanna say though, for, you know, WordPress three, what was cool was the, the editor changed. Mm-hmm. And that was what made me go full-time and WordPress. That’s when it started to be pretty enough for me to play with it. Purdy. And then it was pretty though, and it got prettier. Um, I have a note here that it was 3.7 when WordPress became the most popular CMS in the world,

David Bisset: huh? Accord, according to Matt,

Jess Frick: uh, according to WordPress history.

David Bisset: Okay, that’s fine.

Jess Frick: Um, I think it was built with, it was through, built with. I’ll take

David Bisset: their word for it.

Jess Frick: I’ll find the link for you for the show notes. But yeah, that, I thought that was significant because that was just when I feel like the entire editing experience changed.

Um, But then also agreed for WordPress five. Um, I remember, uh, WP 1 0 1 was one of the big sponsors, and they pulled out of the show because they had to redo all their videos.

Sarah Gooding: It was, it was chaos.

David Bisset: So, to be clear though, yes. Are you picking which WordPress version are you picking? Or have you

Jess Frick: Well, they, those were my two.

David Bisset: Oh, those were you too. Okay. I’m sorry.

Jess Frick: Talking points, but since I can’t pick either of those, I’m gonna say the first all women and non-binary release of 5.6. Ah,

David Bisset: okay.

Jess Frick: That I feel like we’ve got another one coming up too.

David Bisset: Mm-hmm. Yes. We can’t talk about the future.

Jess Frick: That’s, I know we’re, we’re looking

back right now.

We’re just looking back.

David Bisset: Yeah. So WordPress 5.5 0.6 was a major milestone too. In terms of, in terms of that. And I think it’s set, set pretty much a, an example of how those are going to roll in the future. Like we have a second one coming up. Um, did anybody here participate in that? No. Okay. Kind of, well, we kind, we were rooting for the side, but there was, there was so much diversity in that release.

I was, I was very glad to see that, not, not purely from a diversity angle, but as much as just there was excitement and contribution in general because of that. Yeah. And the more that you can expose contribution in general, I think the better off the WordPress project is even when we quote unquote went back to, after that, we went back to, I, for lack of a better word, a normal release or a, a standard release theme, which is no theme at all.

It’s, it’s basically, I went say hand. So Jess 5.6, excellent choice. Maestro, we come down to you. I, I I, I w I’m very interested to hear what your pick’s gonna be cuz this, these were the top three I could think of off the top of my head. But, uh, go ahead. I haven’t been sniped officially, but, uh, because I knew there were gonna be people that picked it anyway.

But Maestro, what is your favorite, or what is the most memorable WordPress release for you?

Maestro Stevens: I feel like I just got sniped right now. Um, two times. Uh, Jessica hit one on the head, um, and you kind of was alluding to one, but I’m gonna go with 5.5. If we gonna go with points. Let’s go with the point system.

I’m going with 5.5.

David Bisset: Okay. Um, that, that’s a, that’s a release. Points of releases.

Maestro Stevens: Points of releases, right? The point of release. Yeah. So, oh, I’m gonna take a different direction and go with 5.5 because it was, it was a release that I felt affected a lot of people’s reason for, you know, being, uh, hired or paid for maintenance because it involved auto updates and once that came out it screwed up a whole bunch of people’s, you know, um, source of income or reasoning or opportunities because I know there was a lot of resistance and pushback when people were saying, well, I don’t need you anymore cuz I can auto update my own site.

So, um, that’s what I would say was one of the biggest ones for me.

David Bisset: I, I actually had someone who went along that same path, but fortunately they used, they used bad plugins, so they’re, so they turned those auto updates off pretty quick. It actually reminded me, and I don’t know what version to this is off the top of my head, but I remember when auto updating WordPress itself was a big controversy.

Um, and I don’t, I’ll figure it out what the version that was, but I remember na for you, for those of you who may remember Nathan, he’s still with us. He’s just not with the WordPress project anymore. Directly for over like a year and a half explaining the concept of WordPress auto updating on major versions.

There was a lot of. Controversy, um, pushback a little bit in terms of do we want to auto update this much of the web? So I, so I can understand that for plugins, right? You know, I, you know, it’s, I think it’s taken time because people paid for WordPress updates too. Like, they’ll just say, Hey, can you just update?

And, you know, they would probably update the plugins at the same time. So, yeah. But you know what, I think in this day and age, there comes a time to evolve. I don’t think, I think auto updates aren’t on many sites for very good reasons, especially probably governmental and educational sites. But 5.6 auto updates did cause a blip in the timeline, right?

So that’s a good choice. I think that’s pretty good. And I totally actually forgot about that.

Aurooba Ahmed: So I, it was WordPress 3.7 when WordPress could auto update.

David Bisset: See that? That to me would’ve been my second choice because it’s now, now, now it’s, I guess it comes down to me, my turn. Um, that would’ve been my second choice because I remember going to so many conferences going to the conference in Arizona, that name, now I’ve Page Lee conference and I’m forgetting in the loop.

No, no, it’s, although they think they talked about it there as well, but, um, yeah, I’ll think of it in a second. I’m just drawing a blank. Uh, it’s, it was PressNomics. PressNomics. There you go. Um, I think it was PressNomics, but I do remember attending a couple of conferences and Nas was there on stage or something, trying to explain how they have been talking to a whole bunch of people about WordPress updates and auto updates and people were scared, so, uh, not scared, concerned, whatever word you wanna throw at it.

And everything’s fine now. So the plugin thing is gonna stray now, but, Because remember, I’ve been with WordPress a long time. I noticed no one went back to the one point WordPress releases. So I’m going to pick WordPress 1.5, which which came out in February, 2005. That release came with pages, comment, moderation, tools, and Kubrick.

Does anybody remember Kubrick? Maestro? You probably don’t. That’s okay. But Kubrick.

Maestro Stevens: Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick, or

David Bisset: the theme was named after him, but Google Kubrick and turn on Google images and you’ll see a blue. What the internet basically looked like in terms of blogs for like, for like seven years, cuz everybody was using Kubrick.

Um, when WordPress came out, this was before like the two thou, the, the, the year themes came out. You’ll see it, you’ll see it. Um, it, not only that, but it also came with a new theme system. That’s when WordPress themes came out in WordPress, 4.1 0.5. And Matt announced themes with these words. And I quote in WordPress 1.5, we’ve created an incredibly flexible theme system that adapts to you rather than you expecting to adapt from it.

You can have your entire web log. Remember those words, run through a single file just like before, or you can literally have a different template for every single different category. How far we have come from a site editor today, from to February, 2005 when WordPress 1.5 came out. I mean, for me, Paige’s was.

The biggest deal, um, because I, and this is the version by the way, that I actually jumped on board WordPress full-time with, was WordPress 1.5. Um, coincidentally because I think prior to that I was trying, I was just at the point when trying out other brow browsers, it was movable type. There was PHP, nuke, I forget what else was out there, but like, I needed something, but I didn’t need a blog.

I needed something to build a client’s website with. And you really couldn’t do that without pages. So when 1.5 came out, pages was the chef’s kiss back then, really young chef’s kiss back then. So anyway, my pick is WordPress 1.5, so that was round one. A little bit of more, uh, sniping than I thought was was gonna happen.

But let’s go ahead and just not waste time and moved around. Two, our round two category that, uh, we picked out was, um, I think most memorable WordCamp. So just to clarify this for the audience, um, this could have been a work camp experience or it could have been the, the work camp itself. Maybe, maybe the atmosphere around it, the community around it, whatever.

Um, as long as it was a memorable, your, your most favorite WordCamp. Memorable experience. So, Aruba, we’re gonna start with you on this. Sure. And if anybody gets sniped on this, I’ll be blown away. But go ahead, Ruba. You go ahead. Start.

Aurooba Ahmed: Okay. I’m not sniping anyone with this one. I’m pretty sure. No, I’m like a hundred percent sure it would be word pit.

WordCamp Calgary. So my hometown’s WordCamp in 2016, which was the very first time I spoke at a WordCamp. And it was also the first time I realized that WordPress was more than just software. There was this whole community around it. And the vibe was, I. Like it was more about more than just code. There was a lot more going on underneath the surface that you might not know unless you are participating in these kind of community events.

Um, and I feel like, and it could just be because that’s when I entered the time, but that’s when community efforts really started to become more of a thing in WordPress world. You know? Uh, I think work, the first WordCamp US was just like a year before that and, you know, things were starting to gain steam.

So for me that was a very, very memorable time, very personally. And if it wasn’t for that WordCamp, I don’t even know if I would be here in on this podcast. So yeah.

David Bisset: I’m looking at the 2016. It’s, the theme was make period WordPress, period. It’s sing period. That was the theme of the camp. Mm-hmm.

Aurooba Ahmed: Because our Calgary theme for that year was music.

Okay. We had a city theme going on that year for a lot of stuff. And so the WordCamp, um, sort of theme sort of fed into that as well.

David Bisset: Make sure to include all, make sure when you provide me the links for all your items to include the mm-hmm. URL to the work camps. I’m assuming that, assuming that there’s still exist, this one does, uh, work camp, work camp, uh, websites were so, so straightforward and simple back in 2016, which Oh yes, is really, to me, that’s not that far.

That’s not that far ago. I’m getting old. It was a two day event on May 28th and May 29th, 2016. And this was your first, I didn’t even have a avatar.

Aurooba Ahmed: I didn’t even have a avatar at the time.

David Bisset: Do you remember your talk? They don’t have your gra Yeah. Your avatars missing. Yeah. Do you remember your talk?

Aurooba Ahmed: Yeah.

At the time, uh, it was, I think it was on theme development using Git. So like how to push your theme from your local environment to your hosting environment. But with just git, you know, deployment was not like a very sophisticated thing in the WordPress land at that time. Um, and I was using get hooks to create this sort of custom workflow so you could like push everything up.

And that’s what I did my little talk on.

David Bisset: Yes. It took a while to find it because shame on them. They’re schedules are graphics on the WordCamp website, so I couldn’t search through text. They’re JPEGs, so yes. Shame on you. Yes, they’re shame on you. All right, so hey, we were learning, we were learning. Moving, moving, moving on here before anything Sarah.

So what is your, Sarah, what is your. Best or most memorable Word, camp moment or work workout? No.

Sarah Gooding: Does this, this include, does this include WordCamp announcements or just like major announcements that were done at WordCamps? Or does, or is it just meant to be your favorite?

David Bisset: Most memorable. Most memorable to you.

And some people can take that is, I was there when this historic thing happened, or, you know, something personal to you. Now keep in mind our, what our next round will be, which I won’t spoil. So if it’s more closely related to that, then that’s the only thing maybe. But you know, I’m putting you on the spot here, I realize.

So just go ahead and share. As long as it’s, um, legit, legit work camp event. I, uh, event of some sort.

Sarah Gooding: My first WordCamp was WordCamp Vancouver in I think 2012. And I was a speaker there. It was a, it was also a buddy camp. And so I was speaking about Buddy Press and I think I talked about like how you could add little jQuery animations to make it cooler.

And I hardly, I can hardly remember because I was so hungover. Um, oh,

David Bisset: I just, oh, what year was this? What was the year was this year? This was 2012. Oh, so this was before the ch before the child.

Sarah Gooding: Oh yeah, before I had kids. And then I think the next year was Buddy Camp Miami or was that 2014?

David Bisset: Oh, don’t, don’t even get me started.

Sarah Gooding: And I brought my dog to that WordCamp and it was my first time in Miami and somebody offered me like a hundred thousand dollars from my dog, or they offered my husband and he wanted to say yes and, but he knew that I’d be so angry.

David Bisset: Um, I can see why that one came in second place though.

Sarah Gooding: Yes, buddy Camps were my first entrance into Ward Camps and those were the ones that I tried to make it do and, um, really enjoyed the most.

Meeting all the people I’d met through, uh, buddy Press and in the forums and contributing and I miss. And, uh, those were very memorable for me.

David Bisset: I miss Buddy Camps, so if anybody who doesn’t know what a Buddy Camp is, is basically like a conference within a conference for Buddy Press. If you don’t know what Buddy Press is, go to buddy press.org.

But it’s software that’s still maintained by, officially by Automatic. It is a social platform. It is the sister project. I, I’ve always considered it’s sister project of BB Press, which is a form plugin, but we don’t go into that. But yes, we did. I forget we had for one or two years Buddy Camps in Miami too, but Vancouver 2012 where Sarah gave her first talk, can’t remember it cuz the brain cells are destroyed, so she’ll, we’ll have to take her word for it.

That’s great. That’s, I always like it. What was, what was your favorite WordCamp? The one I can’t remember. Dude, well, I

Sarah Gooding: remember, I

David Bisset: remember it, but alcohol poisoning here.

Sarah Gooding: I met so many people there for the first time I met Matt Mullenweg, j Tripp, and you know, like there were a bunch of lead developers there just back then, like not, you know, the work camps weren’t huge.

They were really small and it was exciting to, you know, meet the people who were working on WordPress. For real.

David Bisset: Yeah. Back then, the WordCamps were so few and far between when you went to one, chances are most of the core contributors we’d be there. You know, it was because we had to travel. Um, and the website is just as does still exist, October 13th, 2012, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM at a, at Barnaby campus, Bernabee campus.

However, and by the way, when, when, if you’re listening to this, go look at these, um, old work camp websites, links that we’re sharing because you want, I’ll, you’ll get a kick of the people that we’re sponsoring them too. And their logos, if they still exist today, you get to see their old logos and if they don’t exist, you get to see who was uh, sponsoring work camps back in 2012.

