Tag: anniversary

Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the 20th anniversary of WordPress.

Today is a bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s the second of two episodes all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft Tammie Lister and David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

They cover a lot of ground, and it’s fascinating to hear their WordPress stories from the past two decades.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you David Bisset, Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft and Tammie Lister.

David Bisset: We have so much to talk about. We have 20 years of WordPress. We gotta condense in the next 60 or so minutes. Um, for those listening or, um, heaven and forbid if we can use AI to clean up my face. We will be putting this on YouTube maybe hopefully soon. Uh, for video perhaps. We’ll have to figure that out.

I only promise these people audio broadcast, so I have to see if I have to have them sign another contract. My name is David Bisset. Um, I have been talking to people on the 20th anniversary of WordPress, and I’ve been asking ’em a bunch of different questions, and today we have four more interesting people from the WordPress community and me to talk about some particular th and don’t worry, the, the, the, the humor gets self-deprecating, but it goes up from there.
The next 90 minutes, you know, it’s gonna be fantastic. I have four people here that are fantastic contr, uh, contributors and representatives of the WordPress community. Um, I’m gonna let them introduce themselves and then we’re gonna start getting into some particular areas of WordPress history that I think they’re gonna love to share some memories, and hopefully you can relate.
The first is Mihir. Hello Mihir. How you doing?

Meher Bala: Hey everyone. Hi. Uh, my name is me. I’m from Mumbai, India. Uh, I’m a front end developer and a codeable expert. I’ve been using WordPress since last 10 years.

David Bisset: Oh, good. I thought you were gonna say last week. No. All right. 10 years. Wow. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Meher Bala: I don’t know.
I think it’s more than 10 years because I quit my normal nine to five job, eight, eight years back, so it has to be more than that. Just giving 10 plus years.

David Bisset: That’s okay. It’s okay to round.

Meher Bala: I joined the community quite late because I didn’t know there was a community existing, especially my local and then the global.
So it’s been fun from the time I joined.

David Bisset: You’re not going anywhere, are you? You sound like this is Oh, I’m fine. I’m still up on Okay. It sounds like you’re about to send off here and I don’t want this to be that type of podcast. All right.

Meher Bala: No, no, definitely no. All right. I’m here for sure.

David Bisset: Okay, well good. It’s glad to have you. Thank you very much for, uh, coming. Have we ever met before?

Meher Bala: No, I have not met you. I’ve seen all your tweets. I love your

David Bisset: Okay. We can stop there. Alright, we, Robert, Robert, uh, you’re up next?

Robert Windisch: Yeah. I take over before, uh, David like sings in under the screen.

David Bisset: Quickly, quickly, Robert.

Robert Windisch: So yeah. My name is Robert. I am, um, uh, c o of Insight at WordPress agency. I’m in WordPress since 1.52. So for me it’s very e very easy. I’m so old. I can name the release I came in, which was in 2005. Um, and, and people go like, no, you were older. No, no, no, no, no. I’m a late bloomer. Like, I came in like two years already when everybody, when the, the server were already set up, the, the forums was there and I just came in, swooped up and was like, Hey, is can I help with developer stuff? And they got, and the community, German community was like, you can develop here a server admin access. So I just, uh, um, grab a hammer and then like cleaning pipes in the WordPress server community.

David Bisset: All right. Well, good, good to have you on board, Robert. All right, Tammie. Hello. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So I am Tammie. Uh, I’ve. Uh, I had to check how long, which was quite a thing apparently. Um, according to my profile, 2006. Mm-hmm. Uh, I think I, I came because I was torturing a cms, like everybody back in the day, and someone showed me that there was a better way with WordPress.
Um, I think I might have been a bit before that because I was kind of doing it. Um, so that was on wordpress.org and themes brought me to WordPress. So, and since then I’ve been, uh, doing various core contributions. Um, and that’s me.

David Bisset: Yeah. Well, well, if anybody’s been word WordPress, any measure of time, I have seen you in some way, shape, or form.
Ah, Simon, bring it home. Hi. Bring it home.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Hi, I’m Simon. I started using WordPress in 2008, exactly 15 years ago. Um, I started with like, Easy front end development stuff. Worked my way a bit to the back end and at some point graduated from developing stuff myself. And now I am a product owner at Group One. Um, and I spent like the last 10 years organizing meetups and, and wood camps and stuff like that. So I really love that part of our community. Um, and I’m looking forward to at least the next 10 years of that.

David Bisset: Oh good. You, you’re okay. Well exercise and eat, eat a good diet and we’ll see. Uh, well thank you all and again, I’m David, if you’ve probably already know. Um, I work, uh, I’m employed at Awesome Automotive. I run a project called WP r WP Charitable or Charitables, the products for non-for-profit organizations. It’s been a recently acquired and I’m a project manager there. I’ve been, uh, I’ve experienced with, uh, work camps. I’ve been. With Word Camp Miami started in 2008, and I think I was around and since, um, WordPress 1.5, whenever that was. Um, that came out with, with I think, uh, themes and pages and that sort of thing. So I’ve been with, with WordPress for a while. This is not gonna be about me today. This is because I’ve talked enough in the past episodes, um, of that. So I want, I want to feel, um, we’re gonna go around. We’re gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get your picks in terms of the categories we’ve selected, but this is an open conversation. So as soon as the, the initial person gets their, gets their words out of their mouth, you’re feel free to have a discussion and I’ll, uh, I’ll poke up accordingly. So, Mihir, um, Let’s start with you. Uh, let’s talk about, one of the things that we wanted to, wanted to talk, and this is gonna be a little bit different than if you’re, if you’re listening right now, you’ve listened to the others. These are slightly different topics and categories I wanted to touch on here, cuz these, cuz I wanted to get some, there’s so much to cover for WordPress’s. 20th, 20th anniversary in 20 years. There’s so much to cover. So I wanted to make sure we, we, on some of the shows and some of the people I talked to, we, we kind of varied our discussion points.

So first thing we wanted to cover was a memorable design or refresh in WordPress history. Now, some people ask me, well, does this mean this? And does this mean that, um, does this mean project or does this mean that I, when I ask these questions, they’re open for interpretation. So I am not looking, I am looking for something within a scope. But wherever you read that question, you can go from there. So what Mihir, what was your. Memorable design or refresh and WordPress history?

Meher Bala: Uh, my memorable was 1.3. Uh, one was having a multisite built in the co. Mm-hmm. And one was a 20, uh, 10th heme, which was most stylish, more simple and very readable to normal users who, you know, what, just wanna run the WordPress as a blog because blogging had just begun and everyone was using WordPress. So for me it was, 3.0.

David Bisset: Yeah. Uh, I was a big multi-site fan back in the day, and I remember he had to download two versions of WordPress. Yes. Uh, and that was, and that’s, but that was, um, and see that was the, what was the theme again? What was the year 2010?

Meher Bala: 2010 was it? Uh, 2010 was a theme. The year was, uh, 2010.

David Bisset: Right. That makes sense. I was trying to, I was trying to pull up what it looked like, cuz I’m drawing a blank. Remember we were talking about, um,

Meher Bala: it’s the white banner on top.

David Bisset: Oh, there it is. Yeah. I remem Oh yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. That was with the trees in the road. Yes. Is the default picture. Yeah. And it’s kind of hard to describe audibly, but if you just do WordPress 10,000 theme in Google images, you get all the clones appearing and there is some, there was a little bit of styling there, but it was mostly what blogs, what the typical stylish, simple blogs were back then. It was like a large hero image or a large full width image. And then you had your two columns, right?

Meher Bala: Yes. It was something new for a lot of people.

David Bisset: Well before that, not too much before that. I don’t know if there was another word. I, I forget when WordPress year theme started, was this the first one?

Tammie Lister: That was the first default theme? That was the first, that was second one. No, that was the first official default theme. Mr.

Simon Kraft: Well, there was Kubrick before that.

