EDITS.WS

Category: wptavern.com

  • Performance Lab Plugin to Add New Experimental SQLite Integration Module in Upcoming 1.8.0 Release

    WordPress’ Performance Team contributors have merged a new experimental SQLite integration module that is on track to be included in the upcoming version 1.8.0 of the Performance Lab plugin. (This is the plugin that contains a collection of feature plugins with performance-related modules the team hopes to land in WordPress core.) The new module allows the adventurous to test the new SQLite implementation, with the understanding that the overall user experience will still be rough.

    In a proposal titled Let’s make WordPress officially support SQLite, Yoast-sponsored core contributor Ari Stathopoulos contends that less complex sites (small to medium sites and blogs) don’t necessarily benefit from the requirement of using WordPress’ standard MySQL database:

    On the lower end of the spectrum, there are small and simple sites. These are numerous and consist of all the blogs, company pages, and sites that don’t have thousands of users or thousands of posts, etc. These websites don’t always need the complexities of a MySQL/MariaDB database. The requirement of a dedicated MySQL server increases their hosting cost and the complexity of installation. On lower-end servers, it also decreases performance since the same “box” needs to cater to both a PHP and a MySQL/MariaDB server.

    In an ideal world, users could select their database type during installation. Stathopoulos said this would require WordPress to have a database abstraction layer, which other platforms like Drupal have had more 10+ years.

    “Building a database abstraction layer for WordPress would be a colossal task – though it might be one that, at some point in the future, we may have to undertake to ensure the project’s continued evolution and longevity,” he said.

    As an alternative, Stathopoulos sees SQLite as a “perfect fit” and cited the benefits of using it for smaller websites:

    • It is the most widely used database worldwide
    • It is cross-platform and can run on any device
    • It is included by default on all PHP installations (unless explicitly disabled)
    • WordPress’s minimum requirements would be a simple PHP server, without the need for a separate database server. 
    • SQLite support enables lower hosting costs, decreases energy consumption, and lowers performance costs on lower-end servers.

    This new SQLite integration module is based on the wp-db-sqlite plugin, a SQLite database driver drop-in that is also used by the WordPress Sandbox project, as WASM doesn’t support MySQL. The wp-db-sqlite plugin was based on the original work of Kojima Toshiyasu in his eight-year-old SQLite Integration plugin, which is no longer available for download on WordPress.org. Stathopoulos said these solutions have evolved over the years, have been thoroughly tested, and proven to work seamlessly, although they are not well known among users.

    Matt Mullenweg commented in support of the proposal so the implementation moving into the Performance Lab plugin may have a decent shot at landing in core someday in the future. Most participants in the discussion on the proposal were supportive of the idea but also discussed a few of the potential drawbacks. These include poorer support for things like multi-author editing and search.

    “MySQL is and should continue to be the default because if you have aspirations to be the next big thing, then MySQL can scale better,” Stathopoulos said.” If on the other hand you just want a blog, a company site with your about page and a contact form to have an online presence, or any type of small site (which is arguably the majority of sites on WordPress) then SQLite is all you’ll ever need and it will perform a lot better.”

    A few participants in the discussion also bristled at the controversial, religious code of ethics SQLite holds for its contributors. Stathopoulos sees it as a non-issue because the project is open source and the technology is widely used.

    “Its popularity speaks volumes regarding what it can do and where it can be used,” he said in response to criticism of the idea of tying WordPress to a project with an objectionable code of ethics.

    If you have used WordPress from the early days, you have witnessed it become more complicated over the years. Discussions around the idea of a “WordPress Lite” have popped up every few years, but the platform’s specific selection of features seems to have been a major factor in WordPress powering 43% of the web (according to W3Techs). NerdPress founder Andrew Wilder suggested that a SQLite implementation might benefit from being branded as “WordPress Lite.”

    “Reading the comments and potential issues above, if this does move forward, perhaps the way to implement this in a way that makes sense to users would be to brand it simultaneously as ‘WordPress Lite,’” Wilder said. “So if a site is using SQLite, there could be features that are simply no longer available (such as multiple authors, or perhaps plugins that have certain database requirements can’t be installed).”