So, Sarah. Yeah. Work Camp Vancouver gets my thumbs up because it’s got a buddy camp attached with it. Eventually we will get to a work camp in the us. So Jess Jessica, is that gonna be you? It’s gonna be me. Okay. We’re, what were camp is most memorable to you.

Jess Frick: So I actually went outside the box on this cuz I didn’t know how it was gonna play out.

And so I’m coming at it from a different side. Favorite themes and the swag that got away. Favorite themes? Hmm. Favorite themes. I absolutely loved WordCamp Orlando. I’m a fellow Florida in here, Uhhuh. Um, I absolutely loved WordCamp Orlando 2015, which was Harry Potter.

And then 2018 was space with nasa.

Cool. So, yeah, definitely my favorite word, camp themes. But then the swag that got away, I wanna honor you, David. It was those WordCamp Miami lunch boxes.

David Bisset: Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Jess Frick: Oh no, you’re gonna tease me with it.

David Bisset: I’m telling, find it in a second now. You see, I’ll find it in a

Jess Frick: second. All the cool swag everybody has.

And those were the ones that I was like,

Aurooba Ahmed: oh, I don’t know where,

David Bisset: where they’re within or where somewhere. Yeah, I, I will put a link, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but I’ll send it to you. I, we actually have a, um, I have a picture of them on my old blog. Um, so if anybody’s wasn’t aware, so I’m, I’m confused.

So the Harry Potter one is the, is the one you want, right? Is is your pick. Right. But you’re

Jess Frick: Well for theme,

David Bisset: for themed. Oh.

Jess Frick: For theme the way that you, you know, cuz most of the WordCamps will have like a cool theme. And so obviously I’ve gotta stick with my hometown glory and go, you know, Harry Potter versus NASA Thai.

Um, but for the swag that got away, definitely WordCamp Miami.

David Bisset: We had an eighties theme that year. That’s why the lunch boxes Yes. It back you. I’ll see it, I’ll see it in a second.

Jess Frick: Um, it was like a Miami Vice thing, right?

David Bisset: Yes. There were multiple lunch boxes, so it depended on what you saw. We, we kind of put a lot of, um, not to turn this into Work Camp Miami discussion, but we put a lot of Easter eggs into our work camps.

So if we have a theme, it’s like, if you didn’t see the one sponsored poster of the Breakfast Club, then you. Didn’t you, you wouldn’t have known about it, and it was just special for that. But yes, so I, you know, we can only pick one. So I’m putting you down for Orlando 2015, but I’m very honored that your, that your backup, that your second place was WordCamp Miami. I’m, ooh, where? Camp Miami. What year was that? I like to say it was 2018. It was 2018 was it? I think for our 10th year. Um, yeah, but I was supposed to be there and I wasn’t. All right. Well, Maestro, uh, so far nobody’s hopefully taken your picks. So, um, what would, what WordCamp would you put up as your, as the one that you, uh, remember fondly of?

Oh, wait, we can’t hear you.

Maestro Stevens: Since I never technically attended a WordCamp. Um,

David Bisset: not even virtually.

Maestro Stevens: So I spoke at Work camps virtually in 2021, but I didn’t attend work camp as a attendee.

David Bisset: Were you a ghost?

Maestro Stevens: But I’m gonna take it to the left a little bit. Um, I would say no, I was not a ghost.

David Bisset: Okay. But you attend if you spoke, you attended?

Yeah. You just didn’t physically attend?

Maestro Stevens: I didn’t physically attend cuz that was the year that we had to virtually attend. So, um, yeah, uh, it

David Bisset: was north. Oh, so it’s a seance you attended, I mean, you, you were there?

Maestro Stevens: Yes. Yeah. Yes. Uh, attended, um, Northeast Ohio work camp in 2021. So, and what I mean by attendance, I’m talking about like, I didn’t just go there to go or attend, I was speaking, so that was the big part of my attendance versus just going to a world camp as an attendee, if that makes sense.

David Bisset: So that’s the one who stood out. What was your talk on?

Maestro Stevens: Uh, my talk for 2021 was, um, five. Look at my notes here. It was, uh, about modern marketing for, uh, minority and underrepresented businesses using WordPress.

David Bisset: And was that the first one you physically attended? The one you spoke on? Virtually? Virtually.

I’m sorry. Virtually, yes. I’m sorry. I’m getting my, see, that’s why my blood sugar’s low. I’m, I’m, I’m fasting right now and my doctor said as it wasn’t a good idea to come on a podcast while that was going on, so forgive me, but how did you speak at any virtually, have you spoken virtually before at anything before that?

Maestro Stevens: Never. Never a WordPress specific, uh, topic based scenario, but other things I had, yes.

David Bisset: Okay, so you did, so it wasn’t your first real, it wasn’t your first rodeo. Just a just a little bit different speaking in front of a different audience though.

Maestro Stevens: So prior to then, so I’m 36 years old. I feel like I gotta put this out here.

I feel like I don’t judge, I’m real young here. Like you, you try to call me out with the Stanley Cooper thing. So I’m saying I’m 36. My, uh, I, you’re

David Bisset: younger than me, sir. So you take, well, I’m, you take the ball and

Maestro Stevens: run with it. I’m saying this to say, um, I, I started the WordPress late, so I didn’t even know WordCamps existed prior to 2018, which all of you were well endowed into the WordCamp WordPress system.

So thank you. It was totally new for me at that time.

David Bisset: Well, are you looking, are you planning on tending another one?

Maestro Stevens: Do you want me to drop a secret?

David Bisset: Oh, yes, yes. I need the ratings.

Maestro Stevens: So, um, hope, I don’t know when this is gonna air, but, um, I actually am hosting a workshop at Work Camp Europe. Athens. Greece.

David Bisset: Well, there you go. Wow. That is a Well, that escalated quickly. That’s what, that’s amazing. Well, congratulations. Don’t, don’t say anymore cuz we don’t want to get you in trouble. So you are going to be, have you ever spoken out of the country before? No. Oh, so it’s gonna be, wow. I’m gonna watch the, uh, cam, I’ll, I’ll have to find someone to point a camera at you cuz get, get, get you in your most nervous moment.

Tune into an animated gift because my therapist says that’s what works best for me and my condition. So, very good. Very well done, sir. Okay. Well, northwest Ohio, they need some representation. So, Northeast, excuse me. Northeast. No, we don’t wanna, no,

Maestro Stevens: they’re, we’re serious about that now. N eo

David Bisset: now we serious about that.

We don’t wanna represent the northwest. Those sons of motherless goats, those people. This, that’s a, I can’t swear on this. All right. Northeast Ohio 2021. It is. And welcome to the, welcome to the 2020s. So, Uh, work camps on our list. So last ends with me. I’m gonna go with, uh, I I I didn’t wanna pick, uh, any work camp Miamis.

Um, I think that would’ve been way too easy if, if, uh, cuz I, I, I’ve been involved in the organization of that for a decade. I will say though, that work Camp Miami, I think Pat we already mentioned 2018. I, if I had to pick one of that, if I had to pick a second place, that would’ve been it. We had a thousand people at the FIU campus.

That was also the same year. The bridge collapsed. There was a bridge collapse at, at the, um, at the campus. Uh, there was some in like a day before the conference, a bridge spanning over a highway collapse that connected the school with the parking lot. And it was major pana. It was, they had to close the school.

Um, fortunately we were able to keep open. It was just pure madness. Uh, we had to coordinate with the. With the WordCamp committee to, to, to make sure things were okay. And communication got out and people were, it was, it was just a, for the first day it was really a big mess. And it was very sa It was a sad occasion too on top of it, cuz some people did, did lose their lives.

But on the, on the, uh, what helped, what helped deal with that is that we had over a, still over 1,011 hundred people attend that conference, which was the largest work camp Miami in one of the largest non regional work camps up to that time. We think that’s the one with the, where we did have our 80 eighties theme.

We had people dressed like, uh, various eighties stars giving, giving talks. So we asked, we kind of had a costume contest at the same time, um, and the swag. But since I can’t pick a work camp Miami, I’m gonna go ahead and pick work Camp West 2016. Just, I just, this is, um, I’m kind of cheating a little bit by going with the, um, Go.

Well, let’s see. Going with the, sorry, I’m just doing, I’m gonna have to edit this out.

It was the very first one, right? Actually, I got my picks mixed up. I got my, oh, I got my picks mixed up. So anyway, um, don’t worry, I’ll edit that part out. But we’re the, actually the work Camp Miami 20th 10th anniversary was my pick. I will find a way to edit this to make it sound coherent, but yes. Work Camp Miami 10th anniversary.

I got to pick my own work Camp Miami as my most memorable moment. And just to repeat myself, because I’m gonna edit out the part, I’m gonna delete the last part. Um, I got my work camps mixed in. So like I said, there was an 80 theme. We had over a thousand people come. There was that. That was that unfortunate incident.

The bridge collapsed. Um, so we got off to our rough start, but everybody, we, we couldn’t, we didn’t have our pre-party because of that incident, um, at the work Camp Miami. But Friday our workshops went off with a good start. Um, we had three workshops, I think like a couple hundred people came to those. Um, we had Matt show up for Work Camp Miami for the 10th anniversary.

Uh, he was in the neighborhood. He decided to drop by and we had at the very end, one of the most attended closing remarks, um, ever. We have a really great picture of it. I’ll, I’ll try to remember to put it in show notes. It’s a really good PR picture for any work camp, but especially for us. We also had like a two day kids club and anytime someone says, um, like, like what’s a good example for a kids club?

And for me personally, it was that two day kids club that we had at Work Camp Miami. And it, it really, like a lot of good things happened at that work camp from an organizer that I’m very proud of. But I will always look fondly at that 10th anniversary. The kids, the kids’ club or the kids’, um, workshops were the highlight because they, we had, we actually split it up between young, young kids between, I don’t know, between five and 10 or five and 12 or six and 12.

But we had one for the teenagers, the high schoolers, and the first day on a Saturday, they actually learned how to use WordPress. But on the second day we taught ‘EM marketing. So not only do they learning how to build WordPress websites, e-commerce websites, specifically on day one, but on day two they were taught how to market those websites.

Um, And that to me is a model for the getting the younger people more interested in the word in WordPress going forward. It’s not just, this is how you blog or this is how you move a block. Yes. But you really, these days especially need to teach the young people how it really applies to them when they, when young people, I’m gonna throw out some young kids’, kids’ terms here when they’re on the tos, when they’re on the tu toots, whatever, over in the Instagrams, like for, they’re not very hard concepts or networks.

Right? But, but even more so is like, how can I use this platform either to entertain myself or how to make money or how to get myself popular? Which hopefully when you get old enough, eventually it turns into how can I make a living off of this? Or how can I use this to my advantage? And the technology comes second to those priorities, right?

So, Our kids camp. That was the whole point of teaching kids, okay, this is how you build something. But tomorrow we’re gonna show you how you can market this and sell. If you wanna make any e-commerce story, this is how you market it. This is how you get into the search engines, or this is how you use these plugins.

This is how you create a business plan, which was actually part of the course. So anyway, work Camp Miami 10th anniversary, the eighties theme just ruled. Um, I wish I had a poster, um, but I’ll share the link in the show notes to a lot of the posters we took, like we had a back to the future theme for our sponsor posters.

It was just a really great time. So anyway, I digress. Hopefully I’ve covered over some of my mistakes and now you know what my next gonna be, but we Camp Miami 10th anniversary 2018 was my, was my pick on that. Alright, so now we’re in round three. Thank and this is why we didn’t do it live people. Round three last category, Aruba.

We are going to cover now the state of the word announcements. So you didn’t have to be there in person. Just to clarify, you didn’t have to be there in person. You didn’t even have to be into WordPress at the time, technically speaking. But if there’s anything historic, anything that stands out to you. Um, the favorite, Matt Moway, so this is Matt.

Matt was giving these in person up until Covid. So I believe his last in-person WordCamp, uh, state of the word was 2019. And I don’t think he’s done in-person state of the word since. Sarah could probably back me up on this probably, but I think he’s done virtual ones ever since, starting in 2020. And uh,

Sarah Gooding: I think he did, didn’t he do one in New York City or one or two?

He did in New York City with a small audience. It wasn’t like at a WordCamp, but it was like, yeah, yeah, you’re right. You’re technically, but, um, yeah, it wasn’t attached to a WordCamp.

David Bisset: You’re right. I, I misspoke. So not attached to WordCamp. Not a WordCamp. Yes. Used to be a U WordCamp Us. Um, Tradition.

Exclusive. Yeah, yeah. Tradition at the end, everybody would line up, get into the room, get into this big room, and people would approach the mics. Um, some infamous people would’ve questions every year. Um, and if you, sometimes you, sometimes you couldn’t answer, sometimes you couldn’t get to all the questions.

So, and then in 2020, I know he did a couple of virtual ones every year, and then I’m gonna guess 2021, he probably started, um, having them in the Tumblr office. I could be wrong on that. Mm-hmm. But it was a small audience. But ever since then, they, they were disconnected from WordCamps in 2019. Now your favorite, um, this is the announcement.

So you can pick, you can you all pick and pick the same state of the word, but you can’t pick the same announcement during the state of the word. So that’s, so that’s that, those are the rules. So Aruba, in case any of that made sense, What would you like to tell us would be your best, your, your, your favorite, most memorable state of the word announcement or a state of the anything mentioned at State of the Word, I should say.

