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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So stay tuned for that.

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

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

Do you think that worked out great for everyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rogier Lankhorst: Absolutely. Yeah.

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

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

How do you handle that for a free plugin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So stay tuned for more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

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

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

Hello, Damon. How are you?

Damon Cook: Great. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: With 6. 3?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Like what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damon, can you tell us about WP Playground?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damon Cook: Definitely.

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

Doc Pop: Yeah?

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

Doc Pop: Yeah.

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Mm hmm.

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

Doc Pop: Yeah.

Mike Davey: Don’t quote me on that.

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

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

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

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

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

Damon Cook: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damon Cook: Yeah. 24th. Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Mm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Mmm-hmm. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: What year was that? 

Viola Gruner: It was last year. 

Doc Pop: San Diego?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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