    Those who are interested in testing the new SQLite integration module should be able to test drive it next week. Google-sponsored Performance Team contributor Felix Arntz gave a few notes on testing in yesterday’s team meeting:

    For the SQLite implementation, other than the SQLite DB working correctly by itself, another crucial aspect to test is the user experience on module activation. You’ll get an entirely new database, but we’ve added some logic to make the transition as seamless as possible: On a typical WordPress setup, you should not need to reinstall WordPress yourself when you enable the module, and you shouldn’t even be needed to log in again.

    Basically the PR has logic to install WordPress automatically in the new database, using the same basic setup data that is present in the regular database.

    Just keep in mind that it is by no means a migration. It’s only the install you’ll get; no content will be migrated.

    The 1.8.0 release of the Performance Lab plugin is expected on Monday, December 19, and is set to include the new module.

  • #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

  • Mailchimp for WordPress Plugin for Sale in the Ballpark of €1.6M

    Danny van Kooten, creator of the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin, has indicated that he is interested in selling his plugin for somewhere in the ballpark of €1.6M. It is the most popular Mailchimp solution for WordPress, although it is “unofficial” in that it is not developed by or affiliated with Mailchimp in any way. It has more than 2 million active installs and has been downloaded more than 42 million times.

    In a comment on a popular Hacker News post that asks, “What is the best income stream you have created till date?” van Kooten dropped the hint that he is willing to sell the nearly ten-year-old plugin:

    It’s definitely not my passion but in 2013 I built a WordPress plugin around the API of a popular newsletter service and it’s been paying my bills ever since.

    Still going strong at €36K per month excluding VAT.

    There was (and still is) a huge market where non-technical people are looking for a GUI around something a programmer would find very simple (and usually too boring to work on). More so if the tech surrounding it is not particularly sexy, as is the case for WordPress and PHP.

    Ps. In case anyone is reading this, I am open to selling. I spent about 4 hours a week on it and the rest is handled by 2 freelance people costing about €1K / month each. Contact me for details if interested and willing to pay in the ballpark of €1.6M.

    van Kooten developed Mailchimp for WordPress when he was hospitalized in Vietnam due to acute appendicitis with extra time on his hands during his recovery. He identifies himself as an “accidental entrepreneur” in his Hacker News bio. In 2021, he was featured in Wired for his efforts in reducing his carbon output as a plugin developer. He refactored the plugin to send 20kb less data, and, due to its large user base, he estimates these changes reduced the world’s monthly CO2 output by 59,000 kilograms, which Wired estimated is “roughly the equivalent to flying from New York to Amsterdam and back 85 times.”

    Mailchimp for WordPress has commercial upgrades ranging from $59 – $149 per year, and 1% of the plugin’s revenue goes towards environmental projects.

    Although Mailchimp recommends WordPress.com’s “Mailchimp block” as the official WordPress integration (also available in Jetpack 7.1+), van Kooten’s plugin is far more flexible. Mailchimp for WordPress integrates with other popular plugins like WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms 3, BuddyPress, MemberPress, and Events Manager, allowing visitors to subscribe via the checkout or comments form.

    Several commenters on van Kooten’s Hacker News response indicated interest in his offer for sale. His comment offers a a rare, transparent look into a popular plugin’s revenue and potential sale price, as most companies that acquire WordPress plugins are almost never willing to reveal how much they paid for them. As Substack moves to add compatibility for Ghost themes and other third-parties, and newsletters become even more critical with people leaving Twitter, it will be interesting to see more movement in the newsletter support space. van Kooten may be setting out at just the right time to find a buyer for Mailchimp for WordPress.

  • Gutenberg 14.7 Introduces Color Coding for Template Parts and Reusable Blocks, Adds Media Tab to Inserter

    Sometimes Gutenberg introduces features that you never knew you needed. Such is the case with the new color coding system in the Site Editor. The latest 14.7 release adds color to template parts and reusable blocks in the list view, block toolbar, and block selection outlines. The colorization is intended to help users differentiate between the different block types as they edit their designs.

    video source: Gutenberg PR #32163

    Another UI enhancement in version 14.7 is a new, experimental split control for block settings. It splits the block inspector sidebar to separate the settings controls from the appearance controls, giving the appearance side the same half-moon icon used for styles in the Site Editor. The intention is to make it easier to manage blocks with many controls, such as Group or Navigation blocks, that would end up having the settings scrolling down the page.

    image source: Gutenberg 14.7 release post

    The split control enhancement isn’t set in stone yet, as it must be enabled as an experimental feature in the Gutenberg > Experiments admin menu. It seems helpful but could prove to be more confusing for users, so further testing is needed before it moves out of experiments.

