EDITS.WS

Author: Nathan Wrigley

  • #55 – Dennis Dornon on How Partnerships Have Helped Grow His WordPress Plugin Business

    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 finding partners might boost your WordPress business?

    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 very 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 Dennis Dormon. Dennis is the founder of MainWP. A WordPress plugin which enables you to manage multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard. As you’ll hear, the business has changed over the years, as Dennis has learned more about the plugins’ target audience.

    If you’re a solo developer, or a working for a small team, bringing your WordPress product into the market can be very rewarding, but it can also be hard. Given the scale of the market, it’s likely that your product has got an audience. But with the time and resources being limited, it might be hard to break through and be widely discovered.

    Dennis talks today about how, in the recent past, he’s been trying out working with partners as an effective way to increase the plugins reach. As you’ll hear, it’s a strategy that he’s enamored with, given the right partner.

    We start off by talking about why Dennis built MainWP, and who the plugin was originally aimed at. And it’s not what you might expect.

    We then get into how Dennis is working out his partnerships as he goes. What is it he’s looking for in a partner? Not all companies in the WordPress space are going to be a good fit. And so he explains how it’s important that all partners have some skin in the game, and know what part of the deal they have to uphold. What are the things that need to be considered before the partnership begins? And how do you make sure that all the parties are keeping up their end of the bargain?

    It turns out that MainWP is a business which is in just about the perfect spot for bringing on partners. But if you’re a developer and have not considered this type of approach with your business, 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 Dennis Dormon.

    I am joined on the podcast today by Dennis Dornon. Hello, Dennis.

    [00:03:40] Dennis Dornon: Hey, Nathan. How are you?

    [00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Very, very well. Dennis and I have had a little bit of a chat before the podcast began, and it’s been a pleasure getting to know him. You’re going to get to know him over the next few minutes. Dennis, we always ask our guests right at the beginning, there’s some kind of orientation question, just trying to figure out who you are and where you come from.

    I’m wondering if you’d spend a few moments just telling us what it is that you do in the WordPress space and how you’ve become part of the WordPress community. You can take that in any which way you like and go back as far or as near as you wish.

    [00:04:14] Dennis Dornon: Hello everyone. I’m Dennis Dornon with MainWP, WordPress manager plugin that allows you to maintain multiple WordPress sites from one central dashboard. The MainWP plugin allows you to perform most of your daily WordPress maintenance tasks, such as updating your plugins, backups, uptime monitoring things like that.

    And since MainWP is a self hosted WordPress plugin, it allows you to do all that while remaining privacy focused and not relying on any third party solutions like many other WordPress managers.

    [00:04:40] Nathan Wrigley: So when did you discover WordPress? How far do we go back?

    [00:04:44] Dennis Dornon: I would say probably about 10 years ago is when I really started getting into it. About 10 to 12 years ago I was full-time affiliate marketing and had a few hundred websites, mostly focused on the automotive industry. And at that time I just did real cookie cutter sites that just did PHP changes from a flat file where, like I would change the city name, make model, and just put those out.

    But then Google started changing their algorithm, so you couldn’t really have the cookie cutter sites anymore if you wanted to continue to rank. That’s when I started exploring WordPress. Slowly moved those few hundred sites over into WordPress. And then I quickly realized once you have a few hundred sites, I think in my case it was close to 500 sites, that maintaining those could be quite a pain in the neck.

    And that’s when we started looking to different solutions that were already out there. But none of them gave us the privacy we were really looking for. Both me and the co-founder came from an affiliate background, so we wanted everything to stay completely private and no one to have any of our information.

    Started developing our own solution for WordPress and we actually went with using WordPress as the backbone since we didn’t have to worry about login, security and making all those things for ourselves and just built it as a plugin itself.

    [00:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really fascinating. Kind of interesting that it was a scratch your own itch type of product. We’re here today, we’re going to talk about a slightly different subject because a little while ago I put out a tweet and I was asking for people to suggest topics that maybe of interest to listeners of this podcast. And Dennis reached out and so we got connected and we’d settled on the topic of, the idea of partnerships within the WordPress space. So, I’m just going to map out in broad outline what I think we’re going to talk about, and then we’ll see if the conversation goes in that direction or not.

    So, Dennis has a history, or at least I should say MainWP, whether it’s Dennis or other people, I’m not entirely sure, has a history of connecting with other WordPress companies to mix up what they’re doing. So MainWP with partner A and MainWP with partner B. And try to figure out if there’s ways that they can rub each other’s backs, and help each other along the journey to growing and what have you.

    So you have a product and you have lots of partnerships. I guess the easiest way to begin this subject is, can you just lay out some examples of people that you have partnered with in the past and how those partnerships have developed. Just to give us a little bit of a picture of how this all works.

    [00:07:14] Dennis Dornon: Sure we really just got into partnerships. We have a lot of extensions that work with other plugins, but I wouldn’t really call those partnerships. Those were more along the lines of what you were saying earlier of kind of scratching our own itch. So we put out our first kind of partnership way back in 2015 with our first third party extensions. So, about a year into our existence, we actually started going out and working with other plugins.

    The problem at that time is we didn’t tell them we were actually working with them, so we would just go out and build these extensions and then be like, hey, we got an extension for you. And they’d be like, thank you. That’d pretty much be the end of the partnership. But it helped our users, especially with our first ones, which was a backup extension, Updraft Plus. And then we, I believe one of our first extensions was also a Yoast extension.

    But these weren’t true partnerships. It wasn’t until probably the last year or two that we actually started to get into real partnerships, where we talked to the other company, before we built an extension for them so that we could, uh, grow out from there.

    Some of the current ones that we have out are of course, SEOPress, which we just launched earlier this month. Atarim a couple months ago. Before that WPvivid Backups made their own extension and WP White Hat Security made an activity log extension. Those were more true partnerships where we work together to find a common solution.

    But most of these were just a, I would call them code development partnerships. So we were both kind of working in the development of it. Where I failed at would be the co-marketing portion of it. So even though we had grown and had actually started working with the other companies on building these extensions, instead of just building them ourselves, we still weren’t getting the word out appropriately that we now had official partnerships with these different companies. So we’d launch the partnership, announce it for a day or two, and then kind of let it die.

    Die might be the wrong word. We didn’t do too much with it, we just kind of hoped they would grow on their own if you follow what I’m saying there. We didn’t really learn until the, well, I didn’t learn until the Atarim partnership, how to correctly co-market. And that has really jumped up our actual partnerships. People coming in for partnerships. Partnership requests have all gone up.

    Really from what Vito Peleg showed us with our partnership with Atarim, and how to not only do the co-development, but the co-marketing, and co-marketing is what you generally see from, when you see a partnership in WordPress that’s, you know, where you’re on each other’s mailing list, social, things like that. And you do it for a short amount of time.

    So now we have that perfect combination for a partnership of both co-development and co-marketing. Why co-development helps is it gets the other person to have skin in the game with you. So you both, you both have something to lose if the co-marketing doesn’t go well.

    [00:09:58] Nathan Wrigley: So towards the beginning of your endeavors, you mentioned 2013 or something like that.

    [00:10:03] Dennis Dornon: 2015.

    [00:10:03] Nathan Wrigley: 2015, Sorry, yeah. You mentioned that the business was growing and, I guess at that point you didn’t really know that partnerships could be a thing, and so you just looked out into the WordPress ecosystem and thought what would be a good thing for us to build? And how can we help our customer base that exists already? And so you just built it yourself, shipped it, and maybe had some kind of email interaction with the originators of that plugin? Maybe not. It just went out there. But the point was it was all within your silo.

    And more recently, in the last year, as you’ve described, you figured out that there’s this model where you get in touch beforehand and potentially you do the work or they do the work, or you partner together and do the work together, I don’t know what the model there is exactly, but the principle being that it’s much more of a symbiotic relationship. You’re in conversation about it. You both are sending out promotional materials once the thing has finally shipped, so it’s much more of a collaboration. It’s not as if you’re merging together. Your business is separate, their business is separate, but there’s definitely an overlap where you can help each other out.

    [00:11:16] Dennis Dornon: Correct, yeah. Everything stays completely separate. It’s not a partnership in terms of a, you know, giving up any portion of your business. It’s more of a partnership of helping each other grow from your own base of customers. So if we go back to Atarim. Atarim promotes to their base of customers along with an actual, like I was saying, the code developed.

    So they have something to hand them that they can come back and, MainWP, this is how it works with it, because we’ve actually built something together. I’m just not sending you an email blast telling you to go use MainWP. Here’s an email, here’s social, here’s how we’re working together to make your life easier. And that’s what we’re focused on going forward. Both co-development, co-marketing to work nice and smooth.

    [00:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: So in the last year, in this time where you’ve found several companies that you’ve decided to partner with as opposed to building it yourself. Just describe some of the benefits that you’ve discovered. You’ve mentioned things like marketing and what have you, but are there any other unexpected things?

    It might be just that, you know, it saved you a bunch of time. You ended up being friendly with people that you otherwise wouldn’t have encountered. Whichever way you want to take that.

    [00:12:17] Dennis Dornon: I’ve really learned, we’ve been doing this, MainWP itself for nine years, and I am just really started talking to people in the last year. And I think a lot of that comes from being in the partnerships and realizing that, when you get out there and you talk to people that they are friendly, most people are friendly.

    Most people just want to work with you. They want to help. You gotta find who you want to work with, if they fit into what you want to do, if they fit into how you want to grow. But really we haven’t run into too much of people who didn’t align with what we are looking to do so far. But we are working on documents that we can put on our MainWP.dev site that allow people to see what’s expected from them, what’s expected from us in a partnership, so they know before they even contact us, hey, if we want to do a partnership, okay, we need to meet these things, do these things. So it’s all laid out for everybody.

    [00:13:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That’s really interesting because, obviously a couple of years ago you didn’t really have anything to lean back on to say, this is how a partnership may work, and now that you’ve done it a couple of times, you’ve taken the step to even create documentation around that so that you can isolate yourself, I guess, from people coming to you and saying, we’d like to partner with you, and it’s simply not being a particularly good fit. There’s bound to be a whole raft of companies, there’s just really not enough overlap to work with.

    Yeah, I was wondering about that really. Are there any constraints that you’ve placed upon yourself to say, okay, if it’s out of this boundary, we probably won’t be able to work with you, or if it’s inside this boundary, we will.

    [00:13:47] Dennis Dornon: It’s a hard one cause I haven’t come across anybody reaching out directly to me that I would be like, oh, I just can’t, just couldn’t work with you. There have been some things, where I know if somebody reached out that I didn’t feel comfortable putting in front of our user base, we’d be able to say no to. Something that wasn’t, um, don’t want to say privacy focused, but something that is completely against the way we feel about privacy.

    Of course, we wouldn’t work with them. It’s a hard question to answer because it’s, until I’m actually presented with the situation, I’m not sure who I’d say no to, who I’d say yes to. I think everybody’s gotta be evaluated on their own individual basis.

    [00:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: You obviously, when you are creating partnerships like this, you are staking quite a lot. You’re putting your flag in the sand that we would like to work with this company. Our business aligns with them, and if you start to email your list with logos from other companies and what have you, you are firmly saying, we align, we are trusted partners with each other.

    And so the word that I used there was trust. Now I imagine that we won’t get into the conversation of any times that trust may have been broken, but I do wonder what that level of trust means. How have you approached that whole subject of, can I trust this company?

    You know, many people rely on their instinctive sense. Maybe there’s companies that you think if they approach me because I’ve seen what they do in the past, that isn’t a good fit for us. How do you establish trust and what does that trust actually mean?

    [00:15:14] Dennis Dornon: Well, I can say this year we did have a partnership that I would not do again. Not naming any names. We had terms in and then they, uh, changed the terms once things had been launched, and that was kind of upsetting and I’m not sure what you can actually do for that.

    So you really do have to put some trust into it. And I think that’s where combining the co-development along with the co-marketing really makes a difference. This particular partner, we did all the work for the extension for, and they provided the service and then they changed the service after the extension was made.

    So we’ve kind of moved away from doing where we do all the work in those situations. So we really go for the more of the co-development. Where the other person has the skin in the game, we know they’re also working for the same end goal we are. And then go into the co-marketing. And usually if you can get that skin in the game from the co-development, they’re not as, a person isn’t going to be as easy to do something, to break up that partnership or, make that partnership not profitable for both.

    [00:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you say co-development, are you talking about, literally you’ll put people in the same room or on the same Zoom call or whatever. So in other words, MainWP developers are working with company A developers, and together you are building out the solution which bolts into MainWP. Or is it more, you are collaborating on ideas and then somebody goes off and builds this part and MainWP take care of their part? Just give us an idea of what that co-working looks like.

    [00:16:37] Dennis Dornon: Yeah. and not to keep going back to Atarim, it’s just such a good example. In their case, they needed to develop a special API that we could connect to, and we needed to develop a way to connect to their API. So we were both working on APIs, to work with each other’s system. So we knew they were putting in the same amount of time or almost the same amount of time as we were into the extension. So we knew they were going to be just as dedicated to making sure that the product grew and got better.

    [00:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s very much a case of, you work out which ways you can scratch each other’s back, and share out the work accordingly. The hope being that the balance is equal, and it may be that at the beginning, if you’ve got the skill set to do the coding of a particular thing, then maybe that’s something that you would do, and maybe they don’t have the heavy lifting there. But they might have something else that they can contribute later in the journey. You know, marketing clout and so on and so forth.

    [00:17:28] Dennis Dornon: One of the things I have noticed, actually Jonathan Wold in one of his blog posts mentions it, and it’s something I’ve noticed too, is when you’re the smaller partner, you usually end up doing most of the work. And for most of this time we have been the smaller partner. So that’s just one of the things. If you’re the new guy or you’re the smaller partner, just be prepared to have to do more than the other partner.

    [00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: Do you go through this in a very formal way? In other words, you mentioned the Atarim example, obviously one you’re very happy talking about. There’s a lot of work to be done. There’s lots of hours to commit to writing the code. There must have been some sort of procedure that was gone through saying, okay, exactly what is the scope of the partnership that we’re doing here? Exactly what is the scope of what we’re trying to build on top of MainWP, which will interact with Atarim? Do you spend a long time hammering all that out and deciding, we can’t do this particular feature, but we’ll come to that later.

    Because it’s not like you are selling a particular product at the end here where if the Atarim and MainWP partnership works out, it’s not like you can count the amount of units that you’ve sold of that partnership. It really isn’t like that, it’s just that you’ve made customers more happy. So there’s not revenue to be shared, but there is some benefit.

    [00:18:37] Dennis Dornon: Yeah, I think if you boil everything down to profit, what fun is it going to be to actually run the business? So if it helps the user, the end user, then that’s really what we’re going to do. I think that’s shown throughout everything we do as a company, that we just really care about helping the end user.

    Atarim’s a, just a good example. And the reason I keep coming back to that is because it is the one that taught me, if we go back to your earlier question to kind of calm down, and look at how to actually build the partnership. I keep saying I gotta give Vito credit for that, for, uh, teaching me that.

    Because before I would just get an email and if it looked like it worked from a standpoint of our users where I thought our users could really use something like this. I was all in I’d jump, we would go from there. It’d be a very quick process. I’m talking couple week turnaround time, from something that sounded really cool to actually getting it done, without any plan in place.

    We were running headlong into the fire, because that’s all I knew at the time. I just wanted to get this new product out. Make sure it works for everybody, make sure our users are happy, and that was my end goal. When it comes to partnerships, I’m not really too much worried about how many dollars this particular partnership’s going to bring into me. More of how happy will this make our users and will it get our brand in front of other users to also make them happy. So as long as our markets somehow can be combined, I think that’s the best way to look at it.

    [00:19:52] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like this is a train you in your business could at least get onto. You found a couple of partners, you’ve worked very happily with them, and you might move on to the next partner and the next partner, and the next partner and so on. I’m just wondering if that is now the intention for MainWP, you’ve enjoyed this experience. Is the plan to find new partners and see if there’s interesting ways that you can swell what your product does by partnering with other people? Or do you intend to have just a few close partners?

    Because that can be a nice model to work through as well. You’ve got five or six people that you work with very closely. You don’t have to dilute the work that you’ve got and try to maintain 50, 60, a hundred different extensions to MainWP, which may lead to, well, difficulty keeping them up to date as things change within their businesses and your business.

    [00:20:39] Dennis Dornon: Yeah, we actually are working on a dual model, if you will, of that. We have our extensions that we will build out, such as Atarim, which works through APIs. But we’re kind of moving away from building plugin based extensions like we had before, and we’re moving those more to also third parties.