David Bisset: No, I see. Dang. I lost a bet. Years. Yeah, because yeah, I was, I, I should have said that’s the first default theme that was named after years because we had Kubrick for like four or five years before that. Oh yeah. So this is kind of memorable because this

Tammie Lister: is the first default, the one that started the default years
David Bisset: because we got so sick and tired of looking at that, uh, Corick theme. No, I mean, it was nice and pretty, but I mean, it’s like my kids, I can only look at ’em so much before I need something new, new, new to glance at.
So, but yeah, it was perfect. But, alright, so I think that’s pretty memorable. Nice. Round number 3.0, multi-site, no more Kubrick, first year theme. I agree. That’s a pretty good design moment in WordPress history. Um, let’s, uh, so Robert, what’s your, yeah, what’s your, what’s your big, uh, design moment that you wanna share?

Robert Windisch: So, so first, Mihir taking multisite from me, like, uh, we have a conversation next, next word camp like, and from me by the way.

David Bisset: So is that your, was that gonna be your pick?

Robert Windisch: No. Yeah. Uh, I’m the multi side person. Yes.

David Bisset: Oh. Oh, see, we already have our first

Meher Bala: right after three, so.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that’s totally, it’s, it’s, you, you are the first one. Um, and I am, I shying away from other things because I want, I know Tammie wants to, wants to mention that that one thing that end ends with a number, probably this, the design refreshed, but like, I, I give Tammie the, um, the, oh, no. Okay. I can take it. I can take it. Okay.

David Bisset: See, you try to, you try to be a nice human being. Well, well,

Robert Windisch: yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because like, I, I’m the second one, so, um, but I have, like, you are welcome to that one. Yeah. But that’s my, would be my second pick. So, um, so I would, with the, with the biggest like, design, uh, um, like seismic shift from like, uh, from, from the, from the feeling was when the, when the menu went from the top to the left. Like that. That was like that. I have no idea when this was. Like, I’m very bad. Right? Like it was eight ago.

David Bisset: Menu went from the top. You mean the admin making

Robert Windisch: the WordPress menu was in the top third

David Bisset: one? Yes, it was. Cuz I remember in one five it was, but I, I can’t, I can’t remember now. You’re gonna have to make me look things up.

Robert Windisch: I, I would guess, but I’ve, I’ve, I’m bad with like, because it’s, so we’re currently talking about like between like which dinosaur were alive when this happens. So that’s why it’s, it’s so, it’s so far off. And I will simply say like, uh, the biggest, like design wise for the future, for the user interface was really when the, when the top menu, which was not like, it could not scale because you had, uh, determined like link in the menu. We experienced that in the WordPress org menu also that we have a problem with, with link there. So, so that was for me, like a, a, a big, um, like design visible decision that, um, was, was made and then, Like, it’s now the current, the current way of the WordPress backend.

David Bisset: Okay. For now, I’ll, we’ll, I’ll, I’ll guess that it was around 2.0 cuz I remember it being in one five and it was pretty, and I started using one five, but very quickly after I started using it. Like, I don’t remember the top stuff match for very long, so I mean, I’ll be, I’ll be Googling to fill that in, but, okay. Well, we’re gonna, we’re, we’re gonna put 2.0 as a placeholder, but That’s right. It’s, and just fortunately, I mean, we think the sidebar is a bit of a mess today. Although the stuff that we had, just imagine if it was a top-down navigation menu in the admin.

Robert Windisch: Yeah. All the, all the, uh, like upsell things now in the top menu bar, that would be like, lovely. What would it be?

David Bisset: Why, how would that work? You, we all the plugin authors have to add like a second navigation, second dropdown. It’s like a mega menu.

Simon Kraft: We just, we’ll just like break and add another line, and you have a huge block on top of every Diamond page.

David Bisset: Tammie’s miming all of the facial expressions as we’re talking here. That’s fine. All right, okay, well, Tammie, now it’s your turn. Robert, I’m gonna get back to you on a version number on that exactly, because

Meher Bala: I think version number’s, uh, 2014.

David Bisset: Okay. That’s a year. That’s close. That we’re, we’re, we’re getting closer now. So 2014 is the next clue. 2014, the menu came inside. So that’s four years after the 2010 theme. I know I can do math, but I mean, that would mean it would be greater than WordPress.

Robert Windisch: No, no, no, no. The the menu, the, the, the, the, it was was already decide when the, when the other thing that I want to mention later, uh, um, come, come.

David Bisset: No, don’t ruin it. Don’t worry, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. All I know is that I was. Yeah, all I know is that, um, there’s probably dirt younger than the version number that we’re gonna find, but anyway. All right, Tammie, time, time to go from miming to audio and sharing your, uh, the biggest or most memorable design moment. And this should be right up your alley

Tammie Lister: 2005 and it’s Kubrick. And the reason is, if you speak to most people that got their visuals or, or some front end work in WebPress, uh, have been around for a while, they got their start because of Kubrick. That was one of the themes that got them into it. Or they started tinkering around with themes. Um, it was one of those themes that you like cut your teeth on, you learnt with, so that, I know we were kinda saying it was around for a while, but honestly it’s what. Most of us learn how to theme from. So for me, I think it’s the most memorable design. Um, mainly for cuz of the gradient. If you think of Kubrick, you see the gradient. So that’s the one for me. It’s gotta be Kubrick.

David Bisset: Well, for me personally, I may have mentioned this on another episode, um, but Kubrick wasn’t just another design or even a design that stayed for a long time. It was when WordPress was really starting to get popular for blogs. Yeah. And I think visually speaking, at least for me, that whenever you ha if you wanna get a couple of screenshots or photos or memories Yeah. Of just how, when blogging got popular, Um, yeah.

Tammie Lister: Would, and I set the tone. Yeah. So many people just were never color gradient or had that big header and that header format stayed for a very long time. The big headers. We’ve only just very recently stopped having big headers in our designs and kind of started moving away from the big header design and realizing you don’t have to have that in every design, so,

David Bisset: well, you know, what they say about big headers.
What’s that?

Tammie Lister: Um, for, for me, I feel that you, you can’t really include this list without saying that because it feels quite seminal to Yeah. What you learn and at the front end, the code level, because we really learn how to create themes from it as well. Oh yeah.

David Bisset: Iconic. Iconic, very good choice. So, yeah, we’ve had, um, WordPress 3.0, our mystery WordPress 2.0 theme that we’re gonna go to do, and, uh, Kubrick 2005. So, uh, Simon, what I, can you share with us what your memorable, uh, design. Moment is in our WordPress history. So far we’ve, we’ve, and I’m, so far, I’m glad we have stayed in the past, but are you gonna, are you gonna be there with us, Simon, or are you edging a little closer to the future? Like pick something from the future? Um, no, I mean, I meant far past.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Okay. I, I think mine is not that, that long ago. Well, it should be like 10 years. Um, Robert already, um, alluded to it. Um, I pick MP six, the, the redesign of the word presentment interface. Um,

David Bisset: see, you hear that Si Simon. That means I can Google it and get a year versus Roberts description

Simon Kraft: it should be what? Press 3.8.

David Bisset: Well, I’m not gonna fact check-

Robert Windisch: just keep in mind the new redesign of the interface.
Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. It, it’s just 10 years old. That’s, that’s still good. Um, and that was was a point where I really started. Loving the way the WordPress back end looks, because before that it was, it was cool, it was nice, it was usable.
Uh, but with that, it felt like really fresh and still to a certain degree does, uh, today. And I think there were a couple of smaller, um, redesigns, I think WordPress 5.7 at the standardization of, of colors or something it was called, where we had a bit more contrast, a bit more unified set of colors, which is also very nice. I came to really love that. But that’s the interface on the web that I interact with, like every single day of every year, ever since. Uh, so that’s, that’s quite cool.

David Bisset: I, it looks like, to me, the, I mean, I think this plugin was around a while before it actually officially came out in the WordPress police, because I’m finding posts from 2013. Um, and do you remember why it was called MP six? I mean, must stand for something

Robert Windisch: Tammie doesn’t know. Nobody knows here.

David Bisset: Yeah. I’m looking at,

Tammie Lister: I think it was a project name.

David Bisset: It had to be Matt, think it was, it had to be probably Matt or who, or I forget the original designer or the original project creator cuz I’m, cuz this was nine years ago.

Tammie Lister: It was a group, group of people who created it and got together.
It was one of the first projects where a group of people got together and created it and kind of worked on it. Um, it was kind of the first attempt at that, um, to get kind of designed, done collectively, I guess.