    The inserter is getting a major change in 14.7 with the addition of a Media tab, making it faster to add images, video, and audio. Users can select the new tab and select a media type to see the ten most recent items. There’s also an “Open Media Library” button at the bottom of the panel.

    Other notable updates in 14.7 include the following:

    • Page List block can now expand inside the List View to see the hierarchy of pages (45776)
    • Layout controls added to children of flex layout blocks (width for row and height for stack are now available for child Row and Stack blocks) (45364)
    • Significant load time performance improvements from caching the results of querying settings from theme.json. (45372)

    Check out the changelog to get a more detailed look at the dozens of improvements and bug fixes included in 14.7.

  • WooCommerce Blocks 9.1.0 Introduces Products Block in Beta

    WooCommerce Blocks version 9.10 was released today, hitting a major milestone for the development of its new Products Block. The plugin serves as a place to iterate and test new blocks, and this release introduces the new Product Query-powered Products block in beta.

    In this first iteration, users can arrange products by popular presets and control the layout in the list/grid.

    The new Products block is based on the core Query Loop block. WooCommerce Blocks contributors are aiming to replace all of the plugin’s current product-displaying blocks with this one.

    “This new block should be flexible enough to reproduce all of the use-cases currently covered by existing blocks (e.g. showing all products, showing only new products, or products on sale, etc.), while also being filterable via dedicated filter blocks and compatible with FSE templates (i.e. it should replace the placeholders we currently use in archive templates),” Automattic-sponsored WooCommerce contributor Marco Lucio Giannotta said in the ticket proposing the new Products block.

    The first iteration still requires some polishing but it’s meeting the basic objectives for allowing users to display and customize products using the new query-based block.

    Version 9.1.0 also unveils three new “product-adjacent” patterns. These are patterns that don’t use WooCommerce store data but rather focus on presentation. They include the following patterns:

    • “WooCommerce Alternating Image and Text” block pattern. (7827)
    • “WooCommerce Product Hero 2 Column 2 Row” block pattern. (7814)
    • “Just Arrived Full Hero”  block pattern (7812)

    WooCommerce Blocks contributors are also working on patterns that connect to store data and will be releasing new patterns soon. Other notable additions in this release include support for the alignment setting in the Add to Cart Button and Product Rating elements.

  • New WordPress Sandbox Project Demos: Test-Drive Themes and Plugins in the Browser

    WordPress Sandbox, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser without a PHP server, has been chugging along steadily since Automattic-sponsored core contributor Adam Zieliński introduced it earlier this year in September.

    ZieliÅ„ski published three new updates to Twitter this week, demonstrating the project’s potential to provide an in-browser IDE for plugin development along with a quick way to spin up a test environment for themes and plugins.

    In the first example, he shows how the project could be used to test-drive themes from WordPress’ Themes Directory right in the browser. Clicking the demo URL will launch a site with the Pendant theme active, but the theme can be changed to another from the directory by appending a different theme name to the end of the URL. All your changes made on the demo are private and disappear after a page refresh. With a few improvements, this could be transformative for previewing themes on WordPress.org.

    ZieliÅ„ski also showed WordPress Sandbox’s potential for test-driving plugins directly in the browser. The example uses CoBlocks but can be changed to any other plugin from the directory by replacing the plugin name. Having this available to WordPress users would greatly speed up the plugin selection process in cases where it’s not clear if a plugin will do what you hope it will do. It would also be handy if you could append multiple plugin slugs to the URL to install more than one.

    The most recent demo is a video showing how the project can be used to create an in-browser IDE for plugin development, where changes are displayed live.

    For more examples of WordPress Sandbox’s capabilities, check out the quick showcase ZieliÅ„ski built and play around with a live in-browser WordPress instance to see the site updated instantly as you code.

  • Course: A New Free Block Theme Compatible with Sensei LMS

    Sensei LMS, Automattic’s teaching and learning management plugin, has released a new free block theme called Course. In February 2022, version 4.0 of the plugin introduced support for full-site editing with its bundled “Learning Mode” theme. Course features a new bold design made to be customized in the Site Editor.

    Although Sensei works with neaerly any WordPress theme, the plugin looks its best with themes designed specifically for Sensei compatibility. Course includes styles for Sensei functionality to perfectly display course lists, sales pages, and the “Learning Mode” course templates. It integrates with the free Sensei LMS plugin as well as the pro version. Sensei’s new Course List block will also inherit all the theme’s styles seamlessly.