    For example, the SEOPress extension, that was built completely by the SEOPress team. We did help with any development that they needed, but we didn’t get our hands too dirty in that. And then we worked with promoting them out. And same with the WPvivid backup people. They made their own extensions using our API and our code base, and they’re just putting those out themselves.

    We’re real happy with those. And we actually started doing more to help out those third party .org, I would call them, partnerships that kind of came across naturally. Like the WPvivid, I don’t believe they had much discussion with us at all. They kind of did the partnership the way we used to, where we launched the product and then sent over an email saying that, hey, we got a extension here, we made for you.

    [00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: So do you wish to reach out and find new audiences? Different plugins and different, well, whatever it may be, different services that are out there. Is that the intention in the next one, two years, to find other partners to work with? Or is it very much case by case basis? We’ll do one at a time. We’ll take it nice and easy and slow. Or are you racing to get as many as you can?

    [00:22:00] Dennis Dornon: We’re a small team of only seven people. So we can only do, so many and we have to maintain our own. That’s what I was saying earlier, we’re really becoming more API focused when it comes to our internal extensions, because they’re easier for us to maintain as we’re crossing over into the 40 extensions that we have ourselves.

    Which is why we’re having the plugin users, or the plugin extensions are starting to be made by the actual plugin company, because they’re better at keeping those updated on their own, and it kind of takes a little bit off our plate. And then we’re able to still help co-market them. We’ve started adding into our actual plugin to make it easier for you to find these new .org partnerships that are coming around.

    But really what I’m striving for is, like you said, a platform base, similar to WooCommerce. We actually just kind of got lucky in this, because when we started back in 2015 with that first backup extension, it wasn’t to get along the path of WooCommerce and try and build a platform. It was, we’re a small, bootstrap company. I think we only had, uh, three people, or four people at the time. And backups were just killing our support and development time. We couldn’t come up with, didn’t have time to do anything new and exciting. We were just stuck on backup, month after month after month.

    And that’s when we decided start making these backup extensions that work with the plugins that were built by people who knew backups. So, we were able to offload that work to people who actually knew how to do it, just by connecting their plugin with our plugin.

    [00:23:27] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like you have a business which is really, really wide open to partnerships. And what I mean by that, and it may be difficult for me to describe. You have essentially a platform. You have an architecture, which means that things can be built right on top, so that they can update their own website.

    So, you could help SEO companies. You could help image compression companies. You could help form companies. They’re all part of the WordPress website ecosystem. So, there’ll be a lot of companies out there who maybe are thinking, well, yeah, but we’ve got this one plugin in it just does this one thing. I can’t see of a way to be partnering with other people. Have you got any advice to give to those people?

    [00:24:10] Dennis Dornon: Looking at it from my point of view, as the potential platform that you would build on. If you have a plugin, say a form plugin, something that can be used in multiple places. So you can have your setting set. If you’re usually like the same settings all the time, you can do that from a dashboard such as ours. Or if you want to get all your forms returned from one place, so you have 50 sites, but you want to see all the forms in one place. You could think of it like that.

    [00:24:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s more that you have a platform which enables you to partner with more or less anybody it feels like in the WordPress space. So that’s a good bit of serendipity. You’ve got this system which you’ve built over years. But a lot of people will be thinking, I can’t partner with other people, I’ve got this one plugin, which just does one thing. And it may be that partnerships are out of scope for them, and I guess that is just a reality.

    [00:24:58] Dennis Dornon: In that case, you probably would just be stuck with the co-marketing form, and then you would have to find somebody whose market aligns with yours that is willing to actually do a mailing for you. So yeah, that might be a tough one if it’s just a very basic plugin.

    [00:25:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The other thing about partnerships, I suppose, is that you are very much aligning yourself with a particular company. So let’s imagine that in the WordPress space there are four companies, company A, B, C, and D, and they basically do the same thing. We can imagine who these companies might be and how they are competitive rivals in the marketplace.

    There’s something there isn’t there. And what I mean by that is if you decide to partner with one of those and send out emails and you are lording how fabulous product B is. Do you have any fears that you have then cut yourself off from A, C and D? And that they won’t wish to speak to you because now, well, you know, it’s pretty clear from the stuff that they’re marketing over the last year that they’ve made their decision and we are not a part of that. Is that something that concerns you?

    [00:26:02] Dennis Dornon: I wouldn’t say. So if we just take a look at our backup extension situation. As I mentioned, WPvivid put out their own. And then of course we have some built in house and one of the ones we built in house actually comes from one of our competitors who also put up a backup solution.

    And we just deploy gratitude. Work with them and do your best. The fact they came to us, a competitor comes to us and asks for help with their promoting their backup extension. That just makes me feel good. I don’t think of it as a competitive atmosphere in that way.

    Just more of, hey, even though they’re a competitor, they’re not a competitor with this particular product, and this product will help our users. So yeah, that sounds like a, sounds like a good partnership to us.

    [00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any interesting input? We’re in the middle of November and this is 2022. This podcast episode will air within several weeks of this being recorded. And so with that caveat in mind, is there anything exciting that you have in the pipeline for MainWP users? It may be that the answer to that is no, Nathan, I don’t. But it may be that the answer is actually, we’ve got a couple of interesting things that we’re working on at the moment.

    [00:27:08] Dennis Dornon: We have a few interesting things. Um, I’m not sure which ones I can really talk about depending on when this comes out, so I’m going to have to keep pretty quiet on that. But, we got an interesting partnership coming up that I’m very excited about that should be out hopefully by January as long as everything goes smooth and determined by their marketing schedule. And then we also have some core updates, which are going to be pretty exciting.

    [00:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: So this is a product that you’re working on. You are actively working on it. Is this the only thing that you are doing, or do you, Dennis have other fingers in other WordPress pies?

    [00:27:43] Dennis Dornon: I strictly focus on MainWP. I like to stay with what I know. Remember we built this for our own use, and it’s grown from there. This is really kind of my baby. I’ve looked at other things, but just nothing’s ever really, you know, really caught my eye. When I wake up in the morning this is, I want to see how we can make MainWP better. I want to see what’s going on? I still check almost every support ticket, so I have a finger on the pulse of what’s happening. I may not be the one replying, but I’m still reviewing almost every support ticket, every forum post every Facebook post, just to really keep my finger on what’s happening in MainWP. And I figure if I, if I’m doing three or four other plugins, nothing’s going to be focused on for the end user.

    [00:28:29] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds from what you’ve said, and I could be misrepresenting this, it sounds like when you began, you were very much walking in the dark. You didn’t really know how the plugin would develop, how the business would develop. And it feels like you’ve really found your feet in the last few years, you’ve had some success.

    Obviously the plugin is selling to the point where you can swell the team to seven as opposed to whatever it was, one, two, or three in the olden days. And it’s a general question, but I, I do like these questions, the warm and fuzzy question. Are you still happy in the WordPress space. Is this a community that you enjoy being a part of? Are you still enjoying doing the work that you do?

    [00:29:07] Dennis Dornon: I would say I enjoy it more now than I did before. I am a private person. So I don’t like talking. I don’t like doing podcasts that much, or videos. But I’m trying to get better at it. And as I’m doing it, actually enjoying being in the WordPress community more and more. Just being out there instead of, we’re going on nine years in February, so for eight years, I basically hid behind this computer screen and didn’t talk to anybody except through email and chat, to actually be out talking to people and, interacting with people in a more personable way has really just made it much more fun for me than it was even in the beginning. And it just grows every day. I wake up wanting to come in. I go to bed wanting to come in. It doesn’t feel like work any day that I’m here.

    [00:29:53] Nathan Wrigley: Has WordPress itself changed in any way, which has affected your business strategy? Because a lot of companies, you know, if you’re a theme company at the moment, there must be a lot of introspection. Okay, where’s WordPress going with all of this? If you were a plugin which is now being overlapped by blocks, that must be an awful lot of anxiety about, okay, where do we need to go with this? We’re not quite sure how this is going to all settle down.

    It feels like your business inside of WordPress was really insulated from the changes that we’ve had since WordPress, well let’s say WordPress five with Gutenberg and everything. Or has there been a lot that you’ve had to refactor in the background to continue to make it working?

    [00:30:29] Dennis Dornon: We’ve definitely made a shift from where we originally were. If you look at MainWP, in the beginning we were really affiliate focused. I mean, that’s what we came from. Everything was set for affiliates and to grow affiliates and to make sure, you know, you could be a profitable affiliate. As years have gone by, I would say now we’re much more agency or creator focused than we are affiliate focused.

    Not that affiliates can’t find a way to use MainWP. It’s still going to work great for them, but it’s not our focus. As you see new extensions come out, they’re not something doing like a spinner syntax or something like you might have done 9, 10 years ago. Now it’s focused on different APIs, Atarim, SEOPress, things like that.

    [00:31:08] Nathan Wrigley: So, Dennis, you are sticking around in the WordPress space. If we come back in five or six or seven years time, we fully expect to have MainWP still available for us?

    [00:31:19] Dennis Dornon: Yeah. And that, that’s one of the, the great things too about being open source. I’ve said this from the beginning. If something happens to us, you still have everything. If MainWP as a company goes away, you still have MainWP. Your service is still going to work. It’s a plugin that doesn’t need MainWP the website to keep going.

    It’s going to keep going for you. So you don’t have to worry about us disappearing because the code is live, out there, anybody can pick it up if something did happen and we disappeared. Which of course, I hope we don’t, but it’s there available to people.

    [00:31:51] Nathan Wrigley: Is there a sweet spot that you feel, MainWP is now worth it? And what I mean by that is, obviously if you have one WordPress website, I can imagine the argument for getting into the MainWP platform is probably not that strong. You know, it’s fairly easy to log into your website and do all of the things that you need to do. But once you’ve got two or three, or four, or five or fifty or a hundred, the numbers begin to swell.

    And I just wonder if you had any thoughts on that. You’ve obviously got a target market. I know that you don’t gather much data about them, so maybe you don’t have a great deal to say in terms of the metrics there.

    [00:32:27] Dennis Dornon: it’s hard to say on who has what. I know we have different users. I would say probably four or five is where it starts to get a little time consuming, and at least the free core, which gives you most of what you’re going to need for that level would be a great place to start. Our average user based on the.org statistics, show that we average about 60 child sites per dashboards. So, dot org is saying we have 10,000 active dashboards out there with 600,000 active child sites. So I would say the jumping endpoint should be much closer to five than 60, but the average user has 60.

    [00:33:02] Nathan Wrigley: Always surprises me how there’s a tool for just about everything in the WordPress space, and much of it is open source. There’s a lot of SaaS platforms which do what you do, but it is nice to have an option that you can put on your own dedicated website.

    Do give us a little bit of intel, because I imagine quite a few people in the audience are interested in the privacy part. You spoke to me just before we hit record about the lack of data that you can bring to bear. And on the one hand, that might be frustrating for you, but on the other hand, it might be incredibly nice for listeners to the podcast to know how much data you collect, or quite the opposite, how much data you don’t collect.

    [00:33:40] Dennis Dornon: We really don’t collect anything. If you look on MainWP.com, if I can send people there, and you’ll notice at very top of the page we’re one of the only plugins that I know of that has their own private plugin policy. And that was actually a written by Donata Stroink-Skillrud of Agency Attorneys. And that’s a privacy policy for your plugins telling you exactly what information we’re gathering or in our case not gathering. We really don’t record anything of any personal nature.

    [00:34:10] Nathan Wrigley: And in terms of the support that you offer, a platform like this will become quickly part of the backbone of your business. You know, it may be that you log in once a day and update sites and you want to know that that’s possible and you want to know that should there be any problems, you can reach out to MainWP and get those problems fixed quickly. How do you handle support? Is it email? Have you got chats? Are you 24 7? Are you throughout the globe? How does that work?

    [00:34:36] Dennis Dornon: We have multiple people throughout the globe. We’re not 24 7. We are basically eastern standard time, 7:00 AM to about 4:00 PM. We have support both in a support forum at managers dot MainWP, and people can send in tickets. One of the things I’m proud of, we don’t charge for support. So if you’re a free user, or a pro-level user, we’re providing the same support for both levels.

    So nobody’s ostracized to just forum support or just this or just that. Somebody can send in a ticket or they can go to the forum or they can post on wordpress.org. We’re going to answer you however we can in any way we can. And support has been very strong from the beginning for us. We want to make sure everybody can get the answers that they need when they need it. Always keeping an updated knowledge base for users so they don’t have to ask because you know, who really wants to put in a ticket when you can just look at the knowledge base to find the answer. So we try and keep that as up to date as possible.

    [00:35:31] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned before that you are just getting into the idea of making public appearances, so podcasts and videos that you’re making and so on. So this question may fall on deaf ears for you. But ,do you encourage people to reach out to you? Do you have any social platforms? Do you have an email address that you’d like to share? The answer to that can be no. But, uh, if do and you do like chatting to people on email and giving them into some intel into what it is that you’ve been working on, will be working on, you could share that now.

    [00:36:01] Dennis Dornon: Really, if you want to reach out to me, just go to dennisdornon.com. That’s my full name dot com. And it has a calendar on there. And I, I just put this site really updated last month with a calendar on there. Just got my calendly. Started have to actually uh, mark things on a calendar because they’re happening so fast lately.

    You can hop in over there and I’ll be glad to chat over Zoom with whoever wants to chat with over Zoom. Going to actually try and start to do a little more AMAs. It sounds like people in the community want to do that too. So you’ll have chances to reach out to me live on different ask me anything type videos.

    [00:36:31] Nathan Wrigley: Dennis Dornon and thank you for chatting to me on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

    [00:36:36] Dennis Dornon: Glad to be here. Thank you very much.

    On the podcast today, we have Dennis Dornon.

    Dennis is the founder of MainWP. A WordPress plugin which enables you to manage multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard. As you’ll hear, the business has changed over the years, as Dennis has learned more about the plugins’ target audience.

    If you’re a solo developer, or a working for a small team, bringing your WordPress product into the market can be very rewarding, but it can also be hard. Given the scale of the market, it’s likely that your product has got an audience, but with the time and resources being limited, it might be hard to break through and be widely discovered.

    Dennis talks today about how, in the recent past, he’s been trying out working with partners as an effective way to increase the plugins reach. As you’ll hear, it’s a strategy that he’s enamored with, given the right partner.

    We start off by talking about why Dennis built MainWP, and who the plugin was originally aimed at. And it’s not what you might expect.

    We then get into how Dennis is working out his partnerships as he goes. What is it he’s looking for in a partner? Not all companies in the WordPress space are going to be a good fit. And so he explains how it’s important that all partners have some skin in the game, and know what part of the deal they have to uphold. What are the things that need to be considered before the partnership begins? And how do you make sure that all the parties are keeping up their end of the bargain?

    It turns out that MainWP is a business which is in just about the perfect spot for bringing on partners. But if you’re a developer and have not considered this type of approach with your business, this podcast is for you.

    Useful links.

    MainWP website

    Partnerships in Portugal by Jonathan Wold

    Introducing “SEOPress for MainWP” Extension

    Introducing Atarim Inside MainWP & Vice Versa

  • #54 – Steve Burge on Where We’re at With Multi-Author Collaboration in WordPress

    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, multi-author collaboration in WordPress.

    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, well, I’m very 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 Steve Burge. Although Steve is originally from England, he now lives in Sarasota, Florida. He leads the team at PublishedPress, which is a plugin company focusing on improving the publishing experience for WordPress users. The topic of today’s podcast is very much in his wheelhouse.

    Several years ago, the block editor was brought into WordPress core. It was a dramatic change from the classic editor. Pages and posts could be created and edited with a growing variety of blocks. Blocks for paragraphs blocks for images, in fact blocks for everything.

    This ability to edit content with blocks was just one of four phases of the Gutenberg project. The other three phases being site editing, multi-author collaboration and multi-lingual support.

    If you’ve been following recent developments, then you’ll know that we’re currently in the site editing phase. And when that’s done, it will be time to turn our collective attention to multi-author collaboration.

    But what is that? And what does it mean? I think that the best way to think about this would be to imagine Google docs. For years, you’ve been able to open up a document, click a button and share that document with others. Those with the correct permissions can interact with you in real time. And you can see the amendments they’re making as and when they’re making them. It’s utterly brilliant, and how most people would prefer to work with their content. One document. One source of truth.