David Bisset: Yeah. Was that the first, what do you call them? Um, project plug-ins. No, that’s not the right word. Um, feature. I’m not even sure. Feature plug-ins turns back then. Yeah. Cuz this, would this been considered plugins or anything? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the term didn’t exist, but it was, I think it was probably one of the first quote unquote feature plugins. Right. Yeah, I mean without that we’d still be looking at the uh, um, now if I can find a screenshot between Robert’s Pick and Simon’s Pick for the WordPress admin where the, it was side navigation, but it’s still an before MP six. Man, I can’t remember it.

Robert Windisch: People, people will not, people will not like if you show them MP six, it looks very like the current, um, interface. So that’s why, um, oh yeah, we don’t change anything. Just need to like the pre, the pre MP six phase, because that was the new redesign, as I always, I cannot, I cannot emphasize nothing. That was how new this was for, this was for the WordPress people, and we are like, finally someone is investing in the WordPress Pega interface. So that was really like a, a, a jump in in, in, um, in user, in, in, um, user interface, um, and, and usability of WordPress.

David Bisset: It had a bunch of new dash icons, remember, da remember Dash icons. Um mm-hmm. For those of us who know what those are a redesigned widgets page by Sean Andrews from his Widgets project. If, uh, P six included that. Wow. I didn’t, I totally forgot about the widgets project. Improvements to the customizer color schemes. Is this, is this when we got our color schemes like Ectoplasm or some, I wonder if that’s Yep.

Tammie’s shaking her head vigorously guess. And a new midnight color scheme. So that’s, thank you, Debbie. Thank you Sarah from 2013 for helping us remind that. Well, that sounds fantastic. So we have stayed. We have stayed pretty, pretty well pre 2015 pre Gutenberg. That’s a i I applaud you all for the biggest, most memorable design moments, not being part of, uh, anywhere beyond the 5.0 release of WordPress.

Thank you. So just to, just to rehash here, Mihir, uh, WordPress, uh, 3.0 multi-site and the first year themed theme. Um, yes, Robert, uh, we’re still gonna hunt for a version specific for that, I assure you. But when the, but we’re talking about when the big jump made from moving navigation from the top to the left hand side.

Uh, we’re gonna guess that’s 2.0 WordPress for now. Kubrick, who could forget Kubrick? We didn’t. Tammie thought that was, and that probably one of the most fundamental images and thumbnails representing the blog when blog blogs went. We’re in its heyday when movable type was, was starting to fade and WordPress jumped on the scene, how iconic.

And then MP six, Simon picked that. And that of course is just, you know, we still have that with us today. And that’s been, it’s been, been probably, it’ll probably around 10 years. So, Fantastic. Well, uh, from design-wise, I really don’t have much to, to say in this department. Um, I, I think we’re, I think the early version of WordPress that introduced pages was great, but that’s not really much of a design feature.

That’s just, I think it did open it up for a little bit more design. Um, I, if I had to pick something, I, I don’t know if this would be my most memorable, but I use it every day. It is the redesign of the WordPress site, um, wordpress.org. Um, a lot of people don’t remember how that looked way, way, way, way back then.

Um, with, and then it was all split out into various groups, uh, various categories as we have them today, you know, core and design and plugins and, and all of that. Um, I don’t know, maybe I’m, maybe this is an old person talking, but it was really, really clunky and really plain back in the early days. And now with the learn.wordpress.org and the redesign stuff’s, it’s happening.

It’s looking so much more professional and grown up maybe is the, is the best word I can describe it in. But anyway, that’s, that’s just me. And maybe for, I will share some, if I can find some old screenshots of that, which I couldn’t initially, um, I would love to, love to share them with you. So let’s move on to our next category.

Mihir, you are up again. So we are talking about the most notable enhancement to WordPress core that isn’t Gutenberg related. So I definitely, so I definitely put that. That, that qualifier in there, because I think that would be way too easy. Um, we in way too broad. Um, and when I say most notable enhancement to WordPress core, that means this is, um, it, it had to appear in WordPress core at some point.

Maybe it’s something that’s not there anymore or maybe something that it was acquired or merged into WordPress core. Didn’t have to start there, but it was something, a most notable enhancement to WordPress core. And I had some people say, well, what do you mean by enhancement? Do you mean coding wise or design wise?

Again, this is up to your interpretation. As long as you don’t say the G word, we will be Okay. Mihir. So go ahead. What is your most notable enhancement to WordPress Core? We had no guten, guten free.

Meher Bala: Mine is the events, uh, widget on a dashboard.

David Bisset: I’m sorry, say that again. My, my ears exploded. What was that?

Meher Bala: The event widget.

David Bisset: Oh, the event widget, yes. Ooh. This is why I like talking to people that are above the age of 18, cuz that’s all I have in my house for, for like a week, every week. The events widget. Oh, tell us, tell us a little bit about that in case people have have forgotten about that.

Meher Bala: So, uh, whenever there’s any, uh, meetup happening or WordPress happening, uh, in your locality, the events are displayed there.

And in our local, what I noticed is once the widget came out, a lot of new people who didn’t know the community started, you know, attending meetups, started interacting with the community. So we had a few different people at every meetup. So that’s something which is memor, which is.

David Bisset: That for me is an amazing pick. I never would’ve thought of that. And apparently you did.

Meher Bala: I see the community grow even with that. So for me, that’s still in the mind more than Gooden book.

David Bisset: That’s amazing because not only does it serve, did it serve a purp? I I, I can’t remember if this is when people realize meetup.com was crap. I can’t remember exactly when. Uh, sorry. Meet, sorry, or sorry to our sponsor meetup.com by the way. Um, I love you. Uh, so mom, uh, who works there? So, meetup.com was probably the only way WordPress people were fighting each other at the time. I do you have a, do you know when that, I guess we’re gonna have to find out when that came about cuz I have no idea.

Simon Kraft: That was WordPress 4.8.

David Bisset: And do you have a year for that? No. Oh, well, now that we know a version number, hello. Welcome to a podcast, but we’re doing our research live on the air. Thank you. 2017. 2017 or something like that.
Robert Windisch: Welcome. Welcome to a normal community conversation, by the way, we don’t, we don’t run around and no version numbers and years.
We just go like, do you remember this feature? Oh my God. That’s it.
David Bisset: You get what you pay for the hallway track. People are getting what they

Tammie Lister: for when someone get, gets their phone out and starts tapping and then finds it, and then you go, oh yes,

David Bisset: someone’s rolling their eyes right now and starting a letter.
Dear David, oh, well

Tammie Lister: I can’t believe they didn’t know that.

David Bisset: David Professional in quotes, uh, we have that before that 2017. The reason why I was wanting a year is because that is before I think Slack and where Press Slack, I believe.

Robert Windisch: No, no, no. Slack was, slack was uh, in civil already. Slack was there.

David Bisset: So, yeah. Okay, so. I don’t wanna pinpoint it, I guess. Yeah. Cuz 20, I remember a community summit when they made the announcement, but 20, that could have been as early as 2015. So if that widget came out in 2017, there was still ways. I guess the two top ways you would know about WordPress community would be meetup.com was still probably the biggest way there.
And then maybe if you were on WordPress Slack at the time. Right.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, but meetup media.com was the, we, we, so we decided on media.com because I remember the conversation we had internally be, Hey, let’s build this. And like, people who know project management was, was like, um, you know, that we want to do democratizing publishing, not democratizing events here.

So, so that’s why luckily we decided to simply give meetup.com money and let they run all of this. And we simply like hooked the meet, hooked the Meetup API into their system and was simply like, um, doing, let them do all the work.
David Bisset: Oh, I was talking, when I talk about meetup.com, I talk about the interface on meetup.com because my experience with it was, I was running meetups through meetup.com and creating the meetups, um, even searching for meetups, and I’m, I’m sure it got better over time.

I think Amaz, coincidentally enough, is when Weber, when there was that single. Page for the WordPress meetups. Like you said, they, I think there was some, some deal with the, uh, with, um, with, I don’t know. I would, I’m gonna guess WordPress Foundation on this was, was involved or something, but before a while you would just have random spots of communities on meetup.org.