Mm-hmm.

Aurooba Ahmed: So the very first WordCamp I went to, that wasn’t WordCamp Calgary was WordCamp US 2019. And that was very memorable for me. So it was the very first time I also saw a state of the word in person and the thing that really I still remember to this day. And it really drove home for me. What we are now doing with WordPress was when Matt told us that the slides were all made inside Gutenberg.

Wow. That every single one was using and they had just sort of finished live coding it. You know, Ella, one of the core contributors, she had built this plugin and it lets you basically use reveal js and have this block. And so each slide was just a block in this single document where Gutenberg page and it was full screen and it had like really lovely design, even had a little bit of animation and it was like, wow, you know, this, this is, it was such a clear demonstration of what we were capable of, what we were trying to aim for.

With the block editor and I just, it was, it was, it was a core or a press memory for me for sure.

David Bisset: I’ll try if, if you, when you send your links, if you, um, you people have done so much work enough, I really appreciate it. If you can, if you can find the video and find that timestamp to that mm-hmm. When you made that announcement, that would be great.

I almost wanted it that point to have WordPress be a slide maker. I’m surprised no one has really come out with the plugin for that since, or maybe they have, but that must be There is a plugin. Oh. To make slides out of

Aurooba Ahmed: the original plugin is in the repo and since then there have been multiple other plug-in plugins that, you know, let you create slides with WordPress that are out there.

Yeah. Well that’s, I’ve done it for a presentation myself. It’s really cool. Lots of fun.

David Bisset: Okay, so that was work Camp US 2019, right? Yeah, that’s right. The last in person one I, I remember. Mm-hmm. I remember. Mm-hmm. Being in the audience. I can’t remember that specifically cuz I was probably tweeting too fast.

Okay. Well great. That’s fantastic. So we still, we have the Gutenberg. Hey, turns out these are slides announcement from Work Camp US 2019. So Sarah, so you I’m sure covered a lot of state of the words at the tavern over the years. What was the one that stood out to you? Or what announcement or something brought in the state, in a state of a word, stood out to you the most?

Sarah Gooding: Yeah, I usually do a writeup every, every year for the state of the word. And, uh, 2014, um, in, at Ward Camp San Francisco. It was the last ward camp San Francisco. And Matt announced this is the last time we’re gonna be here and, uh, we’re next year we’re gonna continue with Ward Camp us. So that was like a, a major change.

Um, And it was kind of like WordPress was stepping into its global destiny, I felt like, because, um, he also at that time announced that it was a big turning point for the project because, um, the number of non-English downloads surpassed the number of English downloads of WordPress. Yeah. So the software was just getting more of a global user base.

And, um, he announced that basically they’d outgrown their flagship WordCamp and we’re moving it to a whole, a bigger one. And, um, we out, we outgrew I R C and we moved to Slack that year. So that was kind of a big thing. It was a major change for the project’s, communication tools. Um, and at that time, I think Fiber, the future had just started.

So he, he said during that address, this is what’s gonna take us from 23% to 30% or 40%, 23%. And it was so ambitious at the time. It was, I mean, who, who could imagine at that time that, that WordPress would be 40% of the web? And um, it was just an exciting time to be a part. I was, I was there at the WordCamp, um, but there was so much energy because WordPress was growing so fast and it was every year you’re gonna expect it’s gonna grow and grow and outpace all its competitors.

And uh, it was a great, it was just a great time to start getting involved because um, the energy was, was so good at that time.

David Bisset: Yeah, I remember the excitement about award camp us cuz it definitely, there wasn’t anything beyond a city level at that time. Maybe, maybe, maybe a few regionals, maybe, you know, along those lines.

But it was nothing on a continent. Well it’s not a continent, David, you gotta go back to school on a country.

Sarah Gooding: I think they might have, they might have done WordCamp Europe by then, I’m

David Bisset: not sure. Was Work Camp Europe first. I think it, yes, I think it was so,

Sarah Gooding: and there was kind of a rivalry for a while.

Seemed like, you know, WordCamp Europe is bigger, or WordCamp US is bigger. And then remember just back and forth every year.

David Bisset: Remember I remember WordCamp, I remember Matt saying that he wanted WordCamp us to be bigger than that. I, I didn’t think that, I didn’t think that was gonna be possible cuz just on geography alone, um, just because Europe is just so much bigger in terms of, in terms of that than a, than a US would, would, would be able to.

But yeah, so we did have Work Camp Europe, but, but really regardless of size work, camp US is a, is the flagship event of all the work camps, at least in my mind. And it’s not just because of size, it’s just because it was, I, I think because of that. Day in 2014 where it’s like, and I guess maybe, maybe it is a, maybe it is a United States centric thing for me, cuz I live in the US but it was kind of along the lines.

I’ve seemed like that was Matt’s home WordCamp. And as WordCamp US kind of progressed, taken two cities every year. Was it? It was, yeah, it was the same city two years in a row. Move on to a different city. Matt just seemed to embrace the, remember the boot on stage in Memphis. Um, he just seemed to embrace the, I mean, where Campy West was Matt, and it’s not, it was, it was not it, you know, the two seemed pretty closely linked together and although he did attend work Camp Europe, um, I don’t remember him giving a state of the word at work Camp Europe either moving forward.

He always did it in San Francisco and then kind of did it at us, um, for a while. So that to me was always like the home work camp because Matt was always. They’re doing his state of the word. That was, that was the, that was the central thing. And of cor of course, Europe was, was bigger, but it was, it was the WordCampy west that always seemed to be a special home for that.

So I, I guess that, does anybody ever, did anybody ever attend the last one in San Francisco in 2014? I, I was there. Yeah, I was, I was there too. I think that was the one where they had the fire alarm or the medical emergency or something too. Mm-hmm. And, uh, yeah, it was very tightly packed in there. Um, the state, when Matt did his state of the word, people were sitting, like, I, I was, I had, I had to get like there an hour before just to be in the front row and super glue myself to the seat.

Which was embarrassing because I didn’t bring a change of pants. So anyway, that’s a different story. I so work camps San Francisco 2014 when we announced work camp us among all the other things that Sarah mentioned too. So that is a very memorable war camp and what I can appreciate cuz I was there. All right, Jess, keep this train going along here.

What work camp, or excuse me, what state of the word announcement sticks out in your mind?

Jess Frick: Also exciting, but in a different way. 2018

David Bisset: WordCamp US 2018. Yes. It

Jess Frick: was as if the entire stage was surrounded by gasoline and half the audience had pitchforks, like the tension was palpable in the room. And everybody’s like, oh my God, what is he gonna say when he gets on the stage?

And he starts with this video of people just talking about how crappy the interface was on the old WordPress. And we’re like, yeah, actually he’s, he’s not wrong. And then they show. Guttenberg. That was when Morton got up and brought up some really reasonable questions about transparency, and I think that was the first time a lot of people really started thinking about, you know, how much transparency is there for contributors?

And, you know, what do you have a say in? And honestly, like, I don’t wanna turn this into like a Matt Fangirl moment, but honestly that was one of the times where I most admired Matt’s leadership of the project because I felt like he really stood in front of the team and took the bullets and then said, Hey, I hear you.

I feel you. Feel free to get involved and make, you know, informed opinions in our dev meetings and we’d love to have you, but otherwise maybe just hang out. Um, I, I feel, and that’s of course me cribbing it, but I thought that he handled it with. Grace and elegance. And I thought that at the end of it, people were a lot more, I feel like the vibe was a lot more relaxed and excited about the go forward.

You know, most of the WordCamp had, you know, built up this tension and it definitely felt a release after that. Um, yeah, I, I had been to other state of the words, but none really shined quite like that for me. Um, now Matt’s, Matt’s a great leader and I’m not just saying that because he’s, you know, essentially my boss, um, but also because he is my boss.

Um, but it really was a really great moment, I think, for the WordPress project. And that was when I really wanted to get involved into contributing. Um, cause you know, if you’re gonna cry for transparency, you should probably do something with it.

David Bisset: It took a lot of guts to probably get up there because like you said, this was the same event.

Where a couple of days before people were in their hotel rooms coordinating with teams to get their stuff ready for Gutenberg. Right. Um, controversy going forward and like, wait, I, the amount of discussion, because remember, you know, this was before where camp started, so once I think, I think when I think we got out of that mode of rush, rush, rush, rush, like updates happening every, you know, probably on Twitter we were just monitoring the, the entire.org forms was, was just nuts.

And, um, slack was nuts. Um, I think it was, it was Slack then I think, right? Yeah. It was whatever form we were communicating with, it was, it was, it was nuts. And then work camp started and then you had that. Like he’s taught, like that wasn’t the fir, that was the last thing at work camp us. Right? So you had hallway was, I remember having hallway conversations about the, and I won’t, I won’t go into it.

I mean, it was, it was more just nervousness than negativity, but it was just like, you know, people were on edge. And for Matt to have that state of the word and like in that kind of, um, I, it, it took a lot, it took a lot of guts to, for anybody to do that and, um, for anybody to ask questions. And that did lead to conversations with Morton and then from thereafter about transparency.

Does any, does anybody remember, um, that particular feeling in the community at that time?

See, seeing some nods there? Yeah, that’s, that’s okay. I wouldn’t have answered that question either vocally and been on the record. That’s fine. Uh, there’s too much, uh, uh, I, I think people forget. Like how hectic it was then. And I think because of the way Matt handled that, even with probably looking back on it, I think some things maybe could have been handled better in hindsight.

But, but you know what, what, when you look back on something, what’s, how does that differ from anything, anything else in terms of how you can handle anything better? I did make a notable, he did make a notable comment about more transparency. Yeah. Um, because honestly, up to that point in time, the reason why things weren’t so hectic is because it’s not as transparent as things are today.

And that’s, that’s how I looked at it. If everybody feel free to, you know, jump into here, I’m, but now that with especially Josepha, um, over the years being more transparent, the things on.org, I think a lot of that transparency would’ve taken us over time, a lot slower to evolve if it wasn’t for. How Matt handled that and the people asking him questions deserve as much credit as that.

But that was a very difficult time too, because the media, there was a lot of media attention on that state of the word outside of WordPress too. And I’m not sure if people remember that, but, um, I remember like news organizations and I, I don’t remember the, the ones that existed then probably don’t exist now.

So I don’t know what, but a lot of news organizations, this was in the news, is that the one where the mayor came on stage? I can’t remember. But this was on, this was in the news. This was, um, this was big news to the, to the entire internet that WordPress, whatever market share hold the time has launched This Gutenberg editor and Matt Longway was in the news was, was on lot of tech websites that were not WordPress related.

It was a big deal. So that probably was the most media attention, media focused. Hectic nervous ball of nerves type of state of the word that probably I can ever, ever think of. So that was definitely one for the history book. So where camp u s 2018 in Gutenberg.

Sarah Gooding: I think all that, that controversy was so healthy though, because you had all these really high profile contributors and business people who were like, no, this isn’t ready to ship yet and you’re giving us three days notice.

And it was, it was, it was a discussion. And, and Matt was very present there. He was in the dev meetings and he, he was back and forth and, and you gotta remember like all these people really grew up together in their careers. I mean, this is, some of these people have a 20 year history together. Yeah. You know, at least 10 or 15 years for a lot of the people who own the, these big businesses or have been contributing a long time.

And you know, some of ’em are real brave to speak up and be like, Hey, this isn’t cool. We don’t want releases like this in the future. And, um, You know, the, it’s amazing to see how the project, the project has changed over the years, and especially Josepha has been just amazing. But, but they, all these people have grown up together and they’ve, they’ve matured together and the project has matured and it’s, it’s really a cool thing to watch.

And, uh, I think controversies like that are, are good because it means that people feel free to talk to each other still. It’s not just some, some cold corporation style thing that the, you know, it’s a family and people are gonna speak their minds and, and it’s healthy and it, and I like that. It was an exciting time.

David Bisset: I’d be honest. I mean, to me, I think some people stuck I, the further away we get from that moment, which is, it was 2018, so that’s like what, five years from, it’s, it’s a distant memory now, but I know some people look back and instill with a bit of anxiety. Uh, so

Jess Frick: I don’t think 2020 and 2021 were real. So it really was just like two years ago.

David Bisset: Whenever some, i I, this will always be a word can, well, it’ll always be a time where somebody’s gonna say, well, you know what, back then this happened and it wasn’t great and blah, blah, blah. But it, it kind of like, it was definitely a, like a growing up point in terms for the whole community. It’s time to put our big person pants on.

And yeah, some Matt admitted some things were not, were his decision, but they weren’t, they weren’t right. But they were his decision. They took responsibility from ’em. And we have some of the things today. We have the trans, we have the transparency today and things today because of the conversations that came from that.

So, Um,

Aurooba Ahmed: we also have more contributors now because of it. I mean, I’m one of those people who was affected before that. I had never contributed to WordPress before 2018. You know, uh, the, the merging of Gutenberg decor was not just a moment of like a chapter change for the software or even for the folks who were growing up.

It was also a moment of it created space for new blood, which I don’t think really existed before. And I still think that, you know, we’re also doing work to make contr, uh, contributor stuff easier for everyone. But that was for me, a really big, like milestone. Like looking at it from, as in just coming into that community at that time.