    Compare that to how WordPress currently works. Only one person can edit a piece of content at the same time. If you want to edit a post or a page at the same time as someone else, you can’t.

    Phase three of the Gutenberg project aims to bring into WordPress the ability for multiple users to interact with content at the same time. Steve talks today about why this is an elegant and necessary update to WordPress. But also why it’s a difficult feat of engineering to pull off.

    WordPress has a history of working with all manner of hosting configurations, and it’s one of the reasons that it’s so successful. Will it be possible to run WordPress on more affordable tech stacks given the burden that multi author collaboration will require?

    We also get into the projects that Steve has found from community members, which try to lay some of the foundations of how this might be implemented, as well as talking about how Steve’s finding it hard to discover new information concerning this important topic.

    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 Steve Burge.

    I am joined on the podcast today by Steve Burge. Hello Steve.

    [00:04:29] Steve Burge: Hey, Nathan.

    [00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Steve and I met not that long ago. It was WordCamp US. We met for the very first time. Because he was at WordCamp US, you can pretty much guarantee that he’s into WordPress. But as we always do at the beginning of the podcast episode, just to orientate the listeners, Steve, about who you are and what your relationship is with WordPress. You can go back as far as you like, could be last year, could be 10 years ago. Tell us a bit about your WordPress journey, and then we’ll get into the subject of today’s podcast.

    [00:04:57] Steve Burge: Sure thing. I’m from England. I live in Florida in the US, and I’ve been dabbling in open source since about 2003, 2004 or so. And ran a training company for a long time called OS Training, and we were involved in publishing. We published a lot of videos and also a whole series of books on WordPress, Drupal, Magento, php. And about five years ago flipped into developing plugins, and so we went right into the publishing side of WordPress plugins.

    So we run three different plugin brands now, all focused on publishing. One is PublishPress, one is TaxoPress and one is Meta Slider. And that’s really kind of what led me to this interest in Gutenberg phase three. We work with a lot of publishers and to have the kind of collaborative editing that should be coming in phase three is really exciting for a lot of them.

    [00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just pause the podcast general subject, which is, as you’ve just described the Gutenberg editor and phase three in particular, collaborative editing. Can I ask, because you ran OS Training, which I’m sure many people will have heard of, they might have books on their shelf or content on the computer and used it in the past. I certainly did. When you came into WordPress, was it your experience from having a real deep background in publishing that made you interested in publishing inside of WordPress? Because obviously your career now is very much tied up with publishing content, collaborative publishing permissions, and so on.

    [00:06:31] Steve Burge: Yes, partly. We had to do a lot of co-authoring of books. I wrote initially the first three or four books in our series, and then we started to work with authors. We had to do a lot of co-authoring. We worked with some big publishers like Pearson, and often collaboration involved, sending Word documents back and forth endlessly.

    And so you are working on chapter three. The first draft would be chapter_2.1 .doc. You’d edit it, send the Word document back, word document back and forth, and collaborative editing in those days would mean you got to like 250 Word documents for chapter two, and the name would be confused and you’d make an edit and your editor would say, oh, which document are we working on?

    I think I worked on the wrong document. I imagine now if we were able to do that kind of book publishing, but collaboratively online in something like a Google Docs style environment, my life would’ve been much, much easier.

    [00:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: I’m kind of imagining that literally anybody under the age of 25, is probably completely unfamiliar with a world in which technology wasn’t synchronous. So I don’t exactly remember the date it happened, but the first time I ever saw synchronous editing on a screen was, I guess I was sitting in my house and Google came out with a product called Google Wave.

    I don’t know if you remember that? Much like a lot of Google properties it’s now been mothballed and no longer in existence. But essentially for the very first time, you could open a document in a browser and you were able to see other people’s edits in real time. The cursor would appear and it would’ve a different color, and you could see that Joseph over here was writing text and Pauline over here, she was writing texts and it was all happening on the screen at the same time.

    And I remember at that point feeling that it was sublimely clever. I genuinely mean that. I’m not just saying that for the purposes of this podcast. I really did have a moment where breathed in and thought, boy, we’re not going back from here. This is the way it’s always going to be done from now on. It’s completely normal. Just about everybody, I would imagine, like I say, under the age of 25 is probably, this is the only way to do things.

    You can hand documents in online easily, and your tutors or peers or whoever it might be, your boss, can give you realtime feedback. And there’s one canonical version of the document, so you don’t have to keep sending it via email and adding .1, .2, .3 to the end of it, and so on. And it just seems that’s so straightforwardly the way it should be done.

    [00:09:05] Steve Burge: You end up with a, an undo and a back and forward button and everything is just, there’s no revisions. There’s, well, technically there are revisions, I guess, but so much easier to handle. I guess the big difference is all of those are often done on one central platform. Google Drive, Google Wave, back in the day. Just yesterday my kid was doing her homework with a friend and they were doing this collaborative editing online.

    This was Microsoft, because that’s what the school gives them. They’re on FaceTime, happily chatting back and forth while working on the shared document. But all of that was done on a big central shared server, on the Microsoft server or the Google servers. And it does get more complicated when it comes down to doing that.

    [00:09:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah so, we’ve got all of this positivity around collaborative editing, and the fact that more or less, everybody now understands that paradigm, and it basically is the way to edit documents, for most people at least anyway. You may have instances where you just want something to be completely private and you don’t want it to be in the cloud, and so it is still done in a, an old fashioned document, which is saved away, and you edit it yourself, that’s fine.

    But then you open up a WordPress website and you are confronted with a completely different paradigm. You’ve got the option to create content of whatever type you like, text and images may be the, the most common use case. But you are utterly constrained in your collaborations. The best that you’ve got at the moment is, you go to edit a document, if somebody else is editing it, you get a little warning telling you that somebody else is editing and you can either back out or you can take over. In other words, you can kick them out, and they’re your two choices. And so it must seem to people coming to WordPress, like I say, under the age of 25, let’s keep going with that paradigm.

    It must seem that WordPress is something from like a time machine. What do you mean I can’t edit it at the same time? Of course I must be, I’m doing something wrong. But it cannot be done at the moment, but it is in the pipeline. And maybe Steve, you could just lay out the four phases of the Gutenberg project so that we can see where this fits into that jigsaw puzzle.

    [00:11:19] Steve Burge: Sure thing. So this dates back to about 2018 or so, when, I think that was when Matt said we’re not just doing Gutenberg, but Gutenberg is going to be a big four phase product. We’re going to have one, the actual Gutenberg editor inside the posts. And that one shipped in WordPress 5.0. Then we would tackle full site editing, which I think has just been renamed to the site editor.

    [00:11:51] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right.

    [00:11:52] Steve Burge: And that one shipped at the beginning of this year I think, in 5.9.

    [00:11:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think 5.9 was what’s in my head.

    [00:11:59] Steve Burge: And we are in that stage two, which is customization. And then they’re going to be two more phases. And one we’re talking about is the next one up, phase three, called collaboration, which has the Google Doc style editing.

    And then the fourth and final one is going to be multilingual, where inside the core you’re going to be able to translate every element of WordPress.

    [00:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so phase three is going to be the main thrust of this podcast. So this is basically what we’ve just talked about. The ability for multiple people to concurrently edit and leave comments and you visually see on the screen what other people are doing as they’re doing it. So, I guess the question to begin with is why hasn’t this been done already? And I don’t mean that in a cantankerous way. I literally mean to serve that on a plate. Are you able to give an explanation of why this hasn’t been done already?

    [00:12:57] Steve Burge: There are limited resources, and Gutenberg itself was a big project, a big changeover. We still see probably equal usage between Gutenberg and classic editor in the support tickets we get. And then there’s all the other page builders too. And then an even bigger project was the full site editing, which is still ongoing now.

    So the resources have been constrained. It takes a very big team, working very hard, simply to ship what we’ve been able to ship so far. So that’s part of it. And also the collaborative editing is just going to be a, quite a difficult challenge I think. Technically, it’s one thing to run collaborative editing on your Google servers with Google Docs, where you are in control of just about everything.

    But, if you try and do something similar on a $2 a month hosting company, which WordPress is going to have to do, because almost any WordPress feature you ship has to work on any WordPress site anywhere. That’s when the challenge comes in. If everyone was hosted on WP Engine or WordPress VIP, we probably would’ve had this already. But actually rolling it out to 50% of the web, and all the different hosting configurations, it’s going to be a challenge, a technical challenge.

    [00:14:17] Nathan Wrigley: So two reasons there. The first one is the amount of time it’s taken to get through the first, well, the first stage. And then we’re, as you said, we’re in the second stage, the full site editing. I’m going to link in the show notes to an article that you wrote over on Publish Press several years ago, actually it was 2019. In fact it was almost exactly three years ago. It was written in November, 2019.

    And at that point you were talking about getting through full site editing, getting through stage one and two, customization, full site editing, and then eventually landing on the collaborative side of things. It was interesting because back then, much more, probably confident in the ability to get through those first two stages because you were pointing to perhaps a date of 2020.

    [00:15:03] Steve Burge: Oh yeah. Blame me. Those are my guesses.

    [00:15:05] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. But it just goes to show, doesn’t it, especially the full sight editing is taking a lot longer. And there was never a flag in the sand which said, this is going to be the date that we’re going to begin. It was very much, these are the things that we want to achieve, but there’s no date in mind. So it took a lot longer.

    And then you mentioned the fact that yes, it’s all very well working on Microsoft products or Google products, but they own all of that. They’ve got the infrastructure and it’s probably, let’s be honest, pretty impressive infrastructure. And they own the full tech stack, so they can make sure that everything works, and your Google Doc is going to work seamlessly, no matter what level of computing you have at home. You don’t need a particularly fast computer. It’s all handled on their end.

    WordPress has a completely different problem. Some people spend a fortune on their hosting because they need it and they’re happy to do that. Other people spend very little. Sometimes, really, it can be incredibly affordable.

    Are you able to, I don’t know if you are, but are you able to go into the technicalities of why cheap hosting wouldn’t be suitable for, let’s say something like Google Docs at the moment? In other words, what’s actually happening when a page is open that two or more people are trying to edit on. And does the problem scale?

    If there’s five people editing, is it more resource heavy than if there’s two people editing or 10 people editing, what have you? So are you able to discuss what the problems are from a technical point of view a little bit?

    [00:16:40] Steve Burge: I’m not a hardcore developer enough to dig too deep into this without embarrassing myself, but it is very process heavy, and you need some kind of a central server or perhaps a peer-to-peer network that is able to be a central source of truth for what is the latest update and to connect the two together.

    I’ve looked at different approaches that people have taken to doing this. One of the most common ways is web sockets. Which are able to update the content on the screen without refreshing the whole page. Which is a key part of this because both people need to see their page refreshing in real time.

    A few years ago that was impressive to do with Ajax. We’re doing a much more advanced version of that now with both people seeing live updates on the content without refreshing their page. So you need some way to connect the two or three or four or five people who are doing those updates.

    And web sockets is perhaps the most popular way to do it. It’s basically an API to send messages and responses back and forth. But the limitation there is, some of the low budget hosting companies are not able to do it. And you do need some kind of a central service.

    Part of me wonders whether, I don’t know if they would do this, but if they’ve thought about perhaps running it through the WordPress.com or WordPress.org infrastructure, in order to make this work for low end hosts. Because they do need some kind of, like Google servers or Microsoft servers, some kind of centralized server would be a massive benefit to this.

    The alternative, which I’ve dug into most, is from a company called Tag One in Europe. They’re like a big, a big agency and they’ve been developing a script called YJS, which allows you to do collaborative editing through a peer to peer network.

    It’s a pretty different solution to web sockets, but it seems to be, and I’m guessing here, the one that the Gutenberg team have taken on board. There seems to have been a bit of radio silence on the technical side of things. We’ve seen Matt mention phase three at a couple of State of the Words. He talked about it in Europe a little bit, in Lisbon.

    But I’ve been trying to pull the strings on the technical side of things on GitHub, and there’s not much there at the moment. I think from what I’ve been told, that there’s action going on in private. They’re working on it in the background and perhaps on some private repositories. But the only real thing that’s emerged, at least, someone feel free to correct me on this, is a script called an Isolated Block Editor, which basically takes Gutenberg as a kind of standalone product that I think could be used in Tumblr, or the Day one app, or Drupal or anywhere else. And it’s kind of building in collaborative editing into that isolated block editor, which is a version of Gutenberg.

    So really the technical hints that I’ve heard about this, are two or three years old. We did a big interview on the PublishPress blog with the YJS team, where they dig into some of the technical challenges around this. But from everything I’ve been able to read or talk about with people, it’s a real technical challenge.

    The CK Editor team, WordPress uses TinyMCE. CK Editor is kind of an alternative to TinyMCE. They have a really long and detailed blog post about how they tried to build collaborative editing into their, into their editor editor. It took four plus years, and I think ended up with lots of them tearing their hair out and growing prematurely gray. And there’s a Twitter thread from a guy who tried to do this with Microsoft Office. He basically says the same thing. Just an enormous technical challenge is particularly in retrospect, to try and take existing software and add collaborative editing to it. But, and this is one of the reasons why I wonder if they’re thinking about some kind of a central server, for example, WordPress.com.

    We’re finally starting to see the possibility of collaborative editing coming soon. Automattic have a product called P2, which is I think used for their internal blogs, their internal networking. And just in the last month or so, they have an update on the P two blog. They’ve been rolling out collaborative editing to some of their P2 users. I don’t know if I’m on a blacklist or something, but I’ve been sending several messages to the WordPress.com staff seeing if I can get in on the beta invite list. But no luck so far. So collaborative editing is actually live on WordPress.com for some users at the moment, and I can share the link that you can put in the show notes.

    But down in their, in the documentation they have about it, they say that it’s a work in progress, it’s a beta. It can become unstable under some circumstances. If you are running a VPN or some kind of a proxy, often if you’re using Safari, it can become unstable.

    It is kind of a long winded answer to your original question. The technical side is a little bit of a mystery still. I suspect that YJS will play a part. I suspect they may be working on some kind of a central server to make it stable to run on those $2 a month hosting companies. And if you go over to the P2 area on WordPress.com, there’s a little video of it emerging, and collaborative, editing, we may start to see a lot more of it in the next few months suspect.

    [00:22:24] Nathan Wrigley: There was a lot in there, wasn’t there? And I’m just going to go through some of the thoughts that were coming into my head as you were saying it. So the first one is obviously people like Google, they’ve completely cracked this nut. I cannot remember a time at any point where my Google doc froze, for example. Or I was editing it with somebody else, and they seemed to sort of blip out of existence. Suddenly 20 lines got updated when it looked like they weren’t even editing the document. In other words, they were always typing. I could see them typing. It was as if they were right next to me in many senses. No problems in other words.

    [00:23:04] Steve Burge: Is a beautiful experience when it works well, right?

    [00:23:06] Nathan Wrigley: But I’m guessing that could be the problem, couldn’t it? You know, if somebody has infrastructure running their WordPress website, and it simply isn’t up to the task. I don’t fully understand what that means, but we all know that computers given a certain volume of things to do, tend to grind down and prioritize some things over others, and in some cases just cease to function and collapse. But if you were editing a document, you mentioned a source of truth. You have to know, don’t you? You really have to be confident that what you are seeing on the screen now, is what the final version is looking like.

    You can’t be in a situation where, I’ve got you Steve over there. You are editing, I’m editing this document, and it looks to me like you finished because you are no longer contributing. And it turns out you’d written another couple of hundred words, which never made it into the document because your system collapsed in the background. And I didn’t know about that, and that would truly be a calamity.

    You can also imagine collisions in terms of things getting overwritten or me saving a document in some way that then removes the possibility of your a hundred words ever making it in there in the first place. So there’s all these really big problems and as you say, the very fact that we are all using different qualities of hardware, different computers, different versions of Linux, all sorts of different engines going on in the background, powering our websites.

    There has to be some way of figuring out what the source of truth is at this moment. And I really do, kind of understand a little bit more now that that really is genuinely a tricky challenge and one that perhaps hasn’t been faced by another company. Also, your idea of it being a dot com type thing. In other words, this capability is offloaded to, let’s say, some sort of Automattic property.

    [00:24:59] Steve Burge: I would put a caveat in there that that is entirely my guess. I have no, no evidence to that at all. I’ve just been thinking through possible solutions to the problem.

    [00:25:09] Nathan Wrigley: But I find that to be quite an interesting solution. So again, let’s assume that this collaborative editing is something that everybody aspires to. But we can also agree that if you have incredibly modest hosting, it may be something that your aspirations aren’t living up to.