Which org, which was hard to find. That’s the experience I remember cuz I was running one of those meetups, or two of them actually for a while. And then there came a time where everything was under one umbrella. Organizational wise, I think it had a dedicated page and probably, I’m guessing at that time is where the widget would probably start pulling that kind of information.

Right. Cuz it’s all centralized Meetup. It’s probably, it’s probably, um, like a meetup organization or something like that. So apologies for me getting it a little confused. I think it did get better, but I, I remember once we had that widget, I pointed people toward the widget and we would have meetups where I said, how many people found us through the widget and we always had one or

two people at our meetups raise their hand. So I think that’s an amazing pick. Does any, did, doesn’t, does any, I I’m seeing a few people nod. So is that your experience as well, Simon?

Simon Kraft: Yeah. I think our meetup in, in Germany, multiple meetups in Germany, like grew tenfold or something in the year following the, the, this update with 4.8. So that’s really huge for the meetup community.

David Bisset: Yeah. So not only do we get a nice new widget on the dashboard, which doesn’t come by that often, but it had an impact on the community. So I think that’s a really cool pick. Really appreciate you take us down me memory lane and my apologies to meetup.com. Um, Robert. I believe you’re up next. Um, so again, just in case, uh, people have nodded off here listening to us

Robert Windisch: totally like, yeah, totally fine. I can bring up something that is nothing with five. Oh, that is a feature that influenced many people and that, uh, everybody goes like, yeah,

David Bisset: just I said Guttenberg related. Now if there’s anything else in five that wasn’t,

Robert Windisch: no. Not even close. No, no. I’m, I’m still, I’m still in a very old feature. I’m still in three, 3.0. I’m talking about, menus.

David Bisset: Menus. Oh, you mean like creating menus?

Robert Windisch: Before that you needed to have pages and pages needed to have redirect because you needed to get some structure. And then the only thing to have a high, high cultural, uh, a structure where you have like a parents and chil uh, children was with pages. And that was like when people like fumbled their menu structure together with external links. And then you had a drag and drop in the WordPress back and with menus.

David Bisset: You. Wow. That act. Wow. I can’t remember that o That was wor that was 3.0. Yeah.

Robert Windisch: Wow. That was merged from Wu. Seems the WCI feature of menus were merged in the WordPress core

David Bisset: wow. That’s so hard to believe. Looking back on that now, 3.0, not so, not only P 3.0 had multi-site and, and, and the new theme it had, it had the menu stuff too. That’s amazing that, that would’ve been so barbaric. It’s probably the reason why my webs

Robert Windisch: no difference with me. No promise with me with features and breakfast.

David Bisset: Uh, that’s so barbaric. It’s like, for a long time it’s like, why do all these WordPress sites don’t have barely have any menus on ’em until this date? Co. I remember Cooper, I don’t, I might explain why my early Cooper Gays, I don’t see many, I don’t see many menus. They were on the, they were on the sidebar. A lot of the links for websites. Yeah, I re I don’t know,

Tammie Lister: it was all a widget or, or kind of lists

Robert Windisch: and No, that the link, the link, the link feature where you could have like defined what’s,

Tammie Lister: that’s what it was. Cause that’s all we had. You didn’t have anything else. And then when you had early menus, you had to do those walker things. The, you only knew a few knew special magic words and more wizard. That was because it was really, really difficult.

David Bisset: Oh wow. Okay. Well, yeah, definitely notable enhancement menus. Where could we be without menus? It’s like a, it’s like a car without, I dunno, a steering wheel or something. All right, Tammie. Uh, notable enhancement to WordPress core and no good. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: I think I’m back at 3.0, but I want that checked custom post types is where I’m going. Uh, I feel like we’re just settling on that release, but it’s one of those releases where we just kind of, it feels like it grew up or we got the features, which then meant the, not just people could write logs or, or use, you could then pivot and grow and extend.

That’s really what that release felt about. And custom post types, if you think about everyone that’s made a product or everyone that’s used in an agency or anyone’s done anything with WordPress, they wouldn’t have probably done that if it hadn’t been for a custom post type. So it kind of was there, or, or at least that concept.

So, and even Emberg has the, the G word, I’m sorry, but that has the roots in that kind of thinking. So yeah, custom post types is the thing for me. That’s, it’s,
David Bisset: that’s, it’s, it’s. It’s really what started to make WordPress more than a blog. Like everybody’s, yeah. But then

Tammie Lister: you could, like ex you could make it yours and you could take it your your direction and you could build on top of it. You know, we now think about like headless and doing everything you want and all that. That would not been impossible if we hadn’t started thinking about custom post types, which now sounds really like simple. Right? Um, but it’s not that back then that was radical thinking. Yes.

David Bisset: So yeah, you could start making. And history would rather us not learn this lesson too deeply. But I mean, you, you could make a like WordPress into any sort of application you wanted to. Yeah. Yeah. Not that you should, but I mean, you could. Right. And there was, and there was already custom post types.

Tammie Lister: It wasn’t just these pages with, with Kubrick, but it was just this flat file. You, you, I mean, as we’ve just heard, you had navigation and, and then you had these different things. You had so much in 3.0. 3.0 was basically like Christmas.

David Bisset: Yeah. I mean, how much brain matter had this. How much brain matter was scraped off the floor at the Word camp announcement for 3.0. You know, it’s like our minds were blown so much. Just stop it. Yeah, stop it. It’s all, it’s already dead. Uh,

Tammie Lister: yeah, but if you think back then about the upgrade paths of 3.0 as well, cuz back then it was very different as well. Let’s say we don’t have releases that are that significant now because so many things happen then it’s kind of mind blowing.

David Bisset: Yes. It’s like you, you went out, you went to, you went to, you went to the customer saying, let’s upgrade you where this is the customer. No. Really? No. Yeah. Let’s, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s, let’s go nuts. Just cup take. All right, Batman. So, all right Simon. So we’ve got an events widget, we’ve got menus, we’ve got custom post types.

Uh, I don’t wanna put any pressure on you here, but, um, do you have something he’s gonna say entering text into a box? For the win, Alex,
Simon Kraft: and that, that was exactly what I was going for. Now, actually, in the first round, all my picks and the backups and their backups were picked by everyone else.

David Bisset: But this time I, I said to come, I said To come with a sat.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. And, but this time, every single one of my, of my picks is still in the race. And that makes it a bit hard. And I’m going for the, I think most insignificant one of them, because it’s no longer in core. And that’s something we don’t do that often. Oh, no.

David Bisset: Um, oh, no, I think I know what it is. It’s post formats. Yes.

Simon Kraft: Um, I, I really loved that feature back in the day. Uh, as I said, I was

David Bisset: te Tell us a little bit about post formats, Simon.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. I, I, I was, I was building a lot of themes back then and post formats basically had the idea that you cannot only post a post. So not just a blob of text, but also. Oh, I have lists somewhere here so I don’t have to bumble around like an idiot.

Um, something that was called a site, like a, a small kind of update kind of post. You had a galleries, links, uh, images, quotes, a status while reading that. I’m not so sure how that compares to a site. Um, video, audio and chat. And they’re gone now. They were introduced in 3.1. Um, but they were like, that was a really fun way of, of styling different kinds of content in blocks.

David Bisset: I remember Matt talking about it on stage, by the way, and I mean, I’m that old.

Robert Windisch: I’m so happy that they are gone. I’m so happy that they, I’m not, I’m not at all.

David Bisset: Robert. Robert, Robert. They’re some confusing for people. Robert, we, we’ll get to, we’ll get to your negative emotions, but let’s, I’ll, I’m sorry Simon, I interrupted. Go ahead. You were telling us about this wonderful feature.

Simon Kraft: It was so wonderful and at some point, I’m not sure when. It was removed from Core. I think there’s still a way around that. You can still technically use it in some capacity, but it’s not an ongoing core.

Tammie Lister: I mean, still you can also use a block now you could use a block and, and have it as a, that’s not the same. Yeah. I mean, no, you could sign it.

David Bisset: Well, it was introduced in 3.1, it says here. So it almost made like we were writing an, we were writing high back then as a WordPress. People we’re like, oh man, 3.0 is so awesome. What’s next? What’s next? Oh, this post format stuff. Oh man, we gotta do this. And then, and then crickets. Why, why do you all think that post formats didn’t make it?