    If green is not your jam, Course includes four style variations suitable as a starting point with blue, dark, and gold as the accent colors and multiple font combinations.

    In addition to the various styles, Course brings all the power of the Site Editor for customizing for Sensei templates, as seen in the Lesson template below.

    Although Course is ideal for website owners who are selling courses, the theme is also flexible to be used without Sensei for other purposes like blogging, coaching, and small businesses. Course isn’t easy to find if you’re hunting for block themes, as it doesn’t seem to be tagged as a block theme on WordPress.org. It’s free to download in the official Themes Directory or via the Sensei LMS website.

  • The Block Editor Is Coming to WordPress’ Support Forums

    The block editor was introduced to WordPress in 2018 and has matured into a more user-friendly tool for expression over the past four years. WordPress.org’s Meta Team is now experimenting with how they can bring the block editor into the support forums. That they are even considering this is a testament to how far the block editor has come, as the support forums provide a critical lifeline for WordPress users who are struggling with their websites and wouldn’t benefit from adopting a buggy editor.

    “The support forums have a long history in WordPress,” Automattic-sponsored contributor Alvaro Gómez said. “So much so that the current forum editor predates TinyMCE. By introducing blocks, the support forum will make use of the modern WordPress editor to improve user experience. Users will be able to easily insert links, share code or embed screenshots. Using Blocks will also enable new possibilities, such as using patterns for common responses to allow for faster answers.”

    Due to the technical difficulty of how the forums currently work, the block editor would need to be rolled out to all users on all forums, precluding the possibility of rolling it out on a per-user, per-language, or per-forum basis.

    In a ticket opened six days ago, Meta contributors discussed bringing the block editor to the support forums using the Blocks Everywhere plugin by Automattic. This plugin switches the default WordPress editor for comments, bbPress, BuddyPress, and admin moderation to use Gutenberg, giving users access to blocks. Instead of bundling Gutenberg, it side-loads the editor from WordPress.

    The Meta and Support teams intend to start with just four blocks available to forum users: paragraph, list, quote, and code.

    Gómez shared a few GIFs from a test site, demonstrating a user responding on a thread using the block editor:

    Another item on the roadmap is creating an “add via URL” image block that would allow users to embed from various image hosting services.

    A live testing site is available at https://test.wordpress.org/support/ and anyone who wants to join in the testing can leave a comment on the announcement post. Bugs can be filed on the meta trac ticket for the improvement to the forums. The Meta and Support teams are looking for feedback before Monday, December 12.

  • #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

  • Google Rolls Out December 2022 “Helpful Content” Update

    Google is in the process of rolling out its December 2022 “helpful content” system update, which started on the 5th and is becoming more visible in search results. The company estimates it will take approximately two weeks to fully roll out.

    The helpful content system generates a signal that is used by Google’s automated ranking systems to provide people with what it deems to be more original and helpful content “written by people, for people” in search results. This particular update improves the system’s classifier and works across content in all languages.

    The system was designed to reward content where Google determines that visitors have had a satisfying experience and, conversely, where visitors do not find what they are looking for, the content will not perform as well. This is distilled into a site-wide signal where Google’s systems automatically identify “content that seems to have little value, low-added value or is otherwise not particularly helpful to those doing searches.”

    If Google finds relatively high amounts of unhelpful content on a site, the rest of the site’s content is not as likely to perform well in Search. With this application of the system, unhelpful content is like a poison for the rest of the website. Google said removing it could boost the rankings for the rest of the site’s content. It can take months for Google to reclassify a site’s content as helpful after unhelpful content has been removed.

    Google published more information on how the classifier works and what it means for rankings:

    This classifier process is entirely automated, using a machine-learning model. It works globally across all languages. It is not a manual action nor a spam action. Instead, it’s just one of many signals Google evaluates to rank content.

    This means that some people-first content on sites classified as having unhelpful content could still rank well, if there are other signals identifying that people-first content as helpful and relevant to a query. The signal is also weighted; sites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect.

    This is the first major update to helpful content since August 2022. At that time Google encouraged site owners to focus on creating “people-first content,” as opposed to search engine-first content. Site owners are encouraged to reference Google’s guide to “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content,” which includes dozens of questions for evaluating whether content will be deemed helpful or not.