    Well, maybe there is a sort of commercial angle for having that capability built on top of affordable hosting, if you know what I mean. In other words, WordPress.com, whichever company it may be, I don’t know. There’s some kind of upgrade. You have a WordPress website, but you would like the collaborative editing capability to be added in, simply because you know that your infrastructure can’t cope with it.

    Now, that’s less than ideal. I think it would be the ideal that any architecture can cope with it. That would be obviously ideal. But it was an interesting thought, and it just sort of prompted me to think, I wonder if even a company as large as Automattic, I wonder if they could saddle the burden of all of that given that there wouldn’t be any commercial side to paying off that debt, if you know what I mean.

    If there’s 40% of the web, let’s say 20% of those websites can’t manage it, and so they’re doing their collaborative editing on Automattic’s hardware. Presumably there’s a bill for that, which would need to be paid.

    [00:26:33] Steve Burge: I mean, that’s part of the problem of being WordPress, right? You’re trying to solve problems at a scale that no one else has ever solved it. We talked about CK Editor for example, Well, CK Editor has collaborative editing. It took them four years and just about burned out some of the best developers. But there were tiny fraction of the size of WordPress, and what WordPress needs to do. I guess until we, until more of this starts to emerge, perhaps when the full site editing winds down, we’re not going to know too much.

    But I think the two options available are either to build a peer to peer network, using something like YJS or to go through the centralized option of WordPress.com .org or an other service.

    [00:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder if there’s other options that could be explored. And forgive me, my technical ignorance here might be screaming loudly at you as I say these words, but I wonder if it might be possible to have a scenario in which you are alerted to the fact that changes have been made, but you have to, I don’t know, maybe click a button or.

    [00:27:42] Steve Burge: We have lost a connection. There’d be some kind of mess. I guess the most common point of failure for collaborative editing will probably be, the connection is lost, and each person goes back to editing their own separate version of the document. You just lose the collaboration aspect, and there could be some kind of message saying you have disconnected from the collaborative editing, you have disconnected from the network.

    [00:28:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. And of course that throws up all sorts of enormously difficult problems on its own. Because then, let’s say there’s four people editing the document, do they then carry on? And then those four people have to combine their efforts after the fact to figure out, okay, well what did you do? Which bit did you?

    Can we just copy and paste that in here now? In other words, it makes more of a mess than the old asynchronous way of doing things, where I edit it, hand it to you, you edit it, hand it to person three, they edit it, and it finally comes back to me. And at least I know that those three edits have been made. And that’s in the scenario of collapse that we just described, we’d be back to that basically. And obviously if we’re offering the promise of collaborative editing, you have to trust it.

    Another thought occurred to me is, does it need to be as beautiful, let’s say as Google Docs? And what I mean by that is, I can literally watch you type letter by letter. I’ll see each letter coming in one at a time. Does it need to refresh quite as often as that? Is a two second delay, a three second delay, a five second delay. I don’t know if this adds complexity. I don’t know if it solves any problems or creates others?

    [00:29:13] Steve Burge: Well, there is a video on the P2 site. Just a little five second video showing how this works. And it is just like Google Docs to be honest. It has the avatars of the people editing in the top right corner. Each person gets assigned the color. So, if there’s a little Nathan avatar on the top right, you might have red around your avatar, and any changes you make are being highlighted in red. I might have purple. Any changes I make are being highlighted in purple. It is, at least in this video, aiming right for the Google Drive, Google Docs experience.

    [00:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. In your article, I will link to it, and people can go and find it and there’s a couple of them in fact, and I’ll make sure to link to both of those. There was raised, and I can’t remember whether this was raised and then has now been put to bed, or if it was raised and is still a possibility. In order to try and do this, people are coming up with interesting and clever solutions to sidestep maybe some problems that were becoming obvious.

    The idea of being able to only edit the block that you are currently editing by yourself. So in other words, let’s say for example, if we’ve got a page and it’s got 50 paragraphs and a couple of images. I could edit one paragraph, but that paragraph would be locked to you. But all the other 49 paragraphs would be open to anybody. And the first person that gets in there, gets to edit it until they are in effect booted out.

    So we’d have a, an option, very similar to what we have now, on a page basis where I can’t get into the page if somebody else is editing it. We’d have that on a block by block basis. And I think in many cases that might satisfy 90%, 95% of the problems. What are the chances that I want to edit an image at the same time as you? What are the chances that I want to edit a paragraph at the same time as you? Maybe there’s a high chance of collision. I’m not sure.

    [00:31:05] Steve Burge: No, no, I think that kind of thing makes sense. And certainly, while we’re talking, I have the, the demo video playing on my screen in front of me. And that seems to be what they’re doing. That it is a block by block approach. I may be wrong. They may have something else in the background.

    But in the video that I’m watching, one person is editing the header, one person is editing a table, one person is editing a paragraph, and they’re working on the same document, but on different blocks.

    [00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that you introduced to me just before we hit the record button, was there’s a developer called Riad Benguella, and I’m sorry, Riad if that is in fact not how you say your name, I do apologize, but I’ll link to a website that you mentioned in a tweet. I’ll mention the tweet, and I’ll post the website URL as well. It’s Gutenberg with collaborative editing built into it. And you and I were editing on it, ala Google Docs. And it all seemed to work. So obviously there are people who are tackling this problem, but I’m sure the problem that, that we have here is that we don’t know what the tech stack is behind it that’s making it possible.

    We’re both looking at asblocks.com, a s b l o c k s .com, and you can go there. I suspect it’s going to be there for years to come, and share. The first person that logs in can share the link, assign themselves a name, and then presumably that shared link looks the same to you. You have to assign yourself a name and we can both see each other editing and it works as far as I can see perfectly.

    [00:32:32] Steve Burge: Yeah, Riad solved this problem two plus years ago with as blocks, and the demo is still live and still working now. It’s the, the scale out to every WordPress site that is the big stumbling block I presume.

    [00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we just simply don’t know how many people are using this at the same time. And so the collapse of it might not be a problem. Do you have any insight or any kind of spidey sense of when things may start to move in this direction? So obviously we really have to get to the point where full site editing or site editing is more or less complete to the satisfaction of the majority of people, at least anyway. Then we’ll be working on this thorny problem. Do you have any conception of when the work on this will begin properly?

    [00:33:20] Steve Burge: I wish I did. To be honest, I’m a little geeky about this stuff and, our customers want it, and I really wanted it. It would be a wonderful feature for WordPress. So I’ve probably been following this as closely as anyone that isn’t actually involved on the technical side. Every time I Google Gutenberg phase three, I seem to come across something I wrote myself, because there’s not much written about it.

    It’s been done a little bit, not entirely under a veil of secrecy, but maybe they don’t want to distract from the focus on full site editing. But it has been hard to find information. And so I was happy to see something emerge on the P2 blog that this is in progress still. If I had to guess, we’ll start to see more next year. We’ve had a couple of mentions of it from Matt, I mentioned at different WordCamps, and Matias, who is one of the lead developers of Gutenberg since the beginning, has a blog post from June this year on WordPress.org talking about phase three, but really only tangentially.

    It was more about the ending of phase two and full site editing. And so there really has been a lot of radio silence. Quite a lot of the active GitHub repos have gone quiet. I hope next year. But as someone who follows this closely, I’ve not been able to find that anymore.

    [00:34:39] Nathan Wrigley: Everything that I’ve heard has stuck rigidly to the four phases of Gutenberg. I haven’t heard of anybody discounting phase three. So collaborative editing I think is definitely destined to be tackled, and hopefully succeeding in tackling. But you’re right, it’s been very, very quiet.

    Normally, there’s a lot of speculation. There might be more proofs of concept or people popping up, giving their insight into it. But as you say, you followed it really, really closely, and it’s, it’s almost like a veil of secrecy, as you said. So hopefully that doesn’t indicate anything negative. It just means that people are concentrating their efforts on other things and trying to get those things tackled.

    Steve, I’ve probably used up more of your time than I intended to. I’m sorry about that. Just before we go, if people want to talk to you about this whole proposition, collaborative editing, where’s the best place to reach out?

    [00:35:32] Steve Burge: steve@publishpress.com. And actually one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this topic with you was I hoped I might be able to shake a bit more information out of the tree. Someone hears this and has information about it, wants to talk about it, happy to do a video podcast or share the information.

    I would love to see this in WordPress. I’m happy to help. I’m sure they have the reasons for keeping it, for keeping it quiet to the moment. But, this would be a killer feature for WordPress, and if anyone has more information, I’d love to hear it.

    [00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: I really think you are right. I think the realization of this in Gutenberg and if we had an implementation which worked basically effectively for everybody, the day it was released into WordPress core. I think it will really, would dramatically change the prospects of what people would wish to do with WordPress. At the moment it’s largely for websites.

    It really genuinely could be a tool for all sorts of internal communications and publishing things that just are for your close network, your job, your industry, whatever it might be. There’s a, there’s a whole lot that could happen that at the minute is probably left to the likes of Microsoft Teams and Google Docs and all of that kind of stuff, so.

    [00:36:43] Steve Burge: Well, it did pop up on P2 initially, which is the kind of WordPress versions of Google Docs, the kind of internal, Automattic, documentation system.

    [00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you Steve for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

    [00:36:55] Steve Burge: Thanks, Nathan.

    On the podcast today we have Steve Burge.

    Although Steve is originally from England, he now lives in Sarasota, Florida. He leads the team at PublishPress, which is a plugin company focusing on improving the publishing experience for WordPress users. The topic of today’s podcast is very much in his wheelhouse.

    Several years ago, the block editor was brought into WordPress Core. It was a dramatic change from the classic editor. Pages and posts could be created and edited with a growing variety of blocks. Blocks for paragraphs, blocks for images, in fact, blocks for everything.

    This ability to edit content with blocks was just one of four phases of the Gutenberg project, the other three phases being, site editing, multi-author collaboration, and multilingual support.

    If you’ve been following recent developments, then you’ll know that we’re currently in the site editing phase. When that’s done, it will be time to turn our collective attention to multi-author collaboration. But what is that and what does it mean?

    I think that the best way to think about this would be to imagine Google Docs. For years, you’ve been able to open up a document, click a button and share that document with others. Those with the correct permissions can interact with you in real time, and you can see the amendments they’re making as and when they’re making them. It’s utterly brilliant, and how most people would prefer to work with their content. One document. One source of truth.

    Compare that to how WordPress currently works. Only one person can edit a piece of content at the same time. If you want to edit a post or a page at the same time as someone else, you can’t.

    Phase three of the Gutenberg project aims to bring into WordPress the ability for multiple users to interact with content at the same time.

    Steve talks today about why this is an elegant and necessary update to WordPress, but also why it’s a difficult feat of engineering to pull off. WordPress has a history of working with all manner of hosting configurations, and it’s one of the reasons that it’s so successful. Will it be possible to run WordPress on more affordable tech stacks given the burden that multi-author collaboration will require?

    We also get into the projects that Steve has found from community members which try to lay some of the foundations of how this might be implemented, as well as talking about how Steve’s finding it hard to discover new information concerning this important topic.

    Useful links.

    Collaborative Editing is a Really Difficult Challenge in WordPress

    P2 Beta launch and video

    AsBlocks

    AsBlocks project on GitHub

    Automattic’s Isolated Block Editor on GitHub

    YJS website

    YJS project on GitHub

    Steve’s podcast with the Tag1 team about YJS

    Steve’s post about why collaborative editing in Gutenberg is hard

    CKEditor post about lessons learned from creating a rich-text editor with real-time collaboration

    Matias Ventura’s post about thinking through the WordPress admin experience

    WordPress 6.1 to Focus On Refining Full-Site Editing, Next Phase Collaboration and Multilingual Features Anticipated in 2023-2025

    OSTraining

    Google Wave

  • #53 – Matt Medeiros on the State of the WordPress Landscape

    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, the thoughts on the past present and future of WordPress.

    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 Matt Medeiros. Matt is the driving force behind many WordPress initiatives. That could be the creation of plugins, WordPress news, media, as well as podcasts about all manner of WordPress specific subjects. He likes to juggle multiple projects at once.

    Currently he’s the director of podcaster to success at Castos, which is a podcast hosting company with a WordPress plugin. He’s on the podcast today to give us his take on the past, present and future of WordPress.

    Many millions of people like to work with the WordPress software, they create websites, plugins, and themes, and extend what the CMS can do. Others, such as Matt like to ponder the broader purpose and direction of the software and the community around it. The Matt Report and The WP Minute have enabled us to hear about what the community is doing, what it wants and where its points of friction are. He’s talked to hundreds of people about what WordPress was, is, and might be. And so he’s in a unique position to pontificate about what WordPress, beyond the software, is.

    We start with mats backstory. How he found WordPress and why he started to use it. We talk about how he’s dipped in and out of the community over the years. More excited at times, less so at others.

    The conversation moves on to some of the trends that Matt has noticed. He identifies how the software and the wider community have altered over time. We talk about how The WP Minute got started, and how he’s building up a community of like-minded people to consume as well as to create the content that they’re putting out.

    Towards the end, we get into the governance of WordPress and the future of the project more generally. There are certainly things that Matt likes, but there are some wrinkles which get aired as well.

    We finish up by talking about podcasts and Matt’s work with Castos and how they are trying to make it easier to get your voice out there, especially with their WordPress integration.

    It’s a lovely chat with a thoughtful and far sighted member of the community.

    If you’re interested in finding out more. You can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over 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 Matt Medeiros.

    I am joined on the podcast today by Matt Medeiros. Hello, Matt.

    [00:04:10] Matt Medeiros: Nathan, thanks for having me.

    [00:04:12] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. If you’ve been in the WordPress space for, I’m going to say a decade or more, it’s very likely that you’ve heard about Matt Medeiros, but just in case you haven’t, I’m going to let Matt do a little bit of an intro to give us his backstory about WordPress, the WordPress space, the projects he’s been involved in. So, Matt, off you go.

    [00:04:33] Matt Medeiros: Well, my newsletter list says otherwise. So, there’s still plenty of people who need to know me. So Matt Medeiros. I’ve been doing WordPress stuff, 10, 15 years. I don’t know how long it’s been. Started a podcast called Matt Report back when I started a digital agency. That’s how I built the digital agency. Ran Matt Report for many, many, many, many years still out there, and now have pivoted this focus on thewpminute.com, which is five minutes of WordPress news every week.

    So I’ve been in the WordPress space, agency stuff, plugin stuff, theme stuff, podcasting stuff, YouTube stuff. And now I am the director of podcaster success at castos.com, which is a podcast hosting company, which also has a WordPress plugin. And also the parent company of wordpress.com, Automattic, has invested in Castos a little over a year ago at this point. So it’s podcasting and WordPress.

    [00:05:24] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll definitely get into that. I confess I had forgotten that fact. Cast your mind back. Let’s say it’s 12 years ago, something like that. What was the thing that made it WordPress as opposed to something else all those years ago? Could have been Drupal, could have been Joomla, could have been Expression Engine. Why WordPress?

    [00:05:40] Matt Medeiros: In fact, it was Drupal, to begin with. That was my first foray into really taking an open source CMS seriously, besides PHP-Nuke, which I had played with, before Drupal. But Drupal came into my professional career as I was head of web services for an ISP, internet service provider.

    We used to do things like dial up, ISDN, if you can remember those. T1 lines. And we purchased another ISP that had a web development arm and it was a Drupal shop. And this is around Drupal four and five, around those versions. And the head of design or the head designer at the time, he was like, hey Matt, because we were taking over and other people were leaving and I was going to steer the ship.

    He’s like, I want to get away from Drupal. It is so hard to design on top of. Now you got to remember this is, I don’t know, 15 years ago, something like that. And he said, there’s this thing called WordPress. I can really design on top of that. I can do really well with it. I want to try it out. And that was the first theme we bought was the theme called Standard, which was a collaboration way back in the day between John Saddington, Tom McFarlin, and Eric Dye, I believe was his last name.

    That was the first theme I ever purchased, in a professional setting. We use that to build themes and do that with our customers. And, and that was the entrance into WordPress. And once I broke off from that company, I just took all that knowledge and started my digital agency with that. And it was domino effect, ever since in the WordPress space.

    [00:07:08] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve really had a, like a broad, rich, encounter with WordPress though, because for me at least, anyway, it was WordPress websites and then more recently got into podcasting and those are basically the two things that I’ve done. But, as we’ll probably find out during the course of the show, you’ve really dotted around.