Simon Kraft: I think, uh, blogging is not that relevant anymore. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Unfortunately. So I think that’s, that’s one of the things is like, It’s very in the blogging sphere, I think it works just for blogging or not for a particular type of blogging even. Mm-hmm. Um, and there was a, you know, if you think about, what was it?

Timelines, it was a big thing back then. I went kind of wanna bring them back, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, and like listening to, and I’m doing and status updates. It was kind of in a time before we used social media as well, so people were using their blog to post and syndicate everything on there. And people just started doing that in other places rather than their blog.

Not saying they’re not gonna come back with, uh, the world as it is and owning your own content. But I think that because it was very particular, and then WordPress was starting to become about more broad in its terms. I think that’s the thing when we moved to plugins being about particular things rather than the interface.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, I just want to pick on my like, negative thing that I said I, I just wanted, like in terms of the user, for the user, it was very complicated to like decide while writing. And, uh, if we are emphasizing on like for the majority of users and have it very lean, mean, uh, interface, then it’s like going like, okay, what of these seven things, is that what you currently want to do?

And or nine or whatever it was. And it was not extendable, so it was Oh my God. So that’s why it was very, for the user, not that, that’s why I’m saying like, uh, um, it was not easy to understand and they just want to publish and then we are going like, please do this checkbox and otherwise you cannot like, start the car.
So that’s why I was like, um, really against, uh, the, the post format because they were against the, the, the, the directory of WordPress having like becoming easier to use for people. Yeah. And, and as much as I love the feature, I think that’s a valid reason to, to remove it.

Meher Bala: Because even a lot of my clients. They want, they choose a, uh, post type, and they expected some result, something else came up. So a lot of people were confused. Users.

David Bisset: I could see that. S all right, so I have here events, widget menus, custom post types, and r i p to post post formats, although I think it’s in the code somewhere, it’s, and, um, you, you can up to this point, right?

They wouldn’t just outright kill it. They hit it and it’s still in there somewhere. And it’s just one of those few things in WordPress that had a lot of, uh, fanfare. And again, it just, for one reason or another, it just kind of fizzled a little bit. And the, and so anyway, um, so I’m, I’m gonna throw in mine.

So, believe it or not, there is something that was once popular. And I don’t know if post formats, you could say it was popular, but I, I like to think it was at least it had a little bit of, uh, runway. There was something early on in WordPress that was popular, that was used quite a bit. And then inversion 3.5, I think at 3.5.
Feel free to correct me, uh, future Self that, um, it, it disappeared. Um, I’m talking about something in the admin. I’m talking about Something was, started very on in WordPress and in fact, it was part of blogging culture for a long time that if you had a blog on your website in the sidebar, I’m looking to see if peopleare starting to think about this.

You had a list of other people’s blogs that you could l that you would link to, and that was called drum roll. Please think I broke my table. Um, blog roll. That was called a blog roll, but in the WordPress backend, does anybody remember what menu that was? No. Okay. Links. I’m All right. Thanks for reading it.

Links. Sorry, there was a links menu. No, no, that’s right. I made, so it was the links. So I don’t know if this was in WordPress from day one. I like to think like pretty soon in WordPress it was, I couldn’t find when it was actually officially added, but I’m pretty sure I could have, I put my mind to it. But link management phase out of WordPress, from what I can see around WordPress, 3.5, um, supposedly wordpress.com added them back or something along those lines.
I’m not sure if they’re still there. Um, so when WordPress 3.5 links was gone, and, you know, by the time it was gone, nobody was using it. Very few people were using it. Um, it, because I remember when it was gone, it was like one of those things that like, it was, it was getting old and crusty anyway. And it had, it would needed to be taken out to the refuge, trash bin, dumpster, whatever you kids are calling it these days.

But I remember using that as one of the first things when I started with WordPress 1.5. Cuz blog rolls were a thing, you would like link the top. Like you people were reading your blog, they wanted something similar to, and you needed something on the sidebar. And believe it or not, um, when people stopped using that, they kind of went over to menus.

Um, like a menu widget or something, I think was, some people wanted to continue that. But yeah, the links management system blog rolls in the early days of blogging. Those were things, you know. Um, so anyway, um, r i p to R one links management. So that was for me. All right. Lastly,

Robert Windisch: can I jump, can I jump in?

David Bisset: Can you link to something? Sure.

Robert Windisch: Yeah. Yeah. I, um, I cannot like, because it was also hard for me to pick something and, um, uh, Simon, do you do the other thing? Um, yeah. Okay. So, um, uh, one of the, one of the things that, um, was very, was very, very important, but it’s not like really visible to see this to people, um, is for me the, uh, the rest api.

Um, because, um, if we talk about like what we are currently like doing with all the, the word we cannot mention here because it’s a, it is a, it’s a history show.

David Bisset: The he who cannot be named yes.

Robert Windisch: But without the rests api, many things currently would not be possible because that’s the foundation and like the, um, the sheer energy to put this into WordPress against all arts against, like, why do we need this?
It’s not a visible feature. And when everybody was like, but we need a rest api, XML L P C is not gonna make it. We need to have the future to really communicate with the WordPress backend, and this needs to be in WordPress. We really, really need this. And then we got it like, um, some base features in there, and now we have it like as the foundation of, we cannot name it here.
Uh, we have this, uh, foundation that if you would disable that you would like have a really a timeish and jump back in a time with the features that we are currently having.

David Bisset: Yeah. Yeah. The rest

Simon Kraft: and probably the next, next iteration of the WordPress interface, like WP admin. Is, I guess, very likely to also be based on the rest api.
David Bisset: So here are some runner-ups. Just thought I’d throw ’em out there real quick. Auto updates, I’m,

Simon Kraft: that was the one that Robert meant, uh, I, I should mention. Yeah, uh, we discussed that earlier. Um, all updates were introduced in 3.7 and changed, I guess, WordPress forever. Because since then, every WordPress website is updated, at least patched, uh, to its new version, which is really cool.
And until recently we, we also kept like all the, I dunno, what was the last version of, of 3.7 still supported like

Robert Windisch: 30, something like that. 30 or 30 something. Yeah.
Simon Kraft: So it was really crazy that all these old versions are still still maintained to a degree.

David Bisset: Mihir, did you? I, I had, I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry. I wanted to get Mihir. Mihir was shaking her head like a bo, like a bobblehead doll. Um, there, did you grasp auto updates because, uh, Mihir as well as everyone else, I think, because I know there was a lot of controverts in the beginning about WordPress back then. Smaller market share than it does now. Were you comfortable with auto updates, Mihir, in your, in, in your, um, decade?

Uh, well, I’m sorry you weren’t a decade before, but how were you comfortable? Were you comfortable with WordPress updates? Initially,

Meher Bala: no, because a lot of, uh, sites broke. That was because of the theme and the plugins. But as yours past auto updating WordPress is good because at least people have reduced saying that WordPress is not secure.
Yeah. When it is auto updated people, okay. Find that fine. And WordPress is secure, what we add to it with a theme or plugin. There is some vulnerability over there.

David Bisset: So you, you, so you, you got warm to it. What were you saying, Tammie? Yes.

Tammie Lister: Uh, I was gonna take in a different direction, so I’m checking wherever we are done on order updates.

David Bisset: Oh yeah. Well, uh, yeah. The other two I only wanted to mention in, in, in passing was the customizer. Um, that’s kind of, we’re getting, we’re kind of seeing that maybe in the rear view mirror a little bit. For a while though, that was the true no-code interface to customizing a theme, um, of, in core anyway. And la lastly was the, um, uh, let’s see.

I pasted a u URL in this URL does not make sense. There is also smaller things too that maybe doesn’t play to, I wouldn’t say. A huge part, but we had things like site health, um, import exporting, WordPress, um, in from core with the plugins, that sort of thing. So lots of little things. Uh, and
Tammie Lister: I had one from 2012, which was, uh, something that’s gonna get redesigned or reworked mm-hmm.

Uh, in this cycle or this phase, which is the new media management happened in 2012, which sounds a long time ago for it.