Like, oh, okay, I, I could actually do something here too. You know? I don’t have to just wait for all these other people who’ve been here for the last, like, many years, these, uh, the legacy folks and, uh, and wait for them to do something. I could maybe do something too. So, and you’re walking. That’s something.

That’s how I remember looking into it.

David Bisset: Yeah. And you’re walking in brand new, like, why is everybody so nervous?

Aurooba Ahmed: Well, it was still nerve-wracking, right? Like it was also one of those things that affected, it was an economic. Problem because it affected people’s livelihoods in a very deep and impactful way that other updates didn’t necessarily do, or other updates before They did create that impact, but it was almost always a little bit positive.

But this one was like, it could be positive, it could be negative. It’s like a, like we took something that was like this and we said, oh, okay. It’s like this now. Like, what, what’s going on? Took a leap. So it’s different.

David Bisset: Yeah. And there was also the four phases of Gutenberg and very, mm-hmm. And then which, which, which kind of laid out the entire plan, which we are still going, we’re entering phase three as we speak.

So anyway, Maestro, we want to get to you, um, state of the word announcement or anything you want to tackle there.

Maestro Stevens: I’ll segue the, um, the phases of Gutenberg. I think that for myself and then with Aruba, what you were saying as far as the, uh, contributing to like bridge them together. I think it, I don’t know if it was 2020 or 2021, so anybody can help me out.

But I got really excited when Matt started talking about the collaboration. Um, that was something that, it was just super cool bringing Google Docs type features, you know, um, to WordPress. And for me, um, as a new contributor, that was, uh, in essence, um, I would say a part of, um, how I feel like other people can contribute that aren’t really WordPress savvy by being able to at least collaborate with other word pressers.

Um, that was awesome. I believe it was 2020 when he was, if I’m not mistaken, the, uh, instead of the word, um, when he had mentioned it. Cause I started watching them after they were, uh, they weren’t, you know, attributed to the WordCamps themselves.

David Bisset: Yeah. Collaboration’s big. Uh, we’ll find the, we’ll we’ll see if we can find the time set.

I honestly can’t remember. Like the four phases were always laid out and collaboration was always phase three, but I can, but there was very little detail in the very beginning, like 2018, what those phases were actually gonna be. So 2020 sounds about right cuz I, um, I remember sitting virtually getting more information about the collaboration stuff and over, over the years it’s gotten a little bit more detailed, but what about, well, Maestro, since uh, I, since you’ve been, you’ve been humbly listening to all of us Jabber about our old days.

What specifically about the collaboration stuff stood out to you the most? Why, why would you be excited about that particular phase? Why did that stick out in your mind?

Maestro Stevens: Well, I felt for a while it was kind of annoying, um, having to

get permission or kick somebody out. Of being able to edit the page. Ah, and that would like that, that hurt a lot of production time. Um, it made people have to communicate a lot more. It made you have to wait, um, if you are patient or not patient. It made you have to practice patience. Like you got kids. Um,

David Bisset: I kicked them out of their blogs all the time.

Maestro Stevens: Yeah, right. You know, so it was, it was, uh, for, for, for me and for some people that I knew, it was definitely a great, uh, aspect of them being able to work alongside. And so that was different for, um, me working with a designer and a developer. The fact that they can both, like if they can both be in, when he announced that if they can both be on the same page at the same time along with myself and we’re all kind of doing our own thing, we just have to wait for each other.

That to me was just invaluable. Cause I’ve been using Google Docs forever and I think a lot of people have, um, have, have gotten used to being able to like edit things in real time. And it was the real time factor that I thought was so cool. I had no idea. Word Press. Was going to do or could do?

David Bisset: Do you think that could be the next wow factor in terms of Gutenberg?

I mean the, I mean, we, full side editing is big, but to the outside world, I don’t think it has been as revolutionary because well, side editing exists, right, exists outside of WordPress. But I, correct me if I’m, I’m this, hopefully we get this out in a video form, but I, in case you’re listening to the audio, everybody’s nodding their head yes.

I just want to let that, I just wanna make that clear. Uh, but I’m imagining the collaboration more than just editing a Google Doc type of a thing. I, I’m hoping, I’m hoping that collaboration also means I’m seeing someone drag a block here while I’m dragging a block over there on the page. Big, my like.

Yeah, that’s the level. Like we think of collaboration as Google Docs, which is fine cuz we’ve grown up with that. Google has nailed that functionality and over the years other people have caught up. Even, you know, apple and other people took a while for them to polish that out. That wasn’t their strength.

But now, but now it’s, you know, like that’s table stakes now in terms of if, if you’re collaborating, if there’s any collaboration at all. Like unless you’re a journal app that is just you or the author, there has to be some sort of sharing or collabora, you know, live, you’re seeing someone else’s cursor on your screen, right?

It was built into Apple’s os later on. But Google pretty much set the, set, the standard moving forward. But you know, so that is a standard. So if that is done in WordPress, editing a document, editing text, uh, I’m hoping there’s more and I hope WordPress gets that, that wow feature factor. Kind of back, which is difficult to do when you do open source, cuz it’s not like you’ve kept, you can’t keep something hidden.

Right. And then release it, because that’s not, you’re not gonna get open source con contributors doing that. It’s all gonna be out in the open. So it’s not gonna be a surprise to us. But I’m hoping that you can start dragging blocks and building pages, like seeing things being built in front of you and just like, um, I think it was, was it was, was it, I forgot.

I’m sorry. What? Who was who? Who was com Uh, I think Jess said, I think it was you about like when go, that video started that guttenberg about all these people complaining by the editor and then you saw the new editor. I want to see a video like that when, when the, when the collaboration tools come and you just see live on a video or even live like this is, this is this whole, how about the slides were, somebody should just like, you know that that meme with the dog and the, and the, and the railroad tracks from a walls and grot.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know how he’s putting down the railroad tracks really fast. There’s a tr as he’s building it as the train goes. I would like to see that in slide form, in WordCamp, state of the word maybe, or something along those lines. Some live demo or live presentation or really slick video of really cool collaboration tools.

So I think,

Aurooba Ahmed: I think if you put collaboration and multilingual together in one video, it’s like p

David Bisset: yeah. It’s, I can understand multilingual and I understand people’s, like, why don’t you put multilingual before that? Because we really need it. We really need it. I can understand why it’s the last one because I think that’s the most complex part.

I think that could be the most complex of all, everything. And you, you wanna map your things out probably before you start breaking things up in terms of translations. But yeah, just imagine esp uh, I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves, but like, I, I, I’ll, I did like a what would be a, um, ooh, there, there’s a good question.

We could, we could probably end on real quick. Um, a spot on question, um, for me, Just real quick, um, my state of the word, um, was basically, uh, 2016 state of the word Matt. Matt, um, was featuring, uh, the year before 2015 was, and I can’t believe anybody picked this, but I’m not picking it, but he did say learn JavaScript deeply, I believe in 2015 and then tw in 2016.

He, and that’s probably his most quoted phrase of any state of the word, was learn JavaScript deeply in 2015. That’s why no one picked it. Yes, all of you, all of you should be proud of yourselves, but that’s not the one I’m picking in 2016, what happened was after I heard that in 2015 where Camp Miami was like four months away.

So I came back as one of the organizers and I got with the team and we made a learn JavaScript deeply track at Work Camp Miami based upon what he said because back then there was not a lot of focus on JavaScript and we needed to get up to speak to it real quick. And that’s what we did through that track.

But then the following work, uh, after that at Miami in 2016, Unknown to me. He, he put like in one of his slides, like a, um, let’s see, hold on a second here.

I’m gonna put it in our chat so you can take a look. He took a screenshot of the, yeah, thanks. You can s if you’re gonna laugh, okay. Mute yourself. Thank you. Everybody right now is, God, I hate you all. That’s a lot of hair gel. David. The sad part is it’s not hair gel. The, the point is, is that he took a schedule of where Camp Miami and he put it up there, which was fine cuz he wanted to feature p you know, us getting into JavaScript and listening to his advice every year earlier.

But that he found the worst possible picture of me and put it next to it. Now that’s bad for two reasons. One, because that’s not, I don’t think a representative of War Camp Miami cuz it wasn’t just me. Um. Other organizers were involved, but two, that was just a bad picture. And I remember you look so happy.

Well, I was young and I, I don’t know if I had kids back then, but the point is, the point is, is that I was in the audience and I saw it and I was live tweeting at the time and like, you know, I almost had to change my pants. It was, it was just the moment. And I c it was just the, probably the most embarrassing.

And I had people looking at me going like, man, you, you look just as just like that guy. And I’m going, yeah, that’s me. And uh, but so I got to be on a slide, just, you know, next time, you know, I wish my PR people would, would’ve coordinated with his PR people. So anyway, I’ll include a link to that picture in the show notes.

But that was probably like the work camp 2016 I got on a slide and I don’t think that’s gonna happen twice. So that’ll be etched in history. I’ll never get a better picture. Yeah, I look better. You know, we could use another slide. But anyway, that’s, that was my story. All right. So we went from us. We, so we, we went from 2019.

All of these were work camp uss, of course, except for San Francisco in 2014. So I think that’s not a surprise there. Um, actually 2020 was virtual, so not, not work camp us. So anyway, that was, that was fun. Now as we wrap things up here, is there, I’m gonna go in order one last time or one last time. If there’s anything real quick you wanna bring up, just like we can’t be as detailed as we were before.

There’s gonna be rapid fires. Is there anything that we didn’t bring up one or two quick memories that didn’t fit into these categories? Aruba, we’ll start with you.

Aurooba Ahmed: Hmm. I can’t think of anything. I am very happy to not have gotten sniped and got all my memories in.

David Bisset: Okay, that’s fine. If, if you’ve got, if, if you’re happy, I’m happy.

Sarah, is there anything that, that’s, that, uh, you. That didn’t fit into those categories you’ve covered over the years that,

Sarah Gooding: uh, I have more that do fit into the categories, but, um, nothing outside categories. Uh, I had a couple other links that I thought were interesting, um, that were, that actually happened at WordCamp Europe.

Um, in 2017 in, in Paris. Matt announced that the Gutenberg plugin was ready for testing. And I thought it was kind of, kind of cool because he hadn’t been doing big announcements at WordCamp Europe. I mean, he was, he would usually save all the big announcements for WordCamp us. So that was like a major thing that the European WordPress community got to be first in on, or, you know, they got to hear the news first.

And then in, um, the next year, like one year later, I think it was June, 2018 when he unveiled the roadmap for how Gutenberg was getting into core. And it was just like months away, which started like every, all the people, um, were just scrambling to get ready at that point because he was like, okay, here it comes, we’re gonna go for it in 5.0.

And um, and that was an exciting time. I remember I contacted probably like 10 or 15 different people who had freelance businesses or agencies, and I said, what, what are y’all doing to get ready? And then I, I wrote this post about morphine. You know, some of, some people were like, I’m just gonna wait and see and I’ll see if anyone likes this block editor or not, and then maybe I’ll update.

David Bisset: Some people are still doing that.

Sarah Gooding: And then, you know, and then there are others who were like, oh, we’ve already dedicated an entire team to get us ready for Gutenberg. And we’re, we’re already, you know, they’re giving a very good, uh, just very good PR as far as their readiness for it. And, uh, that was a fun time.

So I thought that was cool that he saved, he had given both of those big announcements at WordCamp Europe years later. Once that was just, it was established as just, I think it was the biggest WordCamp for a long time.

David Bisset: Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. So, Jess, Jess, anything we missed?

Jess Frick: This might, this is probably gonna sound way cheesy when I say it than it is in

David Bisset: my head.

You’re on a panel with me. You’re safe because I’ll Okay, cool. Standing next to me, you are the opposite of cheese. What?

Jess Frick: So, you know, uh, Mr. Rogers, you know, he’s quoted as saying, you know, when he was afraid his mom would tell him to look for the helpers. And when I think about the history of WordPress, I think about the people in the community and the countless, you know, GoFundMe and somebody gets sick and they can’t work, or their kid gets hurt, or, you know, during C O V I D when so many different things were upside down.

And, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the really cool, about the really technology, but what’s been amazing to me is to see people that have come together over the years and all the cool things that they’re doing, um, to support one another. Um, even as recently as like last week, everybody was pitching in to help somebody who somehow found themselves homeless.

You know, it’s, it’s been really, really cool to see so many good people join together under the umbrella and all the good that we do for open source and personal. I told you it was gonna sound kind of cheesy. Uh, but I mean it,

David Bisset: Well, I, there’s so many different aspects of the WordPress community that could fit into, um, Kim Parsons is, do I have that name right?

Yes. Okay. Sh not the first ex, not the first example of, of a member of the community passing away, but I bel But it was, it was, she was well known by a lot of people and which started the, um, the WordCamp Scholarship. Scholarship. Right. I’m sorry. Thanks. Mm-hmm. Thanks. So, but she is just one example of so many, like we have scholarships for, for, for diversities now, now for other people.

There was, um, the, I can think of a half a dozen people that have passed away over the years too, that have gotten there every year. We remember them. Um, and that’s very kind of, Very unique for a community for to do something like that even on, um, regardless of the scale. So yeah, the community really kind of pitches together.

And we also kinda have fun too. We, we, we do podcasts like this, um, you know, you know, of our own free will except for that one person and blackmailing to be on this panel today. But other than that, we’re doing this because we are a tight-knit community. So, yeah, I think that’s great. I think that’s a great thing to keep in mind over the past 20 years, you know, and there’s, there’s, there’s drama, but I mean, it’s, it’s, we’re we’re still a collective group for the most part.