    One of the things that I want to raise right at the beginning, and I don’t know what your thoughts on this are. It’s a bit of an abstract thought. If we were to rewind the clock, say 20 years ago. Both of us have obviously decided at some point, I think the internet is quite an interesting and fun thing. But I genuinely had no idea, it could have been a flash in the pan. Maybe it would’ve represented a tiny sliver of what people were doing. Shops, brick and mortar shops would still be thriving. Websites would’ve been really tangential, hardly anybody might have visited them.

    There was no conception that the phone would become a conduit. That you would carry something around in your back pocket. That computers would be basically portable. None of that was a thought, and yet both of us staked more or less everything on it, which with a bit of hindsight was probably the best decision we ever made.

    Now, you can talk to computers that sit in a tiny box in your kitchen and it will give you coherent answers to everything. Do you feel like you’re a very privileged person to have stepped into the broader internet and all that that offers?

    [00:08:28] Matt Medeiros: My genesis around getting into this space, if you want to go even deeper into the rabbit hole of who Matt Medeiros is, is my family ran a string of car dealerships for about 45 years in my local, my local area. We weren’t like this big massive conglomerate auto dealership. We just had two, family owned and operated.

    It was the technology that was moving, fast paced in that world. Consumer internet being born, websites, you know, this all sounds pretty trivial, but back then it was like, oh wow, we can post a car on the internet and somebody can look at it and email us, or most likely call us back then and buy it? Speaking of the privilege that, like being in that space, having a family that ran this dealership, but because I was the youngest one and I was into it. I was the one that put all the technology together, from General Motors, right?

    They were literally talking to an 17, 18 year old at the time, as the head of the internet department. Because I was the only one who got it, who understood it. My dad did, but you know, I sort of led the charge on that. And, I remember being in college and, you know, when you look at WordPress and open source, one of my, uh, capstone courses was to build something with, I forget what the terms were, but they said build it with multiple packages. And back then I was learning like Linux and Novell and, and Windows NT.

    And I remember building PHP-Nuke with a bulletin board with, a blog roll. And I was building a car site, and I was like, wouldn’t it be awesome if somebody could go to this website and book an oil change for their car by filling out this form. And then if you had questions about repairing your car, you could come to this thing called a bulletin board, and have like this little community.

    What I was doing back then was doing everything that social, that we all take for granted these days with the advancement of technology. And I was like wiring it together with little open source packages. So yeah, roundabout way of getting to, yeah, I feel pretty lucky to fall into that space at an early age.

    [00:10:30] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that you and I hit a time when you could flip from just having any kind of job into working on the internet, because the barrier to entry in terms of knowledge was so low. You basically had to learn HTML and then along came CSS, it was straightforward.

    I think the promise now is much more difficult. I can’t really imagine what it must be like for somebody at the age of 17 or 18. The things that they must need to learn in order to become employable. Speaking of the internet, you mentioned social media and what have you. I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

    I know that we’re straying away a little bit from WordPress, but it does touch on GPL and it does touch on the broader purpose of the internet. What are your feelings about how the internet has evolved over the last, let’s say seven, eight years? Things like Facebook, social media, and the associated benefits and harms that go with it.

    [00:11:25] Matt Medeiros: I don’t think humans were ready to be wired up emotionally, to the level that we’re at these days. Spanning across many, many contexts, right? From your everyday life of sharing pictures of what you’re eating, what your kids are doing, to more serious things like health, wellness, mental health.

    Couple weeks ago suddenly lost my father-in-law and like the grieving factor of online. And you really start to sit back and say like, what, what is this? Like why? Is this value, all of us connected like this? Are we really together in this? Or is it just this digital connection that sort of literally just disappears as the feed refreshes?

    And it really starts to have you question all of these things. Now there’s definitely many, many benefits. I mean, friends, that I’ve made through social, the businesses that I’ve built, and continue to build. There’s definitely a plus factor, but there’s a huge negative and, and things that I don’t think human beings are really ready for.

    And I look at it in two different ways. One, I have three very young sons, three boys, under the ages of six. And I’m just like mentally preparing on how to onboard them to the internet, how I will do that. But I also see things from the broader perspective, is you and I are content creators. We’re just playing in the WordPress world mostly and softwares and stuff like that.

    But I see people who are whatever, they’re into fashion, they’re into tech, they’re into video games, and there’s a burnout factor. There’s a, I must continue to create all of this content to please these people who really don’t care about me, factor. And then there’s those who really become hits, they do really well. And they’re not ready for that fame and that spotlight, because they’re one person with a million YouTube subscribers in their home office.

    And they’re not ready for what that’s like, to have all of these humans watching them and asking them for things. And it’s just, it’s not a mindset that I think we’re all really ready for, without some education. But we’re so early that, 50 years from now, it’s, it’s probably not going to be a thing, because we’re, we’re still cresting the analog to the digital. Like you said, the young folks, how are they going to get jobs?

    I think the, the issue is, is they lose the fundamentals of building technology. When I was learning how to build a website, I was learning how to build a computer. So I knew that there was a CPU and memory and a hard disc, and these things were storing this content and yada, all that fun stuff. Now, with the introduction of whatever, let’s say, easy web website builders and you just talk to AI and it codes a website for you. There are going to be this swath of people who just don’t know where all of this stuff lives and how it’s all connected. So, that was a deep rabbit hole that I just went down, and I hope we tumbled around it.

    [00:14:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really interesting. You mentioned your three children and I think that’s really fascinating for me. I have children as well, and one of the things that I struggle with. On the one hand, I’m really a proponent of technology. I love it. There’s almost nothing about it that I don’t love.

    And yet at the same time, I’ve noticed that my children have been born into an era in which technology could be literally welded to your hand and, you know, there’s no escape from it. And so the notifications can come in at all times of day, and night. Stress there on night, so it disrupts things. Like it disrupts the normal cycle of interpersonal relations in a room because, there’s a bing bong on a phone and suddenly you’re distracted.

    And the reason for being in the room with other people is somewhat shattered. And then, you hear about people who leave their phones by their bedsides and the phone goes off in the middle of the night and it disrupts their sleep, and all of these impacts. And whilst I am boldly a proponent of the internet, there are aspects of it which trouble me. And I think your wise point there, right at the end was that we’re young to this. We’re 20 years in, maybe a little bit more, but let’s say roughly 20 years in. And so we don’t really know where this is going.

    It’s kind of like steering a ship. I’m imagining somebody in 1492, Christopher Columbus or somebody on a ship, you know, they’ve set sail. They know they’ve got a destination, but they don’t know how long it’s going to be or when they’re going to get there. This feels to me like the internet. And I do wonder if some of these things that we may regard as bad habits at the moment will get washed away and replaced, hopefully with more beneficial things. I’m optimistic about that.

    [00:15:52] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I agree.

    [00:15:53] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s just turn to the WordPress space, generally speaking. So you’ve been in it for a long time. Certainly much longer than I have. And you’ve been somebody that’s been observing the WordPress space. Not just using the software, but considering it, considering the impact of it, considering the business that can be made around it, and looking at the plugins and the themes and all of that, and having a critical eye on it.

    This is a very broad question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. What have you noticed as the main changes over time? Young people to the community, you’ve been in the community using WordPress for a couple of years. They won’t know that there’s been any changes. The software’s just the software, but there’s been a lot. What do you think the main things have been for you?

    [00:16:29] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I’m, I’m going to try to summarize this as quickly as possible that we can break off into different paths that I think are, are relevant. But there was certainly a long span of the same folks doing the same WordCamp talks, I’m not saying this in a bad way, but there was, I don’t know, a 10 year cohort of WordPress that I felt, we were all jiving and doing the same thing, showing up to the WordCamps, and everyone knew each other.

    The real pivotal milestone, for better or worse, was the introduction of Gutenberg, and the software and how it was introduced and all that stuff. Those pages in the history books have already been written. I think it was at that point where a certain segment of the community was one, they were like, I don’t want this in WordPress, so I’m done. There was another segment where, we don’t know how to code around this, and I don’t want this coding overhead. And then there was a third, in my view, where a lot of people used it.

    Excuse might be the wrong word, but it was certainly a time where, man, you’re 10 or whatever it was, 10 or 12 years into software. That’s a lifetime of using the same shiny tool. And there’s just this natural thing, I think, of all of us who are like technologists or like 10, 12 years in, ah, I just got to try something else. And that was a moment, two thirds of these people are leaving because of these reasons. I guess I’ll leave too, and go find another shiny object.

    And that’s where I guess the no code market really stepped in. Not saying because of WordPress, but it was certainly a right time, right place, kind of thing where those tools were getting shinier and better, and it was a great moment for them to somebody else to be like, ah, Webflow, ah, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Coda, Notion, all these things that we’re just like piecing together like we did with WordPress 10 years ago. Now we can do this again here with these shiny, faster free tools.

    So that’s the way that I see it. That change in the community over the milestone of Gutenberg, and up until now there’s a lot of fresh faces in here, which is great. But there’s less of this, I don’t know, warm blanket around all of us these days, that used to be there, for a good 10 year cohort.

    One of the reasons why I started The Matt Report at the time was, one, it’s because I wasn’t a developer and I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know how to talk to developers, so I said, well, I’ll just interview them and, and promote them so that they can get jobs and maybe I’ll learn more people.

    But two, when I was at one of my first WordCamps, perfect example, there was, you know, one of the core contributors of WordPress and he would walk by and people like, Oh, I really want to talk to him. I’m afraid to talk to him. So there was like this celebrity status kind of thing.

    And that’s when it hit me like, oh, people really care about these other people in the community. Let me go and find them and interview them, and prop them up so other people can meet them instead of being, you know, shy or worried to talk about them at a WordCamp. So I think the biggest change, for me anyway, has been the community in the involvement of everyone.

    [00:19:24] Nathan Wrigley: Did I get a sense, I could be wrong. Forgive me if I got this sense and my spidey sense was tingling in the wrong direction. But, I kind of got a feeling about three or four years ago that you, you kinda fell out of love a little bit with WordPress and were seeking paths new. But then you’ve drifted back in, drift is the wrong word, you’ve come back in with great aplomb, you know, you’re back in making all the content and what have you. Is that true? Did you find yourself in that miasma, thinking I don’t really know whether I belong anymore?

    [00:19:55] Matt Medeiros: Picture us in the, in my therapist office, and you’re sitting across from me with your pen and notepad. There’s a lot of things that go into that feeling. You’re not totally wrong. But, as you know as a content creator, you continue to create all the content. And quite literally, I burned out on the YouTube stuff because it was just a hard slog on the Plugin Tut channel. But then it was, how do I really grow this? How do I grow this podcast and, bring in other, other voices? Because the same thing I just mentioned about this 10 year cohort, all the same people.

    I could feel those effects on the content that I was doing. That’s when I started to introduce the no code, maybe the more business aspect, SaaS developers, stuff like that, and bringing that into the fold. It certainly, my love for WordPress, it actually goes much deeper than the software. I think that WordPress itself is, speaking of like jobs and education. This is a tool that can empower individuals, local organizations, states, towns, to put people into a workforce.

    And WordPress is, I think, a great learning tool. A great building tool to do all that stuff, aside from the fun web stuff that we can do with it. So you’re not too far off, but there was sort of a reshaping of how do I introduce new voices? Because I could feel probably just like you, the social media, the engagement of everyone sort of just getting burned out from the same old thing in WordPress, and that was probably me shifting the way I do content at the time.

    [00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: So shifting more recently, your content creation, it’s not entirely this, but you’ve moved to a new moniker. You’ve got The WP Minute. Just give us a bit of an insight into what the intention was there and how it’s going.

    [00:21:46] Matt Medeiros: We can thank our mutual friend Davinder Singh Kainth for getting me into this, uh, yet another content rabbit hole. But I also thank him very much for pushing me in this direction. I had an idea that I pitched to him one day and I was like, hey, probably just like your spidey sense went off. I’ve gotten really busy with the Castos day job, three young boys. It’s like, how the heck can I even do long form content anymore?

    So I wanted to do short form content and I approached Davinder and I said, hey, what I’d really like to do is a spoken version of your, of your newsletter. Fast forward, to make a long story short, he just said, how about you just start your own and I’ll just support you and I said, I don’t really want to do my own, I just want to, just want to piggyback off of somebody else. And that’s how we, we got into The WP Minute. So it’s your favorite five minutes of WordPress news, every Wednesday. But it’s really grown, to, uh, a small but mighty community. Just introduced Erik Karkovack, who is a top WP Tavern commenter, as the head editor or the editor of The WP Minute.

    So he’s working for me, air quotes, full time as the editor of putting together all the news, curating the news. And then I read the news, every Wednesday, and it’s just a short five minutes, so you’re busy, you’re a busy WordPress professional, you don’t have the time. We get all the top headlines for you and summarize it for you. And we have a fun community. So if you’re into the news, I, I certainly recommend The WP Minute.

    [00:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: How do you decide what stays in and what’s goes out? I face this problem. I have to decide which podcast episode I’m going to make, but it’s much more straightforward because the stuff that I’m producing content on, probably won’t matter whether it’s next week or the week after, it’s less critical. But for you, you’ve really got one shot and you’ve got to presumably try and get all the good bits in in five minutes. That’s hard, because in the WordPress community, as you know, I can talk about it for at least an hour and a half every week. How do you decide what stays in and what gets cut onto the floor?

    [00:23:41] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so I look at the WP Minute as probably the best thing that I’m ever going to create for WordPress, right? So Matt Report, all the plugins, themes, services, consultations I’ve done, I feel like the WP Minute is the best thing that I’m going to contribute to this community. As far as I can see, and I look at it as community driven journalism without, self-promotion on this point.

    The idea is if you really want to have a hand in the news, you could join the membership and be part of this, and you join the membership to support it, because it costs money. And I try to be as transparent as possible of, there’s hosting, there’s podcast hosting, there’s paying Eric, there’s paying Raquel, there’s paying Pat to run this team.

    And the idea is if you want to get the stories out, you join us for short money to support the whole cause. And what I call the members, they call them producers. So you, the community member, can help produce the show. And as you know, Nathan, you get people knocking on your door to promote their product, promote their thing, and it’s like, hey, great, put your money where your mouth is and if you want your news to be heard, submit it to, what we call the link squad at The WP Minute. It’s a member curation. So you have the editorial team, myself, Eric, Pat, Raquel, and then you have the members who contribute the news. We all watch the news.

    You know, I got some Slack bots wired up. We get all the hot topics pumped right into the Slack channel so we can all collaborate on it. But then everyone sort of gets to have a vote. So people who put in their links, if their link makes it to the news, then they all get a credit thank you, both in the newsletter and the podcast. Now the idea is it’s supposed to be a five minute show. So if there’s a ton of news and somebody has voted for their top 10 slider plugins for October, chances are that one’s not going to make it. But we’ve had some times where we’ll cut a story from make.wordpress.org.

    Hey, we’ve got WordPress 6.1 release candidate one is ready. Please test it. Those are things that we always include to raise awareness, but if there’s acquisition news, community news, Tumblr News, like things that are really big and impactful, those things might drop because those things happen a lot more. So that’s not the most educated answer of how we select the news, but it is a community effort, and then within the confines of, hey look, this is also short form, so we try to keep it to five to seven minutes every week. People have said to me, why isn’t it called The WP Minutes?

    [00:26:07] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve been doing this like you said, for such a long time, and so you’ve been inspecting the community and what have you. You’ve got this media channel now, WP Minute, I know you’re doing a bunch of other stuff, and we’ll get onto that.

    Have you noticed over the last 10, 12, 8, whatever number of years. Have you noticed that the audience has changed? The desire of the content for the audience has changed? Because, when I started listening to WordPress content, really the only stuff I could find was how tos. It was, here I am, I know stuff about code. I’m going to tell you about code. Whereas now, if you look around, I feel that you can get news on almost everything.

    You know, you’ve got news about accessibility. You’ve got news about governance. You’ve got news about the plugins. You’ve got news about the themes, full site editing. The list could go on and on. And it seems almost like we’ve really properly got a little ecosystem where you don’t need to code, you could just be a community member talking about the community. So any thoughts on that?

    [00:27:05] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on that. I talk about this topic a lot, I really just put all my cards out on the table and I could be totally wrong and it wouldn’t, certainly wouldn’t be the first time. But I think that the audience size, and again, this goes back to your spidey sense from before. I think that the audience size for the type of content that you and I put out is maximum, if you had the whole globe of human beings in front of you, the whole earth is probably about 8,000 people, out of whatever, 8, 9 billion people.