David Bisset: Yeah. I, I can’t remember what it was like before then. I think you had to draw something and mail it to your WordPress blog,

Tammie Lister: be glad that you don’t remember it. It was, it, it was a big thing. And I think that, and even you could have picked like the old way we used to do revisions, which even now you look at revisions and you think, oh, that’s quite dated. The old way was even more dated back in the day. Um, and why I kind of thought of those ones was because they looked dated to us now, but. We are redoing them now.

And I kind of think that that’s kind of interesting to think of. Like the cycle of like every 10 or so years is kind of when we kind of redo things, which kind of is kind Oh, that’s healthy.

David Bisset: It’s a project. Hey, well we’re an open source. If we can get to the 10 year mark, that’s a win, right? Uh, pretty healthy actually.
To, just to wrap, just to wrap this section up. Um, completely forgot about revisions. Um, not that I used them too often, but, um, that and the little thing when the slider came in. Yes.

Tammie Lister: From when we first got the sliding,

David Bisset: I’m not sure if I took to the slider very quickly because I’m like, it’s kinda like going to the eye doctor, does a look better to you?
Or B, I worked on that A or B, no, it had nothing to do with the design. It had me trying to keep in my head what, and then the side by side stuff, I think, uh, wa was, was a lot better. But revisions has saved more people’s butts probably than, than one would remember. Oh. Because I, uh, that an auto save. Um, for a while, I don’t think, I don’t remember when, but I know WordPress, when it started, did not autos save your posts as you were typing them.

And I remember Matt said, standing on stage saying, no, now your power can go out or whatever. And you’ve got that post and revisions, incl. And, and that also for me, blended into later revisions where, uh, you, you’re, there’s a previous revision. Are you sure you want to edit this or do you wanna look at that or go back to it?

Tammie Lister: But I think back then revisions was, um, Yeah, I think I always kind of forget the words, but it was when we were trying to make things look real, I think skew morphic or something. It was like when you were trying to make like apple, uh, you’re trying to make things look real or those kind of design things.

And I think unfortunately it did inherit a little bit from that. Um, so I think now we would go a lot more, um, streamlined. Uh, design has come on a little bit. Uh, it’s more information based. It’s more how you are gonna process. It’s more kind of quick. If you look at the way GitHub and all those kind of interfaces are now, you know, we’ve learned.

But back then we were trying to solve a problem that hadn’t really been. Kind of comprehended. We were trying to visualize issues that we hadn’t. So it was kind of really interesting to think of like, going back to it now with everything we know about the complications of those. And now we know that people probably do want to extend those, probably do wanna export them, probably do find them useful as well.

David Bisset: We may see a little bit of a change in this department with phase three, with the, um, multi-user stuff too.

Tammie Lister: Oh, I think we’re gonna see a complete change in that way, at least I hope we do, because honestly, that’s not gonna scale.
David Bisset: Yeah. You think? Yeah, I would. Yeah. I, I always get, I get, my daughter says, I’m trying to edit up, posting your site and it says, you’re still in there.

Can you close a tab? And I’m like, I, or I can kick you out. I’m like, fine. You’re your mother’s daughter anyway, so. Alright, so we have one last category here. Um, Mihir, you are up first. Now this category is how I described this. And I’m getting them, I’m getting these, these are getting wordier as we go along, but okay, so this is a memorable community moment or community initiative or community Cause that wasn’t a WordPress release and you’re saying, well, why did David put not a WordPress release?

Um, well, because there have been a couple of memorable WordPress releases focused on who was releasing, who is contributing, all great things. But we’ve got a lot of that feedback in the, in the past about, oh, it was, it was, um, you know, the WordPress releases, especially the ones where, um, the underrepresented groups took over forward word press release.

Great. That that could be counted as a community moment. Fantastic. But everybody says that when they first think of one. So I wanted us to be a little bit more tougher, no word press releases, but anything else is open game in terms of a community moment initiative or a cause. So, Mihir, I would love to hear what you’ve got to say about this.

Meher Bala: So, For me, when I joined the community, I always, uh, like the very few women who participated and when I used to go to work camps, also the women were fewer. So I just started, you know, gathering all the women and started taking group fit pictures and it became a thing, like if I was there in Word Camp, it was, you know, I had to do a group with them because everyone got excited, new people added.

So pre pandemic, each word camp I went to, I had, I mandatory went on stage in the lunch break and decided a time place where, you know, everyone will get together. I heard a few things, but I said, this is helping encourage other women. So I don’t see any problems, so why not? And I used to put on, put on Twitter as well.

David Bisset: So, so, so you organ Yeah. It’s kinda encouraging someone else. What’s that?

Meher Bala: It’s kind of encouraging another woman to be a part of the community.

David Bisset: Absolutely. Um, so like selfies, but good, but selfies representing under underrepresented groups. I, I, they’re there. Yeah. The WordPress, I mean, you can talk about this all, all day. And this is not exclusive to the WordPress community, it’s tech in general, right. We’re always used to that. I have a daughter who is growing up and she kind of grew up in the WordPress community more or less for the last 10 years, you know, with the word camp exposure and everything. And you know, today we kind of take some of the efforts to make people feel welcome for granted a little bit.

Um, there’s still obviously a lot that needs to be done in the community, but back in the early days it was, um, You know, especially if someone, someone relates to an someone who relates to a subject or a con or a conference, they love seeing people that represent them on stage or representing them organizing an event.

Right. And maybe it’s not apples to apples. Exactly. But you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like, especially, um, especially if, just think if you’re a young woman, I can’t, but I have a daughter, so, you know, I’ve seen her reactions and, um, it’s, she, she can connect so well with when people, when women were speaking at meetups.
So just imagine like back then we just, you know, their focus wasn’t there cuz we were just happy to have meetups in ward camps, period. And then once we started getting people to speak, then we kind of, like some people especially, started to notice a pattern and that had to be brought to a lot of people’s attention.

So that kind of, we kind of evolved into a way where, yes, okay, now we’ve got the ba, we’ve got some basics down, but now we’ve got a lot of improving to do because if we want this community to grow and be decent human beings, we should try to make things as as. And you know what that does for me as an organizer, I was focused on speaker stuff, but there were so many people at the work camps like you, Mihir, we’re doing these, um, side, I don’t want to use the wrong term because they’re important, but um, Site events, right?

Or something like that. But I mean that respectfully in terms of like, yeah, let’s, let’s take a, let’s get this certain group together and take a photo or let’s, or, or have this, um, mini meetup or like an after dinner thing at WordPress meetups and that sort of thing. Or even now online, you know, there’s various, um, communities out there that exist for particular kinds of groups.

Um, black Press and so forth that, um, that I, at least I’m familiar with. So I think that was a fantastic idea. I don’t know if anybody else is familiar with anything else or wants to jump in, but I think putting down a moment in terms of, now I don’t know how to word this exactly, so maybe you can gimme a term.
I can put in the show notes. I have women’s selfies written down here just because that’s how my brain works and I don’t wanna be canceled later. WordPress, sorry. If you can gimme another term. That’s what I got. What’s that? Women in WordPress. You got it. I will quote you on that.
Tammie Lister: Have you seen that? It’s possible to not just see one of you though, as well, which is what you are identifying.

You are, you are saying that there’s more than one of you and there’s more than one possibility of you as well, which is really, really important. Um, seeing all the different possibilities that you could do in all the different areas, I think that’s important for whoever you are as well. So I love that. I think that’s amazing.
David Bisset: And more of it, and in the WordPress leadership roles too. So many are women. My family, women are the hardest working ones. Anyway. Okay, we got that on tape. All right, good. All right. Just, just made just a little insurance from, from my wife later. Um, alright Robert, let’s talk, let’s talk a favorite community moment. Or cause Okay. Something along those lines.

Robert Windisch: So my, my job, uh, my day job is to challenge processes. Now, let’s see if I, if I come, if, if I have a runner up. So I just want to see if it’s like how close I am to the things that are not allowed. Okay. Uh, my, uh, favorite or my, like most re uh, community moment is when the, when the whole room at the, at the state of world guest.

Um, the point was when met stopped the release cycle, so when, when the, uh, before like, uh, before the, um, um, five oh release, um, like we had this like every three months we had to release and then, um, this was like, it not going to, it was not gonna cutting it because the, the changes we needed to do, um, were really, were too big.