Um, so finally, uh, my

Jess Frick: Sarah mentioned earlier. People are growing up together.

David Bisset: Yeah. Bringing ki bringing their own kids to work camps. Right. Somebody, some, somebody supposedly conceived one at work camp I am at don’t that, so that’s not at the event. I meant during the weekend. Okay, we’re gonna have to edit that one out.

All right, moving on.

Aurooba Ahmed: Wait, wait. I take it back. There is one like length thing that I wanted to talk about

David Bisset: Uhoh, and that was when her eyes lit up. When soon as I started talking about conceiving children at work camps, her eyes lit up. You’re gonna have to go. Go ahead. Go ahead. You’ll ahead Back over.

Yeah.

Aurooba Ahmed: Yeah. Um, that was when Woo Commerce joined WordPress. That was a moment. Oh, it was a big moment, right? Because Woo. Commerce like woo themes, they were doing so well and they had become fast, become the fast, like the most popular e-commerce system in. Like e everywhere on the web and then automatic, uh, it was like the one, like a really big notable acquisition from Automatic before that there, I don’t know, I have no idea actually if they had done any other acquisitions before then.

But that one was like, it started the train of acquisitions a little bit and it was like, oh, we were Democrat democratizing publishing and now we’re democratizing e-commerce. And now it’s like democratizing like all kinds of other things, social media, et cetera. Right. But WooCommerce really, really began that sort of, um, moment in time.

Right. For automatic and like how it affected all of us in the WordPress community,

David Bisset: uh, au Speaking of acquisitions, I, you can’t go with 20 years of WordPress without talking about the acquisitions that’ve made in the last decade. Right. We saw the first decade of all these people that were starting companies like, um, like, um, Saed, Saed Automotive, but also Pippin and mm-hmm.

Uh, like all these people who I’m drawing punks on right now, the first 10 years you would see them at the work camps and then most of them have moved on or sold their businesses or become acquired. And who’s, you know, the last, especially the last five or six years, so many WordPress companies that we saw give birth in the early part of the WordPress days now are more mature or they’ve been absorbed into larger companies and people that were working out of their basements are now like managing like dozens of people at height level companies, um, and, and the hosting companies too.

Right? Remember when hosting was so immature in the 20, uh, in the early days? Oh, yeah. And, uh, acquisitions. I, when you, when you said that I remember, um, I think it’s more recent, but in August of 2019, Tumblr Joint Automatic, which was huge. And yes, I think we still have to see the ultimate fruits of that labor because we’re starting to see Gutenberg and Tumblr now.

Mm-hmm.

Aurooba Ahmed: And in day one, which was in the news pretty recently as well, the journaling app.

David Bisset: Yeah. So, and then I think that if anything is going to outlive, like what Matt said, if anything’s gonna outlive WordPress, it’s gonna be Gutenberg. Right. That’s, that’s, that’s the ultimate. So it’s so exciting to see how automatic is automatic’s non WordPress business.

Not directly. We used to think of word of automatic as wordpress.com, but over the years with its acquisitions, it’s, it’s now, it’s now so much more, but it’s affecting WordPress in ways that we never, I didn’t think we are, would realize, uh, 10 or 15 years ago. So, Micra, are you with us?

Maestro Stevens: I am back. Sorry about that.

My computer is freezing, so I had to restart it.

David Bisset: No problem, sir.

Maestro Stevens: It’s overheating.

David Bisset: Oh yeah, you’re, you’re, you’re just too hot. All right. So, Hmm. Okay. I’m gonna have to, I wanna, wanna bet with my wife just now. Just thought I’d let you know. Um, said something like that. All right. So maestro, uh, bring it home for us.

Is there anything about, uh, that we may not have, uh, touched on tonight in terms of your, of, of terms, of things in the WordPress history, especially from your perspective?

Maestro Stevens: I can’t think of anything. I think that we’ve touched on mostly everything I would say for me specifically, uh, back in 2020 when I was introduced to, um, o one of one of the plugins, themes and, and, uh, block plugins that I use in cadence, it was a very, um, revolutionary experience for me.

To say the least. I was using Elementor, I was using a page builder before then. People were talking a lot of crap about Gutenberg, a lot of controversy. I’m just keeping it real with you. Um, people were saying it was ready, it wasn’t ready. And then, um, you know, after testing a whole bunch of different, um, plug-ins and themes and they’re all, you know, a whole bunch of are, are so great.

But if I wanted to invest into an ecosystem, kind of like Apple, unfortunately, I thought my investment with Apple kind of suck right now. Cause I’m like, I got this expensive computer that just overheated, but I digressed. Um, uh, it was keep blowing. That changed everything.

David Bisset: Well, thanks. Okay.

Maestro Stevens: Yeah. That changed everything for me.

David Bisset: Well, that’s fantastic. Well, I mean, I think you’re, I I think we have a very good representation here and, and you especially because you’re coming in on the last couple of years and seeing it from that kind of different perspective with those kinds of eyes. Um, Is kind of, kind of now in 20 years, we’ll, we’ll be able to get from your point of view in like the mid midterm, you know, like the, the golden years, not the golden years.

The, uh, kind of a golden age we’re entering into, uh, WordPress right now. So very, very excited to have you back along with everyone else in a few years and see, and see if your MacBook survives so we can talk to you a little bit more. So I wanted to, I What’s that?

Maestro Stevens: Just, um, just to touch on what you just said real quick, I think that, um, based on what everybody has talked about, cause you just made a good point.

So if I can give any context, like I’m not an old schooler here, so I’m really trying to help with different type of, um, generation and new type of people. I’m just keeping them 100% honest with you. That’s the way, reason why I’m, I’m, I coin myself and I’m called the fresh Prince of WordPress because I’m trying to give a fresh perspective.

Oh, a lot people have no idea.

David Bisset: Does that make me the, um, Carlton I.

Maestro Stevens: Uh, that was a good one. I see where you’re going with that one. I know Will Smith here. I don’t slap people. Alright. Um, but still, uh, the whole point was is that people don’t know that it has evolved a lot and there is a lot of people trying to enter into, uh, WordPress without that understanding that it’s not what it used to be.

So I love having conversations with people like you all, cause I get both perspectives. I get people who have been there for 10, 20 years. Like if you have never heard of it trying to get it in and they’re like, I can’t do all that development stuff and all that code stuff and all that, and I have to teach them.

Like, it’s not that it’s not the same, you have that opportunity, but it’s not that. So I think that this is fun.

David Bisset: Yeah. And I, I. Maister and I, this is the first time we’ve been face-to-face. I, he actually reached out to an invitation that I left on Black Press, which again is one of the many examples of how the community is trying to address, um, all the different aspects of that it, that it can in terms of diversity and outreach and finding new people, young, old, whatever.

And I really appreciate you reaching out to me through there. Um, It’s, it’s great to have all these different kinds of channels. Um, at least it it, because not everybody is on post status. Not everybody is on Twitter. Not everybody is here for various reasons. We can only, we can only be in so many channels at once.

Right. And it’s personal to us. So, you know, I’m in my channels because it mean, you know, it’s because of me. My, my livelihood, my background. I’m in these certain places. I can’t be everywhere. And everybody else is different. But we overlap in such ways that finding you in finding you in that area was, was, was a very, very, very thankful that you reached out.

Um, cuz otherwise we wouldn’t have that kind of perspective and viewpoint from from, from that. So, anyway, I’m gonna go around and we’re just gonna close out. It was great having you all. And I want you, you can mention where people can find you on social or, you know, or, or, or whatever you wanna mention to bring up.

We’ll, we’ll start with Rupa first.

Aurooba Ahmed: All right. Well, I’m at Aruba pretty much everywhere, including a website, aruba.com. I’m also the co-host of a fun dev focused, uh, podcast called View Source, if you wanna check that out. View source.fm. And that’s me,

David Bisset: Sarah. Uh, it’s nice to meet you. I appreciate you Ruba coming on.

And I, I don’t mean to rush. I’m just, you get nervous when, when things close down and, um, you know that my kids are still locked in that closet and I, cuz and I really do need to feed them. So I’m, I’m not, I’m not pushing this along, uh, um, by, on purpose, but, you know, I’m getting a little nervous. Um, Sarah, I don’t know where, where people can find you.

Can you help me out on that?

Sarah Gooding: Uh, you can always find me at the tavern wp tavern.com and I’m on Twitter at Poly Plummer. I’m on Mastodon, Facebook, Strava. I’m on almost every social network, so get ahold of me any way you want. Slack. Um, I’m on post status and then the WordPress

David Bisset: Slack. Yes, I’m on a lot too.

Anything that doesn’t have my family, I’m there. I just wanna also say too special call out to WP Tavern. As far as l i when, I don’t know when it, I forget when it was established, but it was so early on. I think it’s, I think WP 2009, it is practically part of WordPress history. It should be put on a podium in terms of, of WordPress history media.

I think the tavern is, is top of that list. So I really, Sarah, you, we all the WordPress community kind of owes you a debt of gratitude. I know it’s not an easy job, believe me, I know Jeff was the one who, who started, we’re gonna have ’em on, on, on the other, on the other podcast. But you have been so instrumental over the years.

The entire publication has been instrumental over the years, covering the highs and the lows and the detail for the articles. You did a, did a terrific job. I’ll think Jeff on the other one. But I wanted to thank you personally here. You’ve been so much a part of the WordPress history just as much as the community and WordPress has.

Sarah Gooding: So thank you David. I appreciate that.

David Bisset: Thanks for that. Um, Jess, where people can find you. Oh God, I’m starting to sound like Yoda. That was barely a sentence.

Jess Frick: It was great.

David Bisset: Where people find you bee,

Jess Frick: where people find me bee, pressable.com, uh, pressable.com for work. Um, you can find me on the socials at renew.

Be, and I dunno, like, like the other ladies, I’m pretty much everywhere, so not hard to find. Okay. Not too many Jessica Fricks running around in WordPress. Oh, well that’s, that probab not too many Fricks in general, but

David Bisset: if, if I had enough energy, I could comment on that. Maestro. I know, Maestro,

Jess Frick: I tune it up for you.

David Bisset: Thank you. And I missed as usual, Maestro, where can people find you?

Maestro Stevens: I’ll piggyback off of Jessica. There’s not many people with the name Maestro Stevens. So if you Google me, I’m the one and only, um, and if you wanna find me, just look for me on LinkedIn.

David Bisset: Okay, that’s fine. Fantastic. You’re avoiding most of the socials like I should be doing right now.

I, and, um, I, if anybody wants to find me, um, as long as you’re not delivering papers to me, my, uh, you can find me, um, at david bi.com or David bi.social. Um, that’s where I pull all my social media into one WordPress website. So in case. Certain social media websites cease to exist, at least my post will be there.

You can also find me on post status and, um, I am doing a little, uh, news website called WP front.page. So, uh, with WordPress News with my daughter as we experiment. A little bit of that, if that’s, you may be able to, that still might be around by the time you listen to this, so go ahead and check that out.

Again, I want to thank my, my panelists. You’ve been great sports. We’re gonna have links to everything they talked about in the show notes for this. Um, and thanks again everybody. Thank you. All right, you have fun.

Today is a little bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s an episode all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens and Jess Frick, with David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

They cover many topics, and it’s great to hear so many varied opinions about what’s been of importance in the evolution of WordPress.

Notes from David Bisset:

To honor WordPressâ€™s 20th anniversary I sit down with four community members to talk about some highlights in its history.

Primary topics include:
- Memorial WordPress Release
- A WordCamp or WordCamp Experience
- The most notable State of the Word Announcement
Guests also share other moments that stood out to them and what the future might hold.

Discussion subjects and links:

Sarah Gooding

https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenwegs-state-of-the-word-highlights-internationalization-mobile-and-new-tools-for-wordpress-contributors

https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-0-targeted-for-december-6-prompting-widespread-outcry-ahead-of-wordcamp-us

https://vancouver.wordcamp.org/2012/

Aurooba Ahmed

Memorable WordPress release:
https://wordpress.org/documentation/wordpress-version/version-3-0/

Memorable WordCamp:
https://calgary.wordcamp.org/2016/

Memorable SOW:
https://wordpress.org/news/2019/12/state-of-the-word-the-story-of-the-slides/

Presentation was made in Gutenberg:
https://videopress.com/v/0uD813PN?at=2398

The WooCommerce acquisition:
https://ma.tt/2015/05/woomattic/

Sarahâ€™s talk at BuddyCamp:
https://twitter.com/buddycampyvr/status/251181980731985920

Phase 3 deets in SOW:
https://www.youtube.com/live/QI3qCoiuG3w?feature=share&t=297

Jess Frick

WP 5.6 all-women and non-binary identifying release squad:
https://wordpress.org/news/2020/12/simone/

Orlando WordCamp 2015:
https://orlando.wordcamp.org/2015/

Orlando WordCamp 2018:
https://orlando.wordcamp.org/2018/

State of the Word 2018:
https://wptavern.com/state-of-the-word-2018-wordpress-embraces-the-block-editor

Masestro Stevens

WordPress Marketing Problem:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7x74kWqWMDY&t=2545

Modern marketing with WordPress for minority-owned businesses:
https://wordpress.tv/2021/05/28/maestro-stevens-modern-marketing-with-wordpress-for-minority-owned-businesses/

How Savvy Entrepreneurs Automate WordPress Maintenance Tasks with Maestro Stevens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_rft3t-HMM&pp=ygUYbWFlc3RybyBzdGV2ZW5zIHdvcmRjYW1w
18.05.2023
#76 â€“ Alex Standiford on How WordPress and the Fediverse Can Be Combined

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how the Fediverse can be integrated with your WordPress website.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the show, I’m very keen to hear from you and hopefully get you all your idea featured soon.

Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jute box and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Alex Standiford. He’s a web developer originally from Dover, Ohio, and has been tinkering with web technologies for years, but started his career as a web developer in 2015. He’s a digital nomad, living in a camper with his family for the last three years.

Alex has built WordPress plugins, websites and web applications, and is an active contributor to the WordPress community, making updates to documentation errors and participating in the organization of WordCamps.

If you’re a user of social media, it’s likely that at some point you’ve signed up for platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and possibly one of the many other options out there. These platforms enable you to post content and have it seen by people all over the world. In effect, this is what your WordPress website does. But we all know that social media has managed to replace the traditional blog for many people. The notion of writing a blog post can seem like a lengthy enterprise. Whereas a social media post is often quicker to write and gets pushed to the platforms users automatically.

In the podcast, Alex explains how he’s noticed the shift over time in his own content creation. He’s put less effort into his WordPress site and has posted most of his ideas on social platforms.

This however is something that Alex has decided to stop doing. For a variety of reasons, he wants to take back control of his own content and make his website the centerpiece of his endeavors.

Recently, Alex stumbled upon Mastodon. It’s an open source platform which is built on top of the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub allows anyone to create their own social networking software, which can interact with any other software using ActivityPub. This is what Mastodon on is, but as you’ll hear, it’s not the only software. There are many flavors of ActivityPub, which can all communicate with one another. And this ecosystem is broadly called the Fediverse.

Alex talks about why he’s decided to delete many of his old social media accounts in favor of open solutions. And how he’s using plugins and his own coding skills to make it possible for crossposting of posts and comments between Mastodon on and his WordPress site.

It’s a really interesting conversation about the recent surge in popularity of these distributed social networks, and how WordPress can become a first class citizen in your digital life; so much more than just a website.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Alex Standiford.

I am joined on the podcast today by Alex Standiford. How are you doing, Alex?

[00:04:33] Alex Standiford: I’m great, Nathan, thanks.

[00:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: This is going to be a conversation which is really up my street. It may be a new project for you if you are listening to this, but it may be something that you are familiar with but haven’t really dug into.

Over the last six months or so, I’m going to say, there’s been a real interest in Mastodon as an alternative social network to Twitter. For a variety of reasons people have brought into question in their own minds whether or not they want to migrate to a different platform. And Mastodon, as we’re going to find out, is one such platform.

Alex has been doing an awful lot of thinking about how this may work, and combining all of that work with WordPress. But before we get stuck into the weeds of that, Alex, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind giving us a few moments just to orientate people. Tell us who you are. What company you work for. What projects you’ve been on. How are you in any way related to WordPress.

[00:05:34] Alex Standiford: Sure. My name’s Alex. I’ve been a WordPress developer since 2014. A WordPress user since 2009. I travel full-time with my family and a camper. We go all over the country. We’ve been doing it for about three years now. And I work for GoDaddy full-time, and then every once in a while I’ll take on fun little freelance gigs, I call snacks. But aside from that, it’s mostly just full-time working for GoDaddy and traveling the country, the United States that is. And, you know, thinking about the Fediverse.

[00:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: Do you want to just encapsulate what the Fediverse is because, I think many people, this may be a new term. It really doesn’t encapsulate particularly well what it is. So, first question I guess is what is the Fediverse?

[00:06:17] Alex Standiford: I kind of wonder if in 10 years they’re going to look at it, that phrase, in the same way that we looked at the phrase blogosphere, right? Blogosphere, like a while back. It’s similar to that in a lot of ways. So basically it’s just where people are, connecting and able to talk to each other socially. Similar to the way that, back then, with a blog post would work. Where you write a blog post and you add an RSS feed and those feeds would integrate with each other and they would like aggregate on different aggregator sites and things like that. Like it was all a part of this way to share content, right?

Today, there’s this newer approach that has the same goal as that, but instead of it using aggregators and RSS feeds, it’s using a specific protocol that allows all of these different social media platforms to communicate with each other. So you can be on a social media platform that kind of looks like Twitter and you can publish something. And somebody who prefers to use a social media platform that works kind of like Instagram can still see it and interact with it completely.

And there’s been a lot of push, and interest in this. Actually Automattic just bought a plugin that would allow WordPress to actually integrate and become a part of this system too. So it would basically align with that protocol, and make it possible to allow a WordPress post to be seen natively on anybody’s social media account, as long as they’re a part of, as long as whatever system they’re using uses that protocol.

So again, if I publish something on WordPress, somebody who’s using a Twitter like experience for social media, could see that post. Respond to it through their app, through their social media account, and it would actually read as a reply on that blog post as a comment. And that if you responded to it, it would then turn around and go back to that person’s post and send them a response. So it allows you to kind of integrate these different ways of publishing content all together with a single cohesive approach.

[00:08:16] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess Fedi is short for Federation, and the idea is that you can combine multiple different outlets, multiple different sources, and have them all communicating with each other. Now, it’s interesting, you mentioned Twitter a couple of times there. You said Twitter like, and I guess that’s an important distinction to draw.

If we were to rewind the clock, let’s say 15 years, I think it’s fairly likely that many of us, if we were into technology and into the internet, our reach there probably would’ve been our own website, our own blog. And we would’ve written content there. And that worked. And as you said, there were ways of connecting your content with other people’s content, but it was log into website, click publish, and you’re done.

But slowly the march of convenience and what became known as social media, really, I think for many people, made that something that they didn’t want to bother in. Because all of a sudden they discovered that all of their friends, relations, colleagues, everybody, were beginning to talk about these proprietary platforms.

We may talk about Facebook or Twitter, but everybody moved over there and the convenience was, well, everybody’s there. So you can post things and it can be seen by your friends, colleagues, relations, but it can also be seen by complete strangers. So you have that capability.

But this seems to be a reaction to that. Now, it may not be, it may be that this technology, the Fediverse and what underpins it, it is just as old. I don’t know, hopefully you can answer that. But it does seem to be a reaction to that because it has certain different characteristics and features which may be of interest to people who are getting, for want of a better word, fed up with traditional social media. So, I don’t know if you’ve got anything to add to that?

[00:10:06] Alex Standiford: Yeah, so that’s pretty much right. So the ActivityPub protocol, it’s not as old, it’s newer. But it’s still several years old. But it’s relatively new compared to the other technologies you’re talking about there. A lot of the reason why it was created was exactly that.

The fact that people don’t want to be isolated and in these individual silos. They want to be able to break out of that and talk to each other. And we kind of lost that between 2007 and 2012, right? Like right at that time where Facebook and Twitter and this true sense of social media really exploded was right at the same time as WordPress blogging was exploding.

And they were all kind of feeding off of each other. And WordPress was, and always has been very open-minded and open focused. It wants to integrate. It wants to be a part of the party. But it doesn’t necessarily want to take over. And then you had all these other social media platforms that we’re doing the opposite of that. They want to take over and they did, right.

So eventually it got to the point to where, you know, you’re not even publishing content on your blog anymore, you’re just publishing it directly on Twitter or something like that. Because a tweet doesn’t make sense. If you think about it, the original, one of the original intents of a tweet was for it to be this ephemeral, quick little update.

It wasn’t really of any serious significant consequence. It was just a little update to let people know, to be in support of blog posts or something that was a longer form that you would write, like an essay or something related to things. Say you’re going on a trip somewhere and you’re publishing tweets, right? I call them micro posts now because I’ve generalized the term.

And you’re sending out four or five tweets throughout the day, as you’re doing things and having this experience. It’s almost like you’re micro blogging, right? That’s literally what it was called. But the idea was that you would then come back and take all that stuff and put it on your blog as a single cohesive complete blog post. But people just stopped doing that. They just skipped that step, right?

So they would just publish these little tweets, and then all of a sudden WordPress became more of a marketing tool than it did a personal tool to be able to provide personal updates. And that’s kind of a big thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is like, how can we make WordPress personal again?

Because a lot of the people who are using it now are companies, right, businesses. And that’s great. That’s an amazing facet of it. But if you look at just WordPress, if you just install WordPress and you just use it as a publishing platform for yourself, it is truly delightful.

Even the block editor and everything about it. If you just take everything away and, you know, you’re not trying to install WooCommerce, or Yoast SEO or all these other fancy plugins or anything, anything at all. You’re just installing WordPress and you’re just using it to publish content.

It is actually really awesome. And we’ve gotten away from that a lot, and I think that this social media stuff and being able to change how we look at our blog can allow us to, not only make more use of our own personal site, but it’ll also allow us to be able to prioritize the content on our site as well.

[00:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we’ll come to all of those different pieces. But one of the things that occurs to me, when people talk about WordPress and building websites on top of WordPress, one of the things that is often touted is, you need to own your content. It needs to be yours. You don’t want to be behind some sort of gatekeeper who you have no control over. So in the event that that website or that service is shut down, then all of your content disappears.

And although we’ve seemed to have settled down, there’s three or four different rival proprietary social networks out there, which have seemed to have got to the point where they’re economically sustainable In that journey, I must have signed up to a dozen or more social networks, in air quotes, that just collapsed. You know, they didn’t make it, and any content that I put there disappeared.

So there’s that. But I totally get the point that you make about the fact that people have stopped using, or stopped thinking about using their WordPress website as the centerpiece of all of their content.

After all, why not just go to Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, and post it there because the audience is already ready made. All of the people are there. But the piece in the jigsaw, which I feel is the clincher for many people who enjoy the Fediverse is the desire to shun the algorithm which is now in existence on those platforms.

So if you went to the original Facebook and the original Twitter, you had a very different experience to the one that you have now. Now it’s, there’s a very complicated algorithm, which in all honesty, I doubt many people understand. But it’s able to put content in front of you, and I guess some people begin to question, well, why that piece of content? Is it because I’m really likely to be genuinely interested in that?

Or is it because that piece of content is likely to engage me further, suck me in further, and make me stay here for a bit longer? And certainly in my life, I’ve noticed that you get to the end of the day and you analyze what you’ve achieved that day. And many, many times I’ve thought to myself, well, I probably spent quite a lot of that day scrolling through things that ultimately I didn’t want to see, but the algorithm is so sublimely good, that I’ve ended up staying there.

So there’s that piece as well. There’s that piece, that wish to get away from the algorithm. And so the Fediverse, or at least the technology behind the Fediverse that I’ve seen thus far, really pushes away the algorithm. It’s not that. It’s a linear feed of content and it comprises only of the people that you follow.

There’s no clever system trying to game your attention. It’s just here’s what you’ve subscribed to follow. If you unfollow people, you see nothing. And if you follow people, you see their things.

[00:15:46] Alex Standiford: Right. I heard somebody refer to Twitter as a content refinery. Or not just Twitter, but all the major ones. So Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, all these, as a content refinery. They’re not necessarily there to give you the content you want. They’re there to just give you content. And sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

I think Chris Coyier, he posted something not long ago that was a really good, I thought it was a really good perspective on it. He said that sometimes he wants the intentional read. He wants the intentional RSS feed and the non algorithmic approach, right? Where it’s like, this is what I want to look at. I want to be intentional with my choices here. But it’s a more high energy take on consumption.

And then he said, but there’s also times where I’m like, I’ve worked all day. I’m exhausted. And I want to just sit down and chill and watch some funny epic fails on Instagram and scroll for 45 minutes or so. It’s like low energy. It’s like, I’m letting the algorithm just entertain me, right?

And that’s not any different than channel surfing or anything like that from the past. But I think it has a place, and I think it’s separate from where you read your newspaper. They’re two different things. So, I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of an algorithm in Mastodon even. I just don’t think, I don’t like that it’s black box. I want to know how it works. I want to be able to control it and customize it to suit my needs. It should be a tool, not a thing that shoved on me.

[00:17:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It is interesting because I imagine there’s a proportion of people listening to this who will not have heard of the Fediverse and think, oh, that’s curious. Okay, I’m interested in exploring that. And equally, there’ll be a whole bunch of people who say, well, I’m very happy with the way that Twitter and Facebook and so on serve me content at the moment. It works to my needs and, there’s no sense of pushing one thing over another, but I guess the impetus of this episode is to explain a little bit about how all that works.

Which leads perfectly to that question. How does this technology work? What is underpinning it? You mentioned ActivityPub, but also I suppose we should get into the whole disparate nature of it. The fact that this is not one thing. It’s a bunch of people owning servers independently who connect together. So, if you could get into the how it works piece, that would be good.

[00:17:56] Alex Standiford: Sure. So, like I said earlier, all of these different social media, pieces of social media software, right? So a Twitter like experience, Instagram like experience, a Facebook like experience, a Medium even, just Medium actually, but different places. They all ultimately integrate with a protocol called ActivityPub.

And basically to put it really simple, it’s a standardized way to be able to communicate between these things. So it’s kind of like REST API, but also on top of that, there’s this very specific set of ways to describe content. It’s kinda like RSS. A lot like RSS in that way where, you know, an RSS feed it has a content tag and a title tag and an author tag. Everybody can use these however you see fit. Whatever fits best for you. Whatever your content is in that spot, put it there.