    I think that’s our cap for WordPress news, the inside baseball or how, how the community is put together, the ins and outs of the project, right. I think that the cap is 8,000 people. Now, the cap for how to put together a WooCommerce store, vastly different, right? those are the ones that, I mean, that’s hundreds of thousands, if not, uh, I don’t know, millions of people, who would want that kind of content? So I think yes, it has changed. I think the one constant is content that is still developer centric, is still the king of WordPress content, because there’s just far more WordPress developers who care about how to put sites together, than it is about the business side of WordPress and, maybe the community side, right?

    So I think that it has certainly shifted, although maybe even has gotten even tighter into the development space with the introduction of Gutenberg, full sight editing and just the general changes of WordPress.

    So, I know that if you told me 10 years ago, could you have made a business out of, whatever I, Matt Report and The WP Minute, I probably would’ve said no, I’m just trying to like grow brand awareness, which I was. I think I’ve successfully turned it, air quote, successfully turned it, into a media business, but it’s still very, very small. Very appreciative to like the sponsors over the years, and I have done really well compared to the larger podcasting industry, But, the audience I think for the stuff that, at least that I do, not trying to put you in the same bucket as me, is pretty small. It’s just people going in and out, all the time.

    [00:29:12] Nathan Wrigley: Given that we’ve both hitched our cart to the WordPress space, what are your thoughts about the future? Because I personally feel at least anyway, that the future is quite bright. I’m fairly optimistic about the progress around full sight editing and the block editor. I can well understand why people have become dissuaded with the desire to use WordPress into the future, I can understand that. But I feel that there’s light at the end of that tunnel, albeit, I don’t know how many days, weeks, months, or years it’s going to be before the train finally emerges out of the tunnel. But for me, it’s important because I do podcasting. I do content in the WordPress space. I would like to think that WordPress has a bright and glowing future. Maybe you share that optimism or maybe not.

    [00:30:02] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I feel like I’m a realist in the fact that Automattic will take over wordpress.org, and it’ll just be more of a prominent upsell to either Jetpack or wordpress.com. And there is nothing wrong with that in my eyes, okay. So let’s just set that aside for a moment. I’ve recently, so hold that thought.

    I’ve recently been using Ghost, another open source CMS and, I’m using their paid version because like the folks who would make that decision to not have to maintain WordPress, get a hosting account, do plugins and themes. I said, hey, for this little side, side, side project that I’m working on, I’m just going to pay ghosts 30 bucks a month.

    And I want to be carefree like everyone else who picks these no code tools. This is what they’re all saying. This is why they’re all moving there. And I’ll tell you, yes, Ghost is good in the lane that Ghost runs in. But just the other day I was like, ah, I need to add a landing page, or I need to edit the footer.

    And I go to the help docs and it’s like, install your code editor. Set up a local repo., like run docker containers, and I’m like, I don’t want this. Where’s my full sight editing? Where’s my Beaver Builder? Where’s my Elementor? I just want to edit this one thing. Why can’t I do it? There is a luxury in WordPress that I think a lot of, a user interface luxury. Uh, a no code luxury. Call it what you want, that when I just want to click something and edit, for all the faults that you hear people complain about speed and performance. Man, put this up against the Ghosts, the Webflows, the Wix’s.

    I was looking at card.co, the other, I think it’s card.co. It’s like a super simplified like page building, five page portfolio site and I wanted to upload multiple photos. This was for again, the passing of my father-in-law and I wanted to put a little memorial site up, and I had hundreds of photos that I wanted to upload and I had to upload one at a time. And I said, no, I just want you drag a bunch of photos like I do in WordPress into a media gallery and display it. And these other tools just, they just don’t do it as easy as WordPress.

    So, like you, I’m, I’m an optimist on using WordPress. It’s the learning curve and the maintenance. But I think that’s a world we’re all slowly moving to where, that will all continue to get simplified by Automattic, by web hosts. Full sight editing. Oh boy. I’m really struggling with that big time. Gutenberg, yes, there are still some things I really struggle with, but there are some other great tools as alternatives that I use. And that’s the patchwork that I’m doing now.

    [00:32:38] Nathan Wrigley: The grass is always greener. There’s always that, I’m going to try that other CMS and see how it goes. And I’ve done the same, I’ve always ended up back with WordPress. It always seems like a, a comfortable pair of shoes. Terrible analogy, but there you go.

    [00:32:52] Matt Medeiros: WordPress, a comfortable pair of shoes.

    [00:32:54] Nathan Wrigley: Let’s get into the awkward business of Automattic and your thoughts around that. And you mentioned a moment ago that you thought that wordpress.org was moving inexorably towards being dominated by Automattic. What makes you say that, and does it trouble you? You went to great pains to say that it didn’t trouble you, but maybe on some level it does?.

    [00:33:14] Matt Medeiros: I think that the biggest factor here is communication, right? It’s communication from WordPress leadership. It’s communication from Jetpack and Automattic. These are signs that are quite obvious. So, I forget six months ago or something like that, I interviewed the uh, president or CEO of wordpress.com, talking about their new price points because they had done new price points.

    And the obvious gorilla in the room to me is, what are we doing with WooCommerce? We collectively as Automattic, like, when are you really going to compete with Shopify? And you know, he is, oh, you can compete with Shopify right now. You can just sign up for a WordPress.com. Yeah, but it’s nothing, it’s nothing like going to Shopify to start an e-commerce store. Nothing is guiding you as a merchant, as a store seller, as an entrepreneur.

    So these are obvious things that I can see, that everyone can see are the obvious paths to monetization to Automattic. And I think, one, we all step back and say, What would WordPress look like without Automattic? What would that world look like? Who would it be? Would it be Salesforce? Would it be Oracle? Would it be Microsoft? Do you want them in the lead of this software?

    I think that the best steward for all of this stuff, .org included, is Automattic. The challenge is, communication, direction. And do we all really get a seat at the table, question mark? And I fight for that seat at the table from my point of view, which is the website builder, the entrepreneur, the user, not a developer, certainly not a developer. But from my perspective, these are the things that I fight for. And I fight for WordPress to be open source because I think it is, in a world where we all go closed source, like I said before, this is things that could impact local economies.

    This is a tool that could get somebody who’s really struggling in life, to get a job in technology because you know how to make a WordPress post. These are the building blocks of the fundamentals of the internet, in my eyes. So, to me it’s, hey, go Automattic. Tax us, air quotes, tax us. I know this is interesting, me being in New England and you being in England to me, for me to say tax us. But that’s fine with me. I used to say the same thing when I used to sell themes. Why is this process so difficult? Why don’t we have the data? Why isn’t dot org just a marketplace?

    I am fine getting a 30% tax. If I can sell my goods in a place that’s trusted, secure, that we’re true partners with. And it just hasn’t happened because I feel that all roads lead to, we’ll monetize WordPress, this is Automattic speaking. We’ll monetize WordPress through Jetpack, wordpress.org, and then we’ll eventually upsell, hey, if you don’t want to host it yourself, come to .com, or Pressable. And I don’t see anything wrong with that. It’s just everyone, I think needs to sort of just face the fact and build their business, their plugin business around that.

    What I don’t like is overstepping and, and the hidden paths to upsell without anyone saying anything, ala Jetpack. I still think Jetpack is good for the right user. In fact, I used it on that memorial site because it’s a fantastic tool for quick and easy. But I think it’s also going to dominate other SEO plug-ins, other contact form plugins, the blue collar digital workforce that I try to advocate for a lot in the content that I put out.

    [00:36:35] Nathan Wrigley: What do you think about the governance of the project? So at the moment, we have the model, which is often called the benevolent dictator for life, and it kind of trickles down from there. Would you like there to be forays into altering that model? Are you happy with the fact that there is one person governing for life, or would you like to see little bits of that chipped away, chunks of the project, which are governed by the community more?

    [00:37:00] Matt Medeiros: I really appreciate the three conversations that Matt and I have had on my podcast. I think it’s been three. I don’t think that there is, when I have a problem with my MacBook, I don’t call up Tim Cook, and say hey man, come on my podcast, let’s talk about this Apple ecosystem you’ve got here, speaking of a 30% tax. It’s great for us as a community to have a single person that is semi approachable to have conversations with you. To be at WordCamps and have this, literally armed lengths away, to have a conversation with. Having said all of that, yes, I would like change. As I’ve told Matt, he does an insane amount of stuff.

    Automattic, wordpress.org, Tumblr, and Automattic is like 25 different products. One of them my favorite, which is Simple Note App, Jetpack, and all the other stuff that he does in life. How can he do it all? And I think that is a real issue. We look at the last couple of weeks ish, he’s actually talked more openly about where he wants to go with Tumblr than I feel he has with WordPress dot org, and how can you balance that?

    I think it’s a super challenge. I think, he thinks he can do it and he is doing it, but I think there should be some level of change. And Josepha again gracious to have her on the podcast once. How much can she possibly load on her back to do all of the work that she does? So, yes, I mean, I don’t have the answer for it.

    I don’t think it’s easy. I think a lot of people think that it’s easier said than done. But there should be something, some kind of governance model change, which I know people have pushed for in the past. I just don’t see how, how Matt can steer so many ships at once.

    [00:38:46] Nathan Wrigley: Speaking of steering a lot of ships. You’ve not only got The WP Minute and various other bits and pieces. You’ve also got a real interest in how podcasts are made, not just because you’re making podcasts and you go through that whole editing process and interviewing guests, much like we’re doing right now. But you’ve also taken a great interest in the technology behind how podcasts work. Actually just occurs to me, many people might not even know that there is a whole industry behind podcasting, but there is, and Castos is one of them. How long have you been now with Castos and what do you do over there?

    [00:39:19] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so two and a half years, something like that. Director of Podcaster success. I try to make podcasters coming in to Castos successful with their podcast, however they might define success, Again, joining Caso because one, I’m a podcaster, two, they have a fantastic WordPress plugin.

    There’s a commitment to open source, on the WordPress side, there’s a commitment to open RSS. These are two worlds that collide greatly with me, and I’m a huge proponent, of course on open source and open distribution. You know, the perfect example is what’s the difference? Well, the, difference is a Spotify where you have to have the Spotify app to listen to a particular show, and open RSS means you can subscribe and distribute anywhere that accepts RSS.

    The world of podcasting, it’s funny, it continues to grow and there continues to be this excitement around it, but it continues to be more in more corporate interest. There is a tiny, tiny, tiny open source team that’s sort of leading the charge for, I’ll dumb it down, but RSS standards.

    It’s called Podcasting 2.0, and you can go to the podcastindex.org, and they run their own index, which is different than Apple, right? So Apple has their index, but you have to, you know, register and do all this stuff with Apple. Podcastindex.org is an open, so think of it as almost like wordpress.org, if you will.

    And they’re really leading the charge of enhancing the RSS feed. Doing things, more things in the RSS feed, like micro payment support, transcripts, chapters, live feed item tags, chat, cross platform chat. So they’re introducing a lot of this data and information that can help podcasters, and their challenges, similar to WordPress. They have to get other podcast hosts and other podcast apps to support these name spaces so that it’s for the greater good of the whole podcast economy or, or industry, right?

    So, you know, I’m a huge proponent of that. Again, to talk about like the approach of Matt, Matt Mullenweg to pull it back. I know, well, Matt’s from Texas, one of the head guys at Podcast Index is from Texas, Adam Curry, and I sent an email to Matt and Adam and I said, hey, you guys should talk to each other. You both know each other, you’re both into open source, open distribution. You all should have a conversation.

    And they, and they had a conversation and that Matt tied together the Pocket Cast team to them, and they had some great conversations. So, yeah, open source, open collaboration, it’s a great thing and I hope to keep waving that flag for podcasting.

    [00:41:52] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really interesting. I wonder if we are on the cusp of something akin to RSS with things like Mastodon, based upon Activity Hub, which is very like RSS. So essentially it’s an open platform where you can attach your social media stuff. I don’t know if you’ve come across this exodus from Twitter over the last couple of weeks.

    But there seemed to be a lot of people who, over the last few weeks have made up their mind that they would like something a bit more open. They would like to be able to get the content and post the content that they wish without the constraints of being logged in to some proprietary system. And in many of the comments that I’ve seen in people’s flight from Twitter, they keep talking about podcasts and how podcasting, 20 years ago, I believe it was Dave Winer who came up with the spec for RSS for podcasts, I could be wrong about that.

    But just how, with the benefit of hindsight, the whole RSS open nature of podcasts, so take Spotify and all those other things out of the equation. The fact that my podcast, your podcast, is available completely for free. You don’t need any sort of system, particularly, you just need to subscribe to a podcast feed, which is held on the website. Just how breathtakingly clever that was with a bit of hindsight.

    [00:43:03] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, yeah. Adam Curry as well helped, lead that charge. And he’s, he’s the one that’s sort of leading up the podcast index stuff, and podcasting 2.0 stuff. Yeah, it is great. A lot of the technology is, it’s very easy to implement, right? It’s all part of the RSS feed.

    And, you know, the challenge is, is sharing that data. So, it’s a, I don’t know if platform war is the right phrase for it, but you know, if you have your podcast on Spotify, Spotify can give you more analytics. They can do things in app that are for the better of the, of the listener. But don’t forget that it will be for the better of Spotify first, because they’re going to be the ones that run the ads and take a larger chunk of the profits or what have you.

    Whereas open RSS, we’re all fending for ourself, and as the more collaboration and the more people who support the innovations, the better we’ll all be. But that’s the challenge. To get everyone on the, on the same page. It’s, it’s actually no, a lot of similarities to WordPress.

    [00:44:01] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned a moment ago that you feel that podcasting is still growing? I, I honestly have no insight into that whatsoever, but it does feel much more of a mainstream thing this year than it was last year and the year before that and so on. Is that in fact the case? Is there still a case to be made, is there data to back up that, yeah, podcasts really are still growing, and if your business or your interest, your hobby is something that you want to plunge into a podcast, it’s probably worth your time and effort.

    [00:44:27] Matt Medeiros: You have to kind of look at it, obviously I’ll call myself an insider to the podcasting space, but there is a lot more money and a lot more interest coming in from what I’ll call the corporate level. And the corporate level translates into Wondery’s, Amazon. Amazon owns Wondery, which is probably the premier podcast production company creating fiction, true crime, entertainment podcasts. And that’s all backed by advertisement. That can be openly distributed, but because Amazon owns it, if you listen to it on Amazon’s music app, then you get it without the ads. But if you listen to it on Apple Podcasts, you get it with the ads, right?

    So there’s this big interest in advertising, and celebrities and movies and movie industry and all that stuff. Then there’s the flip side, there’s you and me. The guys that make probably a few thousand dollars a year, instead of a few million dollars a year, like the big boys.

    If you go to podcastindex.org, I’m looking at it right now. There’s 4 million podcasts in the index. I think Apple says around two and a half million. But there is a stat right below that, that within the last three days there’s been 109,000 updates to podcasts. And in the last 90 days, 483,000 have been updated.

    So of the 4 million, yes, there’s a bunch that have probably either just ended, you know, it’s just a series of content that people have done. Pod faded where they have given up. The true earmark to that is 483,000 in the last 90 days. So people get scared of the 4 million mark. Like, oh my God. How is my podcast going to live within 4 million? But when you look at the data of 500,000 active within the last 90 days, you still have a shot, and yes, the answer is it’s still growing for the hobbyists, like you and I.

    [00:46:14] Nathan Wrigley: It’s really amazing. I feel so privileged in a way that I made the decision to get into it a little bit early when things were probably less competitive than they are now. That I’ve just kept banging on with it week week after week. It’s, yeah, it’s pretty amazing. Uh, I realize that we’ve used up a lot more of your time than I should have done, I apologize. So I’m just going to round off with one very simple question. You’ve been in the community many, many years. Let’s imagine five years, 10 years into the future. Do you reckon you’ll still be

    [00:46:40] Matt Medeiros: here?

    Yeah, a hundred percent. I’ll be using WordPress, as far as I can see, again. One, because I love it as a publishing tool. Two because I believe in it as a tool for somebody to learn and educate themselves and, and find a new opportunity, whether that’s coding, designing or writing. This is a tool that can impact economies. Three, I love, I just love the idea of, of open source on the web and really believe in that wholeheartedly. So yeah, I see myself sticking around.

    [00:47:09] Nathan Wrigley: Matt Medeiros, thank you for joining us on the podcast today.

    [00:47:12] Matt Medeiros: Thanks, Nathan.

    On the podcast today we have Matt Medeiros.