So we cannot, we, like I heard from so many core people that was not, um, um, Like was, was not gonna like cut it in a few months back to just get it in. So my question is, does counting of a re uh, like starting a release cycle counts. So because, um, that was like, I, we were in the room and was like, yeah, and now that’s why we, uh, need to explain.

Matt explained that and that’s why we stopped the release cycle now and everyone was like, what the hell just happened for me? That was like, he dropped the mic amenable

David Bisset: moment. I think he dropped the mic too. I can’t remember. Uh, when was that?

Robert Windisch: Um, 2017, like, uh, weekend as Tammie, because she was uh, um, uh, design, I think Design team rep after that. Yeah. And like Matt was simply,

Tammie Lister: it would’ve, I think it would’ve been, well it would’ve been 4.9, but we didn’t do that. Uh, and so yeah, it was four, 5.0. Then we. Had a pause, ended it. So yeah, I think it was 17. I dunno the year exactly. 17. There’s many years. 17, 18 blended into each other during that time.

David Bisset: But there was a 4.9. There was a 4.9, wasn’t there?

Simon Kraft: It were many 4.9 s.

Tammie Lister: It would’ve been like 5.0. It was after 4.9. It would’ve been. So,

David Bisset: so it’s kinda like 3.0, sorry. It’s kinda like walking toward a, walking halfway toward a wall and then walking halfway toward a wall. There’s 4.9, there’s 4.99, 4.9 9, 9, 4 0.99, nine, oh, not 5.0 yet very

Tammie Lister: long. 4.9 release,

Robert Windisch: Yeah. But the, the, the beauty was really that, that there was no release. So there was like, we will have a release when we have a release and like there wasn’t release in between where we like fixed small stuff because we still needed to do while like Tammie and other people were like, okay.

How, what are we doing? How do we, like, what is the goal here? And, and that’s why it was really for me, like it sh it, it really, uh, in this, in this moment, in this room at the Word camp us, you really could, like, you could feel a needle drop in the room because like, it was something that never happened before, because like you could, uh, um, um, you can set your watch to Roberto releases.

Mm-hmm. And then we simply stopped doing that while deciding that we, like, stop doing it because it doesn’t make any sense. So it was really, really weird and really good because it, it helped us to make this leap that we not talking about right now, but it, it helped us to really, uh, prepare for that.

Tammie Lister: It was also a stop and help was also kind of part of it.
It was a stop and this is how you can get involved. I think that was kind of the other bit like once everyone kind of gets over that Uber stopped, it was, and then here’s how you can get involved. So it kind of had that double um, or this, that was my, my through the haze of time impact, um, was it brings about the, okay, now I can get involved cuz people do like a release circle.

Right. Um, so consistency. Now I get involved and now I can do that. And it, it did get us to 5.0, it absolutely got us to it. And without that we would not have had the 5.0. You know, there’s no point in releasing something there. We are radically different from what we were, but there’s no point in releasing something that would’ve been half-baked. It wouldn’t have worked.

David Bisset: Yeah. So we have actually done that once in our, at least once in our WordPress history. Right. Yeah, I, I, I don’t know if we’ll see a moment like that again, at least anytime soon. It seems like Gutenberg phases seem to be planned out, or at least not like that drama ish type of thing.

Right. It’s not, it wasn’t a press release Rob Robert’s. Right. I remember. I remember saying Matt, Matt said it, and I think a few people had to change their pants. It was that kind of a moment where you just kind of expected like, this is all, this is all we’ve known, you know? And that’s funny because, you know, fast forward to a few days before working at us and, and, uh, you know, me in a hotel room, super caffeinated trying to finish something as Matt is in a chat room saying 5.0, it’s coming out now, whether we like it or not, it’s coming out, you know.

Anyway. I better stop with the analogies. It was ready. Oh, it was, it was, it was ready. Kind of kinda like I’m on top of this, uh, on a heel skiing and somebody says, oh, you’re ready, you’re ready. And slowly pushing me off the ledge. It’s, it was that type of ready. Oh yeah, it was ready. It was ready. Um, I just did, you know, just, just thinking my life flashing before my eyes right before it came out though. Um, let’s see, Tammie, I think your next, um, community initiative, cause whatever,

Tammie Lister: I’m going to take you back to 2014 to, I don’t wanna go Miami and the first ever kids workshop.

David Bisset: Ah, you actually snagged something.

Tammie Lister: Oh. Cause that fell. I still have. Really fond memories of it. It kind of felt really incredible to, it wasn’t even really that organized. It wasn’t really that.

David Bisset: Thanks Tammie, really appreciate it. It was that big in,

Tammie Lister: I’m sorry, but there’s no, like back then we were David all over initiative. I’m sorry. We weren’t, we weren’t trying to do we, we were just gonna be doing the event. We weren’t gonna necessarily try and do anything bigger with it.

And I think it planted a good seed that maybe took a bit of time before anything else happened, but that was absolutely fine. Um, and it was really important for just to start that. I think it’s both important for representation, but also important for an open source project doesn’t work with older people only working on it.

So for me it was incredibly special if I think of the people that were in that room as well, who were passing on. Many of them are still involved, contributing, in fact, all of them that I can think of. And it was just really special for me. Yeah. Yeah.

David Bisset: Um, that, now, just to be clear, for someone who was about to write that email to us, this is not the first kid’s camp ever in a work camp.
It was the one Tammie attended? No, it was a kid’s workshop. Workshop. It was a, well, I don’t like to use the word kids and work very close to each other because people get sensitive about that.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. It was 2014. It was no like kids camp or anything like that. It was, it was just, I, I don’t think it was that long, either, we weren’t doing it for or anything like that.

David Bisset: Kids don’t exactly have long attention spans. So, yeah, that’s under we,

Tammie Lister: no, it was, it was nothing official. It was no official kids camp. It was nothing. And it, it was, it was long time ago, so there was no kind of officialness of it. Um, but no, it was, I think we got them set up on a blog and we got them to customizing a theme and writing their first post.
That was as far as we got. That was our goal for the day.

David Bisset: Some people vowed never have children after that. Our younger, uh, younger volunteers look, well, I mean, I, I, it was there at Miami because I was at Phoenix and saw something very similar. I think it was a one day event at Phoenix. I saw there, I was there watching the kids.

Which nowaday, it sounds creepy when you say, are you here? Do you have any kids? No, I’m just watching them seeing how they do things. All right. Sarah, security and, uh, but I was watching how they did it in Phoenix, and this was, I don’t know, maybe it’s 2 20 12 or 2013 or something like that. And then, yeah, that’s when we started doing in Miami and now it, now there’s lots of kids’ camps.

There’s a whole kids’. Section now of learning and, and people in charge of that type of thing now. And there’s probably gonna be something at, uh, us, I know there’s something at Europe coming up, uh, which is fantastic. So it’s exploded. And then when we did our 10th anniversary word pr, our 10th anniversary were Camp Miami.

It is prog, it progressed to a point where we had the kids, I forget what the ages were, I’ll be gonna say like seven to 11 or seven to 12, seven to 13. That age group doing what you said, more or less. But then we kind of took the pe, the teenagers, 14 to like high school level. And then we had a day where we taught them WordPress.

And then a day after, like we taught them WordPress and how to build a store in WooCommerce. Then the next day we taught them s e how to market it.

Tammie Lister: Wow. I think it was also back then we were being very experimental with what could a word count be? Remember the day of rest and all the different kind of buddy camps and different things.

Oh, yes. I think we were just kind of experimenting with different formats as well. Yeah, exactly. We were just, uh, I think that was part of it as well as like, how can we start? And it’s great to kind of think about that as well. So I think that was kind of amazing.

David Bisset: Fantastic. Memories. Still one of my mentions. So Simon, um, let’s, let’s cover, let’s cover the, um, anything from a community moment standpoint that stood out for you.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll stay in the, um, event space, I guess.

David Bisset: Oh, he’s, he’s choked up. This is a, this is gonna be so good.

Simon Kraft: Um, and I just noticed that we’ll stay in the 2013 ish, uh, kind of timeframe.
David Bisset: It’s the WordPress 3.0 3.0 of years, right? Yeah.

Simon Kraft: Um, because in, I think it was early October, 2013, uh, we had the first word Kim Europe in, in Liden and it was such a stupid idea, um, back then and still.