And it works in that same way, but it also, on top of the consumption perspective, it also works with the ability to be able to interact as well. So it’s a better version of that. So you end up with other standardized things to be able to like describe a response to this and describe what the content is, and the body and all those other details. I could get into the, more of the complexities of it beyond that, but that’s the gist.

So you have this protocol and then Mastodon, which is the Twitter like experience, uses this platform to be able to just talk to the other platforms. Pixelfed, for example, for an Instagram like experience. Or PeerTube even for YouTube.

So you have all these different ones and then, each one of these, that’s just the software, right? So if you think about it like WordPress, because even WordPress can fit into this category too, of different pieces of software that work with the ActivityPub. But you still need hosting. You still need to be able to host it, right?

So some of these software, they’re built to work like Twitter or Instagram, where it’s one server and it’s hosting thousands of people. And obviously it’s impractical. One server can’t hold the entirety of Twitter’s accounts. To be able to do this in a way that doesn’t require ads and allows people to be able to volunteer and donate and support it, is they break it down into smaller servers.

So instead of it being one single piece of Mastodon software runs Mastodon for everybody, it’s several thousand servers are all running the Mastodon software and they’re all talking to each other, exactly like they would as if using the ActivityPub protocol.

So, you’ve got Mastodon that has all these servers and they’re all talking to each other through what’s called Federation, right. Through this protocol, back and forth. And then they’re also able to talk with other servers that are running different software. Because they don’t really care what the software is. All they care about is the protocol, and they’re all able to just connect with each other and talk. And that’s really what the Fediverse is, in the technical sense.

[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that one of the difficulties that I’ve experienced anyway, with people trying to get on board the Fediverse, is they have this notion that because Facebook’s a platform and you are always going to facebook.com to log in. And the same for Twitter. It’s a little bit of a, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance going on when you realize, well, I can’t go to mastodon.com and sign up for an account over there. I need to go to some other smaller entity. But that’s the point. There’s loads of them, thousands of them, as you described. They all talk to each other.

But you’ve got to, you’ve got to pick a place to begin. But one of the things that you can do is you can port your account, you can move it from a particular server to another server. But also, because of the free and open source nature of the software, certain servers can decide rules for themselves, which may be exactly what you want to hear. It may be music to your ears that this particular server, allows this kind of content, but not this kind of content.

This particular server will communicate with this one, but we’ve made a decision for various reasons that the content that’s being created over on that server is something that we don’t want to see. So it adds all that complexity, but with that complexity comes some wonderful benefits I feel as well.

[00:22:11] Alex Standiford: For sure. And also, and then if you end up with a bunch of bad actors who spin up a server and they’re trying to like, cause some kind of problem. Cause some drama or spread false information or something through the Fediverse. All the different servers, they can look at that one and say, this server is full of people who are not doing anything but causing problems for my server. I’m blocking this server. This server can no longer communicate with my server at all.

And they call it fedi locking. So, what’s happened a couple of times, this is before me, I’m still relatively new to all this, but they’ve had a few scenarios where that exact scenario has happened. Where somebody spun up a server and they were publishing a whole bunch of just garbage, and all the other servers talked to each other, not automatically, but like literally the administrators and everybody were just communicating about the content that was flowing from that place. And said, yeah, this is a problem, we’ve got to block it. So everybody just blocked it at once and it just completely shut that server down. And it’s like a fire, you know what I mean? You smother it and it just dies and it goes away.

[00:23:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess it’s important to emphasize there that each server is run by an administrator, several administrators, it depends. So it’s on the server level that that blocking takes place. It’s not like this cabal of people got together and said, Mastodon, ActivityPub will block this server. No, they’re blocking it on their own server, the one that they’re in charge of.

[00:23:36] Alex Standiford: Right. So if you liked that content for whatever reason, you can be on a server that doesn’t block it. But the thing I really want to talk about today is the idea of taking this a little bit further and owning your content again, right? Bringing it all back to WordPress.

Publishing on social media is fantastic. It’s been an amazing change for me at least. I’m sure it has been for you, like, it’s been transformative in how I approach being able to talk to people. I’ve met so many people as a result of it. It’s been so good for my career and everything.

But, the problem is that I, like I said, I stopped publishing on my blog and I stopped doing that because I was putting my blog on a pedestal. I would say this content isn’t good enough for my blog. This is just a little 25 word post with a picture. This is a small update about me. This isn’t good enough for my blog. I’m just going to go throw this on Twitter.

And what ended up happening was I would publish something on my site once every six months or so. Granted, it’s polished. It’s a great article and I’m proud of everything I’ve written, well, proud of most things that I’ve written. But it was so infrequent, right?

So my site no longer was the singular place where I would send people. I got to the point to where I was basically sending people to my Twitter account instead of my personal site. You know, it makes sense because I am inadvertently creating and publishing the most authentic version of myself on Twitter. On social media. Which is just crazy when I say it out loud.

If 13 year old me knew that I was capable of building a website and building my own cool little space that was just mine, and didn’t belong to anybody else, and I wasn’t publishing absolutely every dang thing that I ever published about myself anywhere but there first, I would’ve been mad at myself.

When I was 13, I had a, it was like a, I don’t know, it was one of those frost fire sites or something. I can’t remember. It was like a self-hosted. It wasn’t even self-hosted. It was like you go there, you sign up and you have like frostfire.com/service, or Alex or something. Anyway, it was crazy, right? It had GIFs of like clouds in the background and there was music playing on it. It was terrible because I was a kid and I didn’t know anything about web design, but I loved it.

I would go to that all the time and I would check it out and I was like, this is mine. I’m doing this for me, and I want you to see it, but this is mine. I feel like I’ve gotten away from that over the years where now I’m, well not now, but up to recently, I was looking at my site and saying, this is a brand, this is a product. This is for me to be able to put the best stuff on and nothing else.

And, it wasn’t an overly personal site. It wasn’t a, it was just a site that felt inauthentic. It wasn’t me. And it really bothered me whenever I made that realization.

[00:26:31] Nathan Wrigley: So in the future that you are imagining, and some of the pieces of this puzzle probably exist already, but some of the pieces of the puzzle that we are going to lay out, have still yet to be created. But the Fediverse allows you to choose to have WordPress as the fulcrum, the centerpiece of Alex’s digital life.

And you are imagining a scenario where you could publish things on WordPress. Obviously WordPress has a commenting system. But that content could then be sent to other platforms. Let’s imagine Mastodon, for example. It could be read over there. But equally, any commentary that happened over on Mastodon would come back and be reflected on your website. And so in this way, the website becomes the centerpiece of it all.

[00:27:24] Alex Standiford: Yeah, exactly. You publish on your site and it syndicates everywhere else. And that’s where I’ve come to, right? So I had a design of my site prior to this one, my current one. It was just a single React site that I built that, all it did was it grabbed content I published from all the different blogs that I publish on. And it pulled them in and it put them on a single feed.

The idea was I wanted this site to be as easy to maintain as possible. I don’t want to mess with it. I want it to just be automatic where I publish content. Wherever I publish it, I want it to show up on my site. And I’ve realized that that’s kind of backwards, and I want to flip that and get to the point to where I’m publishing content from my site, and then having it go out.

Now, the reason why I didn’t pursue that, and I instead was focused on ingesting that content, bringing it into my site, was because platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram make it very difficult to integrate with them in a way that allows you to be able to obtain that public data, right.

I’m publishing a tweet. It’s public. It’s available to the public, and yet I can’t publicly access that stuff via a REST API or an RSS feed or anything like that. Because one, they’re trying to manage their integrations and trying to maintain their servers to make sure that it doesn’t get abused.

But really what it is, is they just don’t want you to do that. You know what I mean? They don’t want you to be able to have that. They want you on their platform. They want you looking at ads. They want you there. And for a couple of years now, because I actually hadn’t even heard of the Fediverse. I’d been thinking about all this stuff. I hadn’t heard about any of this, and I was like, man, I really hate this.

Like, I want to publish on my site first. It was bugging me, driving me nuts, right. And then the Elon Musk, the purchase rather, last year happened and I literally tweeted, because I still even at this moment, didn’t know about the Fediverse at all. I was like, hey, we’re developers. Why don’t we fix this? I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I would love to be able to fix this specific problem where I’m not publishing on my site. I don’t want to be on Twitter anymore. How can we fix this?

And somebody was like, well, why don’t you just use Mastodon? I looked it up and I looked into it, and it was over. That instant, literally that day I switched over. I made an, my entire day was lost. I switched over, I made account. I deleted all my tweets. I exported everything. I deleted all my tweets. I changed my profile name to my Mastodon handle, and added a description and said, I’ve moved, I haven’t looked back.

I haven’t missed it. I don’t want it. That’s not what I want to be. I want my content to come from my website, and I knew that that requires open protocols, open source software, and staying away from these siloed, closed source places like Twitter and Facebook.

And if I’m being honest, as a open source WordPress developer, as a person who believes in WordPress and believes in the promise that publishing content should be available for everybody, and things like that. And being able to access and work with that data should be open and, all the fundamental open source values. I have to be on Mastodon.

It’s not even a choice, right? Because it’s simply either you do, you mean it, right? You mean that. You believe this and support this. Or you don’t. Because if you’re on Twitter, you don’t. I just don’t think you do, because you’re using a closed source platform to be able to publish content.

You may be telling yourself that you’re not, but ultimately you are. And it is completely contrary to WordPress. It doesn’t want WordPress to exist. It only allows it to exist because it has to and it can’t get rid of it. Whereas open source things, they want it. They invite it. They welcome this as a part of the whole.

Even from an identity perspective, that’s where it hit me. It hit me all the way down to like my very identity on social media. And I was like, I can’t be on Twitter now that I know this exists. I literally can’t be. It’s not even a matter of what’s better or not. I just can’t do it.

[00:31:22] Nathan Wrigley: If we were to try and implement some of the bits and pieces that you’ve just described, this kind of bidirectional relationship with the Fediverse, Mastodon or Pixelfed or whatever it be. And so you, can push content from WordPress out there, but also that you can consume content from the Fediverse back into, let’s say, a commenting system on a WordPress post.

How is that achieved? Now, I know that the goalposts here are moving all the time. It seems like there’s a whole tranche of developers who are really interested in this and are proposing different things, and there’s different plugins that are trying to tackle this. Given that we’re recording this towards the latter part of the beginning of 2023, and caveat emptor, who knows what the state of play will be when anybody listens this.

Given all of that, what are the plugins that are spiking your interest? It may not be plugins, it may be something else. What are the solutions that you can point people towards to make this possible in a WordPress site?

[00:32:20] Alex Standiford: You can do it today with the ActivityPub plugin, and that’s the one that Automattic just purchased recently. They hired a person full-time to be able to take it on and maintain it. Well, actually they hired the developer, the person who built it and just said, going to hire you and you’re just going to work on this, right.

It will do those things you’re talking about. The problem with that plugin, at least today, and I know that this is something that they want to improve. But at least today, the problem is you can’t actually build a social media feed from it. And what I mean by that is, your blog will have an account, right?

So anybody can follow your blog account, your website’s account. Just by going to your address which is basically your username at your account, your website.com, right? But they can access it and they can see the content and they can follow it, they can comment on it, they can boost it, they can do all the things that you can normally do with it on the Fediverse. And you can interact with the comments and how people respond to it. But you personally can’t follow other people and view their content using your website right now. That to me is kind of the killer limitation that has stopped me from doing that today.

[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: It’s around the content creation process, not the exploration of what other people are producing. It’s about you producing and receiving commentary, but not exploring what everybody else is producing, right?

[00:33:46] Alex Standiford: Right, as I understand it, there’s a hope that we can get to the point to where both sides of that, both the discovery and the writing side can all happen in a single, cohesive place. But it doesn’t quite exist yet. That’s kind of the big, for me personally, that’s the big limiting factor.

A lot of people get around it by having a social media account and then manually boosting everything they publish after they publish it. I think that defeats the purpose. But I am doing something that’s not terribly different, to be honest. The conclusion that I ended up coming to was, I’m publishing everything on my site, including social media posts and everything.

And I’m using a plugin, I can’t remember the name right now. Let me find it real quick. It’s called Share on Mastodon. That was pretty easy. So there’s a plugin called Share on Mastodon that allows you to automatically cross publish content that you publish on your site onto Mastodon.

And of course, these things exist or existed for Twitter and Instagram and all those other ones. But again, on a closed platform, they’re kind of difficult to work with and they can just go away at any time. But that’s neither here nor there.

The Share on Mastodon plugin will automatically cross publish content you post on your site onto Mastodon. You can filter it. You can customize how the content is published. What format it is, and all that stuff through the plugin via a filter, or several filters really. It’ll even scan the content and grab the images from the content and attach them in the posts and things like that.

That’s been my solution. As of right now, I am active on Mastodon and that’s it. I don’t plan on being active anywhere else anytime soon. If I do, it’ll be on another platform on the Fediverse. But to be honest, there’s not a huge reason to do it. Once you pick the software you like, the feed can ultimately be the same people. You know what I mean? I’m not there yet. I’m finding plenty of people coming to the Mastodon. I’m good with that.

I’ve got my site personally set up to do that. It’ll auto publish content. But then the other challenge that I ran into with this is the mobile experience, right. Because I’m not going to open up my website through my phone, open up a post, click add post, and like go through this whole process to be able to publish a micro post, a social media post, right? It’s supposed to be this small quick thing that just takes a second. I mean, Twitter, originally you were literally texting a phone number, right?