    Matt is the driving force behind many WordPress initiatives. That could be the creation of plugins, WordPress news media, as well as podcasts about all manner of WordPress specific subjects. He likes to juggle multiple projects at once.

    Currently he’s the Director of Podcaster Success at Castos, which is a podcast hosting company with a WordPress plugin.

    He’s on the podcast today to give his take on the past, present and future of WordPress.

    Many millions of people like to work with the WordPress software. They create websites, plugins and themes which extend what the CMS can do. Others, such as Matt, like to ponder the broader purpose and direction of the software and the community around it.

    The Matt Report and The WP Minute have enabled us to hear about what the community is doing, what it wants and where its points of friction are. He’s talked to hundreds of people about what WordPress was, is, and might be, and so is in a unique position to pontificate about what WordPress, beyond the software, is.

    We start with Matt’s backstory. How he found WordPress and why he started to use it. We talk about how he’s dipped in and out of the community over the years; more excited at times, less so at others.

    The conversation moves on to some of the trends that Matt has noticed. He identifies how the software and the wider community have altered over time.

    We talk about how The WP Minute got started and how he’s building up a community of like-minded people to consume as well as to create the content that they’re putting out.

    Towards the end, we get into the governance of WordPress and the future of the project more generally. There are certainly things that Matt likes, but there are some wrinkles which get aired as well.

    We finish up talking about podcasts and Matt’s work with Castos and how they are trying to make it easier to get your voice out there, especially with their WordPress integration.

    It’s a lovely chat with a thoughtful and far sighted member of the community.

    Useful links.

    Matt Report

    The WP Minute

    Castos

  • #52 – Hannah Smith on Why We Need To Be Making Websites More Sustainable

    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 making websites more sustainable.

    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, well, I’m very 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 Hannah Smith. Hannah is the operations and training manager for the Green Web Foundation, and founder of The Let’s Green The Web campaign. She’s also co-founder of Green Tech Southwest.

    Her background is in computer science. She previously worked as a freelance WordPress developer and also for the Environment Agency, where she managed business change projects.

    It’s pretty easy to forget that the device that you’re reading or listening to this podcast on is consuming power. We plug things in or charge them up, and they just work. They are sleek and sterile. No pollution comes out of the device directly. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that many of us never make the connection between our use of technology and the impact that this has on the environment.

    Enter Hannah Smith. She’s been thinking about this for years and is on the podcast today to highlight the issue and hopefully get your ideas about what users of WordPress can do to make sure that the websites we create are having the smallest impact possible.

    Her approach is not that we need to cease and desist using our technology. Rather it’s about coming up with new and innovative ways that we can reduce the impact that we have.

    As creators of websites, there are a whole raft of options available to us. Reducing the size of our images. Inspecting the HTML to remove bloat. Choosing hosting options that source renewable energy.

    With this in mind, Hannah and others have been working on a sustainability related blog post, which has been published on the Make WordPress site this week. This post is intended to trigger meaningful and open discussion in the global WordPress community about the topic of sustainability.

    She really wants to encourage others to weigh into this public conversation with their own thoughts, so that we can build on what is already happening to make WordPress more sustainable.

    It’s a fascinating and thought provoking topic, and if you’re interested in finding out more, you can get all of the links in the show notes by heading over 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 Hannah Smith.

    I am joined on the podcast today by Hannah Smith. Hello Hannah.

    [00:04:02] Hannah Smith: Hello Nathan. Thank you so much for having me today.

    [00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. Hannah is here today to talk about the environmental impact of having WordPress websites, and I genuinely think this is going to be a real eye opener for many of us.

    Before we do that though Hannah, we always orientate our listeners by allowing the guests to just give us a bit of background on who they are and what their relationship is with WordPress. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to ask you that very generic question is just tell us a little bit about yourself and how come you are into WordPress.

    [00:04:35] Hannah Smith: Thank you. I’m a massive fan of WordPress. I’ve so much love and admiration for the community. So my background is as a computer scientist, so that’s what I studied in my degree. Had, like many people, are very sort of winding interesting journey in and around different things.

    And about eight years ago, I set myself up as a freelance WordPress developer. So having done sort of other careers within tech, I won’t give you the long winding path that I got there, but serendipity basically somehow landed me, as a freelance WordPress developer. Finding myself wanting to give it a go.

    I was living in Bristol at the time, and wanted to learn more about WordPress and found that we had a meetup community in Bristol, and decided to pop along. Was made to feel very welcome, and learn loads from the awesome people there. So, a shout out to Simon, Janice, and Rob, who were the people that grounded me into that community.

    And then it wasn’t long before I somehow found myself invited to help run that community and help drive that community, which I was very happy to do for a good few years. And then in 2019 we did WordCamp Bristol. We had about 200 odd people come to that, which was brilliant. And I’ve been quite involved in WordCamps and speaking at conferences. Try and contribute where I can.

    These days I’ve actually hung up my shoes, only recently as a WordPress developer, and I’ve transitioned to working full-time for the Green Web Foundation. But part of my role at the Green Web Foundation, so I do a lot of training and outreach and operations, because we’re small, so everyone wears lots of hats.

    But I do also manage our WordPress website as well and our WordPress estate too. So, whilst it might not be my full job title to have WordPress every single day, it is still very much a part of what I do.

    [00:06:35] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. What a, rich and interesting history you’ve had. We’ve met in person on a number of occasions, but it’s been a little while since we met up in person. But you came across my radar on the 1st of November because of a piece that you had written over on make.wordpress.org.

    I will link to it in the show notes and, it may well be a good idea, if you’re listening to this podcast and you are anywhere near a device, it might be a good idea to pause the podcast actually. Go and read the piece it’s called, now we have a sustainability channel in making WordPress Slack, what should we do?

    And the reason I’m asking you to potentially go and read that is because really it’s going to form the basis of everything that we are going to be talking about around the environment and so on. So tell us what was the concern? What was the primary motive for writing that piece?

    [00:07:25] Hannah Smith: So, the piece was written very much in collaboration with four others, so I want to say from the outset that whilst it was my face next to the post when you read it, I was the nominated person to publish it. It was very much a collaborative effort with four others.

    So with Nora, Nahuai, Pace, and Csaba, who are placed in different places across Europe. And, Nahuai and Nora, I knew from some workshops I’d run back in the spring, exploring the topic of digital sustainability. But we were chatting and we all felt that where was the action in WordPress on sustainability?

    We were kind of looking around and, I’m very involved in the wider community around digital sustainability. But I was looking around and I was like, I just don’t feel this in WordPress. It’s just not surfaced enough. It’s very niche and, we are really getting to a point where sustainability can’t be a niche concern.

    It has to be a concern for everybody, everywhere because what’s happening around us in terms of the changing climate, in terms of our lack of sustainable approaches, does affect every single person, whether they want to admit that or not. We are all impacted by it. Rich, poor, young, old, we’re all going to face these consequences.

    So we were chatting and Nora and Nahuai I were at WordCamp Europe this year, and Nora actually asked a question in, you know the Q and A that Josepha and Matt have? So Nora asked a question about sustainability and stood up. I mean more power to her. She stood up in front of the whole crowd and said, hey, sustainability. We really care about this, but there’s nothing much happening, and Matt and Josepha said, well, okay, look. The very first thing we can do is set up a channel in Slack. So maybe that will help, WordPress Slack. You know to give people a collaboration space and a meeting space.

    And they also said, well, and if you’ve got any ideas or specific proposals that you want to make, we are going to listen. The door is open, essentially. So Nora set this ball in motion really with her question. And then Josepha and Matt responded really well. And so since then, since the summer, a few of us have been sort of working, just informally, thinking, okay, well how do we capitalize upon this?

    WordPress leadership is saying we’re listening, or, we are happy to collaborate with you. But now what we need to do is to get the community together and to get the community, A, to know who each other are, and B, to acknowledge this is a topic and to talk about it, and discuss it, and bring knowledge and ideas into a space together. So this is why we ended up writing the post. And the post is very much saying, hey, WordPress community, look, we’ve got this channel, but you know, a channel isn’t going to solve our problems.

    It’s, it’s you. You and your ideas that are going to solve these problems or that are going to make progress. So, could we please get into a discussion about what people’s ideas are? So we’ve invited people to share their ideas and particularly any vision that they have. Or ideas that they have around what sustainability and WordPress might look like in the future.

    Because if we can’t imagine it, we’re not going to get there. And I think a lot of the narrative around climate change is very doom and gloom. It’s very pessimistic. It feels almost like we’re accepting that we’ve been defeated. opposite. It’s so the opposite. We have every opportunity and potential here to turn things around and change things. It is not yet too late. So we wanted to really bring everyone together and imagine these ideas together and then see where that leads us.

    [00:11:18] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That’s really helpful. You used the word sustainable a dozen times or more in, in that, last little section, and it occurs to me that there’s probably quite a few people listening who have some sort of conception of what we mean by sustainability, but I’m pretty sure that everybody’s conception of it will be slightly different to everybody else’s.

    What exactly are you meaning when you say sustainability in WordPress or sustainability surrounding WordPress? What are the areas that you are touching on? What are the points of concern that we need to have drawn to our attention?

    [00:11:54] Hannah Smith: Yeah, that’s a great question. You are absolutely right that most people will have slightly differing ideas of sustainability. Some people may even have a very narrow view of sustainability, which might be something called decarbonization. Which really relates around carbon emissions. But, Perhaps let me give a really sort of wide view of what sustainability is outside of the realms of tech or WordPress, and then we can kind of narrow in a bit and talk about how that relates then to tech or digital specifically, or WordPress specifically.

    So if we talk about sustainability or the word sustain, it means that we’re able to keep doing things into the long term. There’s this quote that’s often used. It’s about meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs, or the ability of the future generations to meet their needs. So at it’s most basic level, sustainability can mean that. To get a bit more specific about it, I draw on something called the donor economics framework.

    If anybody here is interested in a really holistic way of thinking about sustainability, that’s a bit more in depth, I really recommend this as a resource to have a look at. Very accessible. Don’t let the fact that it’s about economics or economics turn you away, make you think it’s not for you. It is for everybody. And the way that donor economics talks about sustainability, I really love this is, it talks about sustainability as having humanity at the center of the story.

    So sustainability is much more than us thinking about the environmental ecosystems. It’s about thinking about how humanity sits within the environment. So if you can imagine a simple donut shape with a hole in the middle. Essentially what you get there is two circles, one smaller one inside, a bigger one. That smaller circle, we might often think of something that they term as the social foundation. And the social foundation is a set of 12 things that, when you consider them all in relation to one another, define the things that makes us human, and defines the things that just allow us to survive as humans, but allows us to really thrive as humans.

    So it’s more than just thinking about food, water, shelter, clothing. It’s also thinking about those emotional needs that we have as well around peace and justice. Around meaningful connections with other people around access to education and opportunities. So I love to think about our social foundation as the center of the story of sustainability. Because humans are a part of this planet. And it is a very dangerous mindset, or a very dangerous kind of thing to get into, to think that the only way that we become more sustainable is by not being here. And that’s really not a good story to tell, and it’s not the right story to tell. We are part of the planet, and we can live within the boundaries of what the planet can provide for us.

    And that moves me onto the second circle, this outer circle. And donor economics talks about that as our ecological boundaries or our ecological ceiling. And that’s basically accepting that the planet has a finite amount of resources. There’s only so much wind that blows. There’s only so many raw materials in the ground. There’s only so much accessible water, drinkable water. There’s only so much land.

    It helps us understand that we have these boundaries in place. We have these limitations. So when we talk about sustainability, or when I’m talking personally talking about sustainability, I’m thinking about those concepts. I’m thinking about humanity being at the center of the planet. Being at the center of our concerns, but I’m also thinking that humanity has to live within these constraints that the world places upon us.

    And in donor economics, if you have that donut shaped circle, if I’m hoping everyone listening can picture it or maybe you’ve looked it up online. If you’ve got this kind of circle, what you have is, the way the donor economics talks about it is we talk about sustainability as being this sweet spot in the middle where we are meeting everybody’s needs to thrive. But we are doing that within the boundaries of the planet. And that it is absolutely possible that we can have nice things and that we can be happy, healthy, joyful humans, but that we can live within the means of our planet.

    So for me, sustainability is that broad concept. And I’m just going to stop there, Nathan, because I know we haven’t actually talked about this before and I’m curious to know, how that resonates with you, as a definition of sustainability or as a way of thinking about it.

    [00:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I fully understand where you are coming from. I guess the piece that I’m confronted with is that, I always think of, how to describe this. I very often think of conservation and I think about it in terms of we’ve got to do less things. We’ve got to drive the car less. We’ve got to consume less electricity, we’ve got to get on planes less. We’ve got to produce less.

    And so the environmental debate always, for me at least anyway, comes back to reducing what we’re doing and kind of admitting to ourselves that the aspirations that we seem to have as a species, to rampantly consume everything and believe that we are fully in charge of everything on the planet.

    It feels as if we need to put the breaks on and actually, rather than that, we need to go in reverse. We need to, like I said, produce less things, consume less things. It sounds as if you’ve got a slightly different philosophy there, which is we’ve just got to figure out how we can carry on the way we are. But with cleverer solutions so that the things that we create, the plane journeys that we go on, the cars that we drive. All of that’s still possible, but we need to figure out how the impact of that would be lessened.

    [00:18:28] Hannah Smith: Almost, yeah. That’s almost what I’m saying, but not quite. If we think about what we’re driving our cars for. What we are flying for. What are we doing these things for? It might be that the mechanism by which we create connection with one another or that we get from A to B, or that we see our family and friends, or that we have meaningful relationships with people.

    It might be that those things are done differently. And yeah, so it might mean that we reduce car use. We reduce airplane flights. But that doesn’t mean we don’t replace it with other things. Technology is amazing. I mean, look at, look at the internet. It’s absolutely incredible what digital technology enables us to do.

    So I think the story of sustainability, it’s very, very important to not get drawn into this narrative that we’ve all got to live like cave people, which is so often what people think being sustainable means. It means giving up all the things that bring us joy and bring us meaning in life.

    And actually, I don’t buy that at all. I think that that is the wrong way to look at sustainability. I actually think what living in a truly sustainable way means is reducing the things that don’t give us those joyful things. Don’t provide meaningful connection in our life, and replacing them with the things that do. And do you know what? What’s amazing is that the things that genuinely, meaningfully do improve our lives, are generally sustainable, at the same time. Like riding a bike, walking, exercising, spending less time on social media, perhaps doing more time crafting or reading a book. Those things do all actually add to our lives, add to our happiness, add to our, you know, meaning and purpose.

    So I think it’s a really important starting point just to say to the WordPress community, hey, look, being sustainable doesn’t mean we’re going to lose all these things that we love. In fact, we are going to lose the things that don’t service and replace them with better, better, more meaningful things.

    [00:20:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. One of the things that I find tricky is I don’t really equate my use of the internet with the environmental consequences that there are from my use of the internet. Before we hit record, I was talking to you, I described how the technology that I’m using, so I’ve got a computer in front of me, I have a mobile phone. Unless I actually apply thought, my default in a way, is that they are completely benign and harmless. Typically, if I’m using my mobile phone say, there’s not really any part of me which is consciously thinking, okay, for every minute that I spend on this phone, there’s a consequence to this. There’s an environmental impact. I’m consuming electricity. That phone needed to be charged, and the same would go for any device, any piece of technology, any website that I visit.

    Just not bridging that gap. Whereas other things, so for example, the driving of the car. I’m acutely aware of the consequences of that because there’s things actually coming out of the rear of that car through the exhaust system that I can detect. I can feel the harm from that.

    You know? There’s no way that if you told me to go and stand behind a car for 10 minutes and breathe in deeply. There’s no way that that’s going to be something that I wish to do. I can draw a, a line between the stuff that’s coming out the exhaust, and my health and lungs, I can completely understand that. Whereas the phone, like I said, is completely benign. I could do that for hours, and so, I do think it’s an interesting thing.

    I wonder if you sense that generally speaking. When you have these discussions and you are trying to encourage people to equate internet use, technology use, whatever it may be, with the consequences of that, I’m wondering if people are generally, they’re open to it, they understand it, they draw that line themselves immediately.

    Or is there a bit of, what, hang on a minute. I’ve, I’m going to have to apply some thought to this. What do you mean? How can my, how can my computer possibly be doing any harm?

    [00:22:53] Hannah Smith: oh yeah, it’s such a good point. I mean, I can speak from my own experience as someone that has always been really interested in the environment, and really conscious of sustainability, environmentalism. And it wasn’t until I went to WordCamp Europe, when it was in Berlin actually, and Jack Lenox was giving a talk and Jack Lenox’s talk was, are website’s killing the planet? Something along those lines.

    I had this like total mad aha moment where I was like, oh my God, right? Digital tech runs on electricity. Has to be built. All that stuff’s got to come from somewhere. So of course it has an impact. But it wasn’t until I heard Jack’s talk, and also around the same sort of time, I heard Whole Grain Digital talking as well, I put two and two together.

    So it’s funny, but once, as soon as someone told me, oh yeah, you are using electricity to run this stuff. And of course electricity is mostly coming from the burning of fossil fuels, and all this stuff has to be manufactured. So all the lithium and cobalt, gold and silver and all the stuff that’s in your phone all has to come from somewhere. And that’s really energy intensive and damaging to create, or extract.

    As soon as I was given that little push in the right direction, suddenly this whole cascade of implications unfolded in front of me, and I was like, oh, well, yeah obviously, now I see it. But I, like many people, I think just need to be given that little nudge. Really helps to hear someone say that explicitly. Hey, did you know that between, see if I can get the numbers right. 1.9 and 3.3% of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions arise from our use of digital tech.

    Did you know that that’s more than shipping and more than aviation? Did you know that that actually means that the internet becomes the world’s seventh biggest polluter is a country? When you start to hear those things, yeah, it dawns on you. And that’s certainly how I came into this space, or certainly how I kind of realized this for the first time.

    Maybe many people listening to what I’ve just said, the light bulbs have just flicked on as well and gone, oh right, yeah, of course, good point. It’s unseen, isn’t it, this pollution? To your point earlier, it’s all been abstracted away from us, so that we have clean, convenient lives. As you rightly say, you know, our phones are really sleek. Our laptops are really sleek. And that’s part of the service I suppose, that we’re being provided. We’re being given this convenience. We’re being given beautiful, well designed things. But that impact, unfortunately, is still very real at the moment. Maybe in time to come, we’ll get to a place where it’s not.

    We’ll have some new technologies that perhaps use the regenerative techniques, where we’re not extracting materials from the ground. Maybe we can start to grow them or find other ways to create them. But right now, yeah, that impact is real. Whoever came up with the term cloud really like clever, but from a sustainability angle, not helpful.

    [00:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: It’s about the most benign thing imaginable, isn’t it? It’s fluffy and, welcoming and, you know, they’re associated with the sun and all of that. Yeah, that’s interesting.

    [00:26:24] Hannah Smith: Yeah, and it’s just not true. Like actually it’s like a big diesel plume. To your point, actually the reality is 62% of the world’s energy, electricity comes from fossil fuel sources. And we can think about it as the internet is actually the world’s largest coal fired machine. When you start to have those pictures in your head, it does change your relationship to what you’re doing and what you have in front of you a bit I think.

    [00:26:51] Nathan Wrigley: And I guess that’s really the purpose of what it is that you are doing in the article that you wrote. Is you are, you’re keenly aware of this. It’s obviously something which is meaningful to you on a personal level. And you are, you’re really scouting out for ideas and suggestions and, for the community to gather around, and come up with what we can do.

    So, let’s lay out a few things in terms of WordPress. These are the things which just come into my mind as we’re sitting here talking to one another. I confess that there isn’t a great deal of backstory here. I’m just going to generate things as they come up into my mind.

    So the first thing is that our website’s dependent upon what is being presented to the end user. So, you know, if it’s a, if it’s a website, which is rich in large images. If it’s a website which is rich in video. If it’s a website which has huge amounts of JavaScript and CSS. We are pushing more bits over the wire. And so maybe there’s a piece there. Can we cut down the amount that WordPress needs to do, and needs to deliver?Would that have an impact?

    [00:28:00] Hannah Smith: Definitely.

    [00:28:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And then another thing which comes into my head is, at the end of the day when I finish with my computer, the last thing I do is I switch it off. I turn it off, and then when I need it again, I’ll switch it on and I’ll, whenever I’ve finished I turn it off again, so it’s on, off, on, off.

    What I’m trying to say is that it’s off more than It’s on. Significantly more. But our website hosting, let’s just call it that, wherever that might be, whatever system you are using. We need that to be on all the time because our websites need to be available all the time. That’s one of the points is something which is, you know, you don’t have to go to a website and be visited by a page which says, one moment, we’re just going to switch the computer on, and come back in a moment and everything will be ready to go.

    No, you want it to be ready immediately. And in fact, we’re being told all the time that the faster our webpage is being served up, the better it’s going to do in search engine rankings, which is almost like a holy grail. So everything needs to be quicker and everything needs to be more available.

    So there’s just a couple of pieces there really, which came to my head, the first one being that can we reduce the amount that WordPress has to serve up, and will that have a positive effect? And obviously that very much feels like a seesaw. You could argue that from both sides. But also the machines that our websites are running on, there’s probably quite a lot of conversations that we could have around there. The kind of things that hosting companies are doing to source the power and so on and so forth.

    [00:29:30] Hannah Smith: Yeah, I mean, it’s brilliant, isn’t it? You start to think about these things and you’ve hit upon two real, really key actionable things that we can look at within WordPress. So we’re talking at the moment about electricity and energy use, and I’m just going to sort put this into context and say, hey, don’t forget that electricity and energy use is just one aspect of sustainability. There is a little bit more to it than that.

    But I do think that when you are brand new to thinking about the impact of digital tech on sustainability, this is an absolutely awesome starting point. It’s very tangible and there’s quite a bit of research and tooling out there to help you. So I just want to kind of caveat and say, let’s deep dive into that for a little bit, awesome. But bear in mind, there’s more to think about.

    There is a very direct relationship between the amount of data that you send and the amount of CO2 emissions that that creates. So the more data to use your words, the more data, the more stuff you’re sending down the wire, the more pollution or the more energy that you’re using.

    And there’s a simple way to calculate this. For anyone that wants to get into this. If you know how much data you are sending, we can estimate how much electricity that is going to use to send that data from A to B. Whole load of assumptions that you’ll have to make in order to make that estimation.

    But there’s some models out there that you can use. You can have a look at the sustainable web design website. So if you know how much data you’ve got, you can figure out an estimation of how much electricity that would use to send from A to B. And then we can use something called carbon intensity data.

    And carbon intensity data allows us to understand how much CO2 emissions are created per unit of energy, or per unit of electricity that is created. So I mentioned to you that 62% of the worlds electricity is generated by fossil fuels. In different countries, and in different regions that will change. So I think Norway, for example, is 100% renewable energy.

    So depending on where you are in the world, you’ll have different carbon intensities to consider. But yeah, so essentially it can come down, a really good starting point is to think about performance and optimization, and think about how can I reduce the waste around this. There are dozens of reasons why we should be thinking about performance anyway.

    This is not a new ask of developers, or ask of technical people to think about performance. We have reasons around accessibility. We have reasons around cost. We also have reasons around SEO as well. The more performant and optimize something is, the better your SEO. And we also have things to think about in terms of people’s enjoyment of using said service, or said website.

    And we can add another one, another cracking good reason to think about this optimization and performance, and that is also the sustainability angle. So, I mean, really this stuff is just stacking up and stacking up to be like a no brainer. If you want to be a sustainable web developer, your first job is to get good at performance and optimization.

    [00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting, the whole performance thing, while you were talking about that, I was thinking about the fact that performance really can go in two directions. The performance could be gained by cutting out waste, but it can also be gained by using more resources.

    [00:33:05] Hannah Smith: Ha ha, yes, good shout.

    [00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: It is possible to simply say to yourself, I shall purchase more expensive hosting, which has got more CPUs and so on and so forth. And in that way, I cut out the need for me to make my website leaner, if you know what I mean. So, just to be clear, when you talk about performance, you really are talking about getting rid of the waste, considering whether that image needs to be that big or could it be smaller? Do I need to put that video on there? It’s more trimming things down as opposed to spending more money on a faster machine for example.

    [00:33:39] Hannah Smith: Interesting point. I’m really glad we’re having this conversation. Yes and no I would answer that question. 100% the yes part is definitely around the waste. Is around just not sending stuff we don’t need. Not having analytics collecting that we don’t need. Not generating data that we don’t need.

    The resources part is a really interesting one, because there’s a piece around maybe using our resources more wisely. So there can be arguments for perhaps having better hosting. Because if that better hosting, say you are serving a website across, you’ve got users all across the world visiting your website. Actually having a better hosting service that makes really good use of CDNs, content delivery networks, actually can have an impact on sustainability.

    Because if you are serving your data closer to the person that actually wants to use that data, you can save quite a bit of energy, electricity, because you’re not sending it from one side of the world to the other. And there is an electricity cost to doing that. Again, it’s not seen by us, but it’s real. It is there.

    So the service side, the hosting side of things. Something very specific you can do there is look for hosting companies that are using renewable energy, using renewable energy sources to power themselves. And I’m going to plug the Green Web Foundation where I’m working now.

    We have a really awesome data set, which we’ve been collecting for 10 years or so on hosting companies that are powered by renewables. That’s a very specific action you can take. But yeah, to your point that you can make something really performant by chucking loads of resources at it. Yeah, that’s not what we are talking about here when we are talking about sustainability. We are talking about speeding things up through the use of wise resources instead.

    [00:35:36] Nathan Wrigley: I know that time is pressing for you, so we’ll wrap up fairly shortly, but I just want to, just want to offer a few thoughts as well, and, the piece that I mentioned towards the beginning of the podcast where I said that, it’s very difficult I think for me, and I’m sure a lot of other people as well, to draw the line between the website and the impact on the environment, and I’m wondering if it might be that we need to be alerted to the consequences of our use of the internet.

    So just throwing out some ideas, which probably, may very well have no legs, but just some thoughts really. Would be interesting, for example, if in the WordPress backend we could see something which gave us a measure of what it was that our website was doing. So if it gave us a direct link to okay, every, every time somebody comes to this particular page, this is what you are sending to them, and that has this kind of consequence.

    Now, obviously, that’s much more complicated, as you’ve described, because it depends on the hosting that you’re using. It depends whether they’re close or far away. But just some sort of broad metrics so that we could understand what the consequence of the thing that we’re building is. So I don’t even know what that would look like. Maybe it would be some sort of graph or chart or just raw number that would give us some indication.

    And then also more broadly, just browsing the internet. If we could have this kind of information coming back to us. So, I don’t know, I’m thinking of like a browser extension or something like that, which would measure what it was that I was doing when I went around the internet, and then give me some kind of feedback for, okay, this week you consumed this much in terms of electricity or carbon that was produced as a result of your browsing the internet.

    Last week it was this, the week before it was this, so you know you’re going in the right direction. Just those kind of things. I’m just wondering if there are things afoot. Maybe tools that exist already, or projects that you know about that can help us to understand the consequences of what we are doing.

    [00:37:39] Hannah Smith: Definitely, and do you know what Nathan? These ideas absolutely have legs and these are exactly the kind of ideas that we are inviting people to come and share on our post with us. All of these suggestions, all of these ideas are relevant and very, very actionable, and have already been actioned in certain ways.

    So to your point about CO2, understanding CO2 emissions of websites, so there’s a fantastic tool called Website Carbon Calculator. I think the URL is websitecarbon.com. So you can go along to that and put any URL in, and immediately get a sense of how polluting that page is. And that is such an awesome tool to use with bosses or clients, who perhaps aren’t so interested in the nitty gritty technical detail, but want a number, or a statistic or a sense of how good or bad they’re doing.

    And the Website Carbon Calculator has a little bit of JavaScript code that you can embed in your site that will give you a reading of each page of how much CO2 that that page is polluting. Now I believe that there is a plugin for that as well, and I don’t know if that would give you the information in the back end of WordPress, but Website Carbon Calculator’s being developed by Whole Grain Digital. If you’re interested in WordPress sustainability, I mean, they’re really thought leaders in this space, so definitely worth checking them out.

    I had some conversations with Jenny Wong many years ago, and, and those of you that are in the UK WordPress community, you’ll probably know Jenny. I think most people do. And if you’re listening, Jenny, hello. Jenny and I exchanged some ideas around using Site Health, and actually building some of these ideas into Site Health. That section of the WordPress backend. It might be difficult to get that as a core contribution to begin with, but we could certainly look at making some plugins.

    There’s loads and loads of data out there that we could use to surface these emissions. And then to your point about browsers, yes. Actually at the Green Web Foundation, we’ve been talking quite a lot with the Firefox people, made by Mozilla. And there are some open issues in GitHub at the moment around integrating carbon emission readings and estimations into the Firefox browser.

    I don’t know off the top of my head whether the intention would be to track it in the way that you’ve talked, but you know how if you’re a developer, you, you might be familiar with the web dev tooling that we have, say within Firefox or Chrome. The idea is to create a separate tab in the performance section, to start to give you a reading within the browser as well.

    So there are all these things happening, and this is where I really want to invite people to come and join us. Please let us share these initiatives that are happening. If you’ve got some time and capacity and you’ve got some energy, and you want to take action, we desperately want people to come and join in, and make these things happen. So yeah, please share these ideas that you have.

    [00:40:49] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Yeah, that’s really, really interesting. Just before we wrap it up finally, it just occurs to me that we’re always looking for ways to, to have a competitive edge. If you are a freelancer or an agency, you’re always trying to figure out ways that you are different from your competition. And it just strikes me that maybe this, maybe this could be one of those ways. You are one of the developers who actually gives this some thought. And it may very well be that there are a whole load of clients out there for whom this would be a very important metric when making hiring decisions, so.

    [00:41:24] Hannah Smith: Such a good point. As a freelance WordPress developer, uh, you know, people were, were starting to know me as someone who knew about digital sustainability and who could build sustainable WordPress sites, you know, efficient WordPress sites. And the demand was mad. I couldn’t keep up with it. I was constantly being like, oh, I need more people to recommend this work to. So yeah, I think this is a really strong selling point, and it makes you feel good as well, to know that you’re doing the best you can, you’re doing the right things.

    [00:41:55] Nathan Wrigley: Hannah, just as a very final thing. If people have been interested in this, I will obviously link to the post in the show notes. You can check those out on wptavern.com, but if they want to contact you, are you available? And if so, where should we do that? What’s the best way to reach out to you?

    [00:42:12] Hannah Smith: Yeah, well, I mean, I would love to chat with anyone that’s interested in bouncing some ideas around, or is interested in finding out more. The best way to get hold of me is through the Green Web Foundation, so hannah@thegreenwebfoundation.org, or if you’re in make WordPress you can also drop me a line. You’ll see me lurking around in the sustainability channel quite a lot in the make WordPress Slack space. You can drop me a line there too.

    [00:42:38] Nathan Wrigley: Hannah Smith, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast.

    [00:42:41] Hannah Smith: Oh, thank you Nathan. Thank you for making time for this today. I really appreciate it.

    On the podcast today, we have Hannah Smith.

    Hannah is the Operations and Training Manager for the Green Web Foundation and founder of the Let’s Green The Web campaign. She’s also co-founder of Green Tech South West.

    Her background is in Computer Science. She previously worked as a freelance WordPress developer, and also for the Environment Agency, where she managed large business change projects.

    It’s pretty easy to forget that the device that you’re reading this post on is consuming power. We plug things in or charge them up, and they just work. They are sleek and sterile. No pollution comes out of the device directly. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that many of us never make the connection between our use of technology and the impact this has on the environment.

    Enter Hannah Smith. She’s been thinking about this for years and is on the podcast today to highlight the issue, and hopefully get your ideas about what users of WordPress can do to make sure that the websites we create are having the smallest impact possible.

    Her approach is not that we need to cease and desist using our technology. Rather, it’s about coming up with new and innovative ways that we can reduce the impact that we have.

    As creators of websites, there are a whole raft of options available to us. Reducing the size of our images. Inspecting the HTML to remove bloat. Choosing hosting options that source renewable energy.

    With this in mind, Hannah and others have been working on a sustainability related blog post which has been published on the Make WordPress site this week.

    This post is intended to trigger meaningful and open discussion in the global WordPress community about the topic of sustainability. She really wants to encourage others to weigh into this public conversation with their own thoughts, so we can build on what is already happening to make WordPress more sustainable.

    It’s a fascinating and thought-provoking topic.

    Useful links.

    The Green Web Foundation website

    #Let’sGreenTheWeb Campaign

    Wholegrain Digital website

    Sustainable Web Design website

    Website Carbon Calculator