That’s why the character counts exist. Limits existed originally and stuff. It was a technical reason. It was because you were just texting a phone number and that added a tweet. So it’s always supposed to be this quick, you whip out your pocket, something out of your pocket and you send a text message and it should be that quick.

So to have to go through all of that, I already know that’s a non-starter. If I have to do that, this is never going to work. So I actually had to design my site around the limitations of the WordPress app today. Which to me, I think is getting that better is as important as getting the connections and everything to the Fediverse setup. Because it’s very limited on what it can do.

You can use posts. It supports the block editor, and it’s fantastic. Don’t get me wrong. The editing experience is great, but it’s limited. I can’t customize that app at all. So whatever that app has in it are the tools that I can use inside a WordPress, to be able to solve my problems.

That means I can’t use custom post types. That means I can’t use custom blocks. I can’t use custom sidebar widgets inside of the block editor to be able to organize or change my content. I can use categories. I can use tags. And weirdly enough I can use post formats. And that’s it.

So, I designed my site to support those, to use those. I’m actually using post formats on my site. It is the weirdest thing. I don’t love it. I’m okay with it, it’s fine. But I would much rather have a custom post type with a block editor template, right? So that I could create like a image post type and be able to click on it. It’ll just be a fixed template with an image and a paragraph for me to be able to add text. Like, I would like to lock it down like that, but I can’t do any of that stuff because I’m limited by what the WordPress app allows me to do.

So with those two things, basically now I am whipping out my phone, opening up the WordPress app, tapping on post, clicking, add new posts, typing in my content. And then I’m setting the post format to aside and adding my tags and hitting publish. And I have a little action that runs in the background that automatically, with that plugin, Share to Mastodon plugin, I’m hooked into that.

So whenever my content publishes, if the post format’s aside, if it’s a micro post, it automatically shares the body, all of the content in that post. And then it’ll automatically parse the tags as hashtags. And then it also shares a link to the original posts, as well. So that happens. But then if it’s an actual blog post, right, it’ll just take the excerpt and it’ll do the same thing, but it’ll take the excerpt instead. Share a link to the original post and the hashtags.

[00:38:46] Nathan Wrigley: So, being a developer, you’ve been able to conjure up ingenious, by the sounds of it, ways of overcoming the problems of sharing different types of content. But it feels like that solution is something which you would desire, well, maybe to build yourself, I don’t know.

[00:39:03] Alex Standiford: Yeah. The spirit is willing, but the time, there’s only so many hours. The problem with this is that my theme that I’m using, it’s a custom theme. Now, it’s not a crazy, I mean, okay, yeah, it’s a pretty crazy setup. It’s way beyond what a typical person should be expected to use and set up.

It is mine, 13 year old me, right? This is mine. It’s for me. I’m having fun with it. I’m going to put all kinds of crazy stuff in this. I’m going to overbuild the crap out of it just because I can, and I want to. But, just a more practical look at this. The big problem with what I just said is the post formats because very few themes, if any themes at all, support post formats today. Because they were marked as, they basically killed them off, right, in favor of custom post types.

But then they never actually added support for custom post types in the app. So here we are. So you’re kind of in this weird catch 22 where if you want to do this, you have to figure out how to allow your blog, your website, to be able to actually support post formats again. Which, that isn’t hard. Actually just telling it, hey, I want to use post formats on posts. That’s not a big deal. That’s like four lines of code, no big deal. The problem is the theme support, right? The actual, whenever you’re going through the loop, actually setting it up to be able to recognize those different post formats and to display them appropriately is a challenge, right? Actually integrating it with the actual content.

[00:40:30] Nathan Wrigley: It feels at the moment as if, whilst it’s a lot of fun, you are also saying, it’s a lot of fun for somebody like me. In the sense that, you know, you’re a developer, you can overcome these problems. Given all of that, is there still right at this point in time, is there still a benefit do you think, in just throwing on the plugins that are freely available at the moment and going for it, and just working with the limitations?

Because, again I think if I cast my mind back to the beginning of Twitter. Twitter was nothing like what it is now. It took years and years and years for people to figure out what Twitter would be. For Twitter to figure out what Twitter would be. Facebook the same. It went through this iterative process.

I remember the Twitter fail whale. It was just a hot mess. 50% of the time, everything I tried to do just died. And so maybe it needs to be viewed with that approach. Yes, you may wish to be a part of the Fediverse, but we’re at the beginning of the evolution. We haven’t fully conceived of what that might be. And in the year 2023, 2024, that will become a little bit more solidified. But jump in, have a go with what’s available right now, developer or no.

[00:41:36] Alex Standiford: Yeah, I think so. If for no other reason than this. I always told myself that I didn’t care about the content I was posting on Twitter. Like I didn’t care a lot about it. I was just posting it because it was easy to post things there. I cared about being a part of a conversation. I treated it like a Slack chat, right? Where it’s, truly this thing that’s just going to go away. I don’t really care if I never see it again, that’s fine. But Twitter’s not that, it’s not. Content never goes away as we’ve seen, right?

So, I found that I was, this became especially true whenever we started traveling in the camper because, I was posting all these cool things. These cool like little moments that would happen. Like, I’ll give you an example. I had a, I was in Taos last summer, and it was like three in the morning, and these donkeys woke us up. And we’re at my door, and I was like, what are these donkeys doing here? It’s three in the morning. And I whipped out my phone. I recorded a video. I published a tweet. Didn’t think anything of it.

Well, of course that tweet became something that I was linking back to and referencing all the dang time. I didn’t think anything of that at the time. It didn’t matter. But then I decided I didn’t want to be on Twitter and I wanted to leave, and all of a sudden I’m deciding I’m deleting all my tweets. And I’m losing all that. Right, I gave up all that.

Now I have all that stuff and I hope to someday maybe be able to put it back on my site. But the point is, I wasn’t owning my content. I wasn’t doing it right. I wasn’t doing it well enough. I thought I was, because I was saving the super shiny, amazing blog posts, but I wasn’t sharing my most authentic self on my site. I wasn’t even sharing all of my content that I clearly cared about, right?

Because I thought I didn’t care about it because I thought that Twitter was just a place for me to chat with people. But it proved to be very much not the case. So now, if nothing else, even if you’re manually, I mean, for weeks I was manually publishing on WordPress and then turning around and posting it on Mastodon.

I was doing this manually, and if you literally just hide, you could add a filter onto a theme that doesn’t support it, and just hide all of the posts that aren’t, like your aside post type. So, if it’s a micro post, maybe it literally just doesn’t show up on your site today. You could still do it, and it would just look funny because it wouldn’t have a title, but some themes it might look fine. You never know, maybe a couple CSS tweaks and it looks great. But, I think it’s worth it for no other reason other than owning your content and being true to that fact, right? And truly believing and knowing that you have your stuff and it’s yours, right?

For example, my family doesn’t follow me on Twitter, right? So I had this really cool moment the other day where I shared a personal update about my son and, my site is set up to where my WordPress site happens to also be set up to where it’s a single WordPress website, but it’s actually. three different websites that are on the front end. So it’s actually managing, casualweirdness.life, alexstandiford.com and eventually it’ll also be managing, WP Dev Academy. So all three of these sites are running through this single site, and it’s just querying the data based on what site it needs to be.

So with that, I’m actually able to not only publish content across the Fediverse, but I’m also able to publish this personal update. And since it’s a personal update and it’s detected that it is, because it’s using a specific tag, it also automatically just shows up on the feed on casual awareness’ site too, which is a more personal lifestyle blog of my family and me, compared to alexstandiford.com, which is a more holistic look.

But it was really cool because I had this post, right, I published it, and I was able to send it and just share from alexstandiford.com, this is a post from me about me, that I want to share with you and it’s got a video on it. I know that seems silly, but there was just something really cool about being able to just share something on a personal level with my family, because I’ve never done that.

It’s always been the blog is the business, right? The blog is buttoned up. I’m not sharing this content with my family because nobody gives a crap about WordPress until they suddenly decide they want to start a business. So, to be able to just use my site beyond networking needs, and be able to just share it, something like that with my family was really cool. It was this like first moment where I really felt that my site was like an intimate, personal thing, not just a tool.

[00:45:48] Nathan Wrigley: You really have gone into the weeds of this, haven’t you? It’s fascinating listening to all of this, and all of the different ways you’ve got of consuming the content from three different websites and I would encourage anybody who likes UI and UX, to go and click the little clock icon on the top right of Alex’s website. You’re in for a surprise.

[00:46:05] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:46:07] Nathan Wrigley: That is something else, bravo. That’s fun.

[00:46:09] Alex Standiford: Thank you. Thank you.

[00:46:11] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that I suppose people get onto social media for, is for reach. And for that content that they’re producing to be seen by a bunch of people. How do we feel that’s going on the Fediverse? For my part, the graph just keeps going up. The user base keeps growing up. Is it logarithmic? No. It’s more of a linear growth, but it’s growth nevertheless. What’s your feeling on that? Because I feel that some people think, well, I can’t let go of Twitter because I have this business. I’ve built up a reputation there. I don’t want to lose all of that. Do you see people moving over slowly? Is that a trend?

[00:46:43] Alex Standiford: So to answer your question first off, I see more. I see a lot more. Honestly, I saw a lot more in December. It was just almost instantaneous. And maybe it’s because I found the right server and the right people when I was talking about the right subjects. I’m not sure.

It could also just be simply because I joined right at the same time as everybody, a lot of other people who were joining, who were excited about it, and we were all talking about it together. But even now, now that things have calmed down, relatively speaking. I don’t even notice a difference in terms of engagement, but I can tell you that for a while, I was cross-posting both on Mastodon and Twitter at the same time for a few weeks.

And every post on Mastodon was consistently getting more engagement than it was on Twitter. And I have half the followers on Mastodon as I do on Twitter. So it’s definitely more for me. I have like 1800 followers on Twitter, and I think last time I checked I had somewhere around 700 on Mastodon. And it was still, two to three times as much engagement.

[00:47:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s amazing. It definitely seems to be growing. We’ll have to see how this whole Fediverse thing pans out, but it’s, for the moment at least, it’s very, very exciting. I do like the idea of creating some system where WordPress sits at the center of all of that, and the ability to create content over there and see it, see the impact of it inside of your WordPress website. Even though the impact, the commentary or whatever, was happening elsewhere.

If people are interested in this, Alex, and they want to reach out to you because it can be confusing. There’s a lot of strange pitfalls along the way. What are the best places to reach out to you? Don’t say Twitter.

[00:48:16] Alex Standiford: alexstandiford.com of course, is my personal site. So, I’ve got several blog posts I’ve written. You’re invited to ask questions as a comment on there. You can also just reach out to me on the Fediverse on Mastadon. I am @alexstandiford@fosstodon.org. That’s, you know, a perfectly fine spot to message me to. I check that pretty often. Of course, I’m on Slack on several different channels like Post Status, so I’m on Make WordPress as well. You can just message me directly on there too.

[00:48:42] Nathan Wrigley: Alex, I hope that we’ll be able to say when 2024 rolls around that this has taken off. Let’s see how it all lies in a year’s time. Thank you so much for chatting to us about the Fediverse today. I really appreciate it.

[00:48:55] Alex Standiford: Yeah, no problem. I appreciate your time. Thanks.

On the podcast today we have Alex Standiford.

Heâ€™s a web developer originally from Dover, Ohio, and has been tinkering with web technologies for years, but started his career as a web developer in 2015. Heâ€™s a digital nomad, living in a camper with his family for the last three years.

Alex has built WordPress plugins, websites, and web applications, and is an active contributor to the WordPress community, making updates to documentation errors, and participating in the organisation of WordCamps.

If you are a user of social media, itâ€™s likely that at some point youâ€™ve signed up for platforms like Twitter, Facebook and possibly one of the many other options out there.

These platforms enable you to post content and have it seen by people all over the world. In effect, this is what your WordPress website does, but we all know that social media has managed to replace the traditional blog for many people. The notion of writing a blog post can seem like a lengthy enterprise, whereas a social media post is often quicker to write and gets pushed to the platform’s users automatically.

In the podcast Alex explains how heâ€™s noticed this shift over time in his own content creation. Heâ€™s put less effort into his WordPress site and has posted most of his ideas on social platforms. This however is something that Alex has decided to stop doing. For a variety of reasons he wants to take back control of his own content and make his website the centrepiece of his endeavours.

Recently Alex stumbled upon the Mastodon. Itâ€™s an open source platform which is built on top of the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub allows anyone to create their own social networking software which can interact with any other software using ActivityPub. This is what Mastodon is, but as youâ€™ll hear, itâ€™s not the only software; thereâ€™s many flavours of ActivityPub which can all communicate with one another, and this ecosystem is broadly called the Fediverse.

Alex talks about why he decided to delete many of his old social media accounts in favour of open solutions, and how heâ€™s using plugins and his own coding skills to make it possible for cross posting of posts and comments between Mastodon and his WordPress site.

Itâ€™s a really interesting conversation about the recent surge in popularity of these distributed social networks and how WordPress can become a first class citizen in your digital life; so much more than just a website.

Useful links.

ActivityPub protocol

Mastodon

Pixelfed

PeerTube

ActivityPub WordPress plugin

Share on Mastodon WordPress plugin

Alex’s Casual Weirdness website

Alex’s personal website

17.05.2023