David Bisset: Wait, let me, let me write that down, Simon. Yeah. Stupid. Okay, go ahead Simon. Just wanna make sure I got this cuz

Simon Kraft: it’s just the, the kind of stupid idea that hold on and exploded into the kind of mega event that what computer is today. And it was totally different back then, but the idea to bring like a whole continent together and have a joint event, um, It was beautiful and also it was a nice event.
Um, I have to say that, um,

David Bisset: possibly the first regional event, although I don’t know if Word Camp Asia or it’s forced in existence. What’s that?

Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. Oh, it really was. And uh, there was no word can be asked before that, at least. No, no official one.

Robert Windisch: There was none. There was just the, just San Francisco, the global one as, as we European call that. Yeah. And I think it’s,

Simon Kraft: it’s some, sorry.

Tammie Lister: No, you go. As it was the first, and it was done in an incredibly short time. Uh mm-hmm. I don’t think anyone ever realizes how short a time it was done in the end as well.

David Bisset: Somebody only had a few people, only had one change of clothes was that quick.

Tammie Lister: But yeah. And, uh, so as, as someone that was involved in it, I, um, it was one of those things that I, I think you, I.
Rarely get to experience, but the venue was incredible. Mm-hmm. I plus one that mm-hmm. That was one of those venues. Um, we, several of us had gone to a conference before in that venue and got to see that venue and it’s was one of those venues that I would love to use again for something. It’s just a great venue.

David Bisset: It really also symbol started to formulate the idea that we could have larger word camps and the community had matured to that point where we could bring in a larger event and we could coordinate across multiple countries for that sort of thing. Um, before that, um, you all you had was cities or I think in a few places or, you know, general regions like Word Camp Southeast or Midwest or something, some direction in the us.

Um, but that was a very memorable moment in terms of community history. Cuz again, I don’t know, I, I think, I don’t know when Japan. I know Word Camp Japans have been very, very long standing, but, but for Europe it was, it was got a lot of attention and I think rightly so. So I’m, I’m really good for that cuz it kind of set the, it set the pattern for all for, for camp us a bit.

It set a precedent for, um, the scene. There’s War Camp Asia and there’s probably, I feel like I’m leaving somebody out. I think there’s one on the books and I just can’t remember what region is now gonna be. I know they want to have a war camp, Africa War Camp

Robert Windisch: Nordic. You had a WordCamp Nordic regions in, in, in Europe.
Mm-hmm.

David Bisset: Yeah. And you know, who knows in 30 years War Camp Mars. So anyway, that, I think that’s a pretty, pretty, pretty good thing to put a pin on in terms of the community there. Now I, uh, I could, as, as much as I like my, uh, work camp Miami, there really was nothing. Uh, there’s, there’s nothing that equals that level.

So I’m gonna leave that out because I’m biased anyway, I do wanna put together. You mentioned two things, um, from a community, uh, cause or initiative standpoint. One was reco, and I may have mentioned this in the past episode, so listener, I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but it’s also when we talk about the community, recognizing those that we no longer have in our community.

Um, so I thought, uh, one thing that stood out to me, that representative was the Kim Marshall’s Memorial scholarship. Um, and you know, and because a lot of the old, old timers remember her, um, I remember her at Work Camp San Francisco. Um, But also like all those other people that, you know, our community, the older community gets, people get old.

Um, that’s, that’s life, uh, currently. So people will leave the community, uh, in that manner. Not, you know, not, not, not drama wise. I’m never coming back community, but people pass away or people have, uh, accidents and that sort of thing. So it is that, that kind of represents to me, not just the scholarship itself, which is a great initiative on its own, but it’s a recognition of, you know, we have important people that we want to remember the WordPress community, whether it’s in the form of scholarship or honoring them on social media every year, seeing their names and releases.

I know there’s a couple of people, and I am really, really bad at remembering his name right now, but he created a plugin. He was race, he was into a race car driving. I remember him in a race car. What’s that? Wipo? Yeah, VI, right. But what was his name though? Yeah. What was the name I, I’m gonna kill my why was 0 0 7?

Yes. The user name. Yeah, but I’m talking about his real name and I’m frustrated with myself. I can’t remember it, but I remember when he passed away, I forget what plug-in he did. I guess I’ll have, I’ll include that in

Simon Kraft: Shownotes, but he did the regenerate thumbnails plugin and his Alex,

David Bisset: yeah. Oh, okay. So we, we remember ’em by reputation, but it’s all of those people that do these plugins and Alex Mills. There you go. I’m horrible at remembering names, but yes,

Robert Windisch: I’m googling ju just like,

David Bisset: oh, I don’t judge. Just keep your hands here. So we have Kim Parcels, we have Alex Mills, all of these people that, that are involved, that with the community that, that we, that we’ve taken their plug-in, we’ve taken their plug-ins and their work and they’re, you know, and it’s in WordPress core now to our popular plug-in now.

And the other, the other thing I wanted to point out as a community initiative or, or moments was the Wampoo itself has, and, and I see one behind, um, Tammie, hopefully she knows it’s there. And we have so many, it’s incorporated, like every word camp now has a wpu. Um, it was also a lot of the kids’ stuff had wpu involved as a cartoon character and, you know, that was part of the kids’ camp stuff.

And, um, I’m sharing a link with you all right now. One of the, one of the coolest swag moments I ever had was, um, for, I don’t know which, where Camp Miami was, but we came out with these UNO cards, with wpu s on them, and. I put it on his open source on GitHub and be, this is the community angle, like a couple of work camps from like the other side of the world.

I think from, I think from India or Indonesia, I believe it was somewhere in that general area. They pinged us and said, can we use these? I said, yes, they’re open source. So what they did was they just changed the design a little bit. Like they, they put the work camp logo on it and made it, maybe translated it a little bit in their language, but now people are saying, oh, those are cool cards.

And like, you know, I have a little bit of pride. I said, yes, those, I, those are cool when we thought of them over in Work Camp Miami. But I am, so I’m even more happy to see people repurposing swag like that. And I thought the Wampoo, um, was an original great idea and I’m glad that, um, um, Matt kind of adopted that as part of the unofficial slash. Unofficial. I’ll say unofficial mascot cuz I’m not seeing it on official.

Robert Windisch: Unofficial. Official. It’s the official term for the, it’s unofficial official.

David Bisset: Just think of all the pins, all the badges, all the shirts. I don’t know if you ever saw the Work Camp Wpu shirt from Work Camp Miami that had the face,

Tammie Lister: there was an actual physical wapuu.

David Bisset: Yes. The one walking around there.
wapuu became physical. I was wandering around. It was the best work camp Miami 2019. I know the people that were in that suit. It was like a walking Cheeto, but it was so worth to see a walking wapuu around.

But yeah, it’s just, think of all the swag and like the MAs, the just the very thought of a mascot, um, itself. Not a logo, but a mascot I thought really helped shape the WordPress community was a great community moment. So anyway, thumbs up to all those people. I have one to, what’s that?

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I have one to add. I think the sustainability initiative, which is a newer one. I think that’s just getting started. But I think. And gathering momentum and finding out what it means. But as someone that’s organized a word camp before and tried to do it, sustainability when we in Brighton, um, I think it’s really good from that app. But I also think it’s really good from just the impact as a project that we leave and like the technology, I think it talking about like trying to be around as a project for a while, we kind of have to be aware of all those aspects.

So I think that initiative deserves a kind of mm-hmm. Call out because it crosses so many of our areas and it doesn’t necessarily get and so much kind of eyeballs I think.

David Bisset: Yeah. Make sure to throw that in the show notes by the way, cuz. We’ve shared so much here today. And, and, uh, no, I’ll include everything that you’ve mentioned. Everything you thought of, throw it in the show notes. I’ll do a array matching thing so we don’t get duplicates. Um, all right, so I, we’ve covered kind of the categories and we’ve covered a lot of stuff and I’m really happy cuz a lot of stuff we’ve talked about here today is, is not been mentioned in depth in my other conversations.

So that’s fantastic. I got exactly what I wanted out of you all. But, so what I wanted to do is I wanted to go around one last time and see if there’s any random thoughts that appeared in your head about anything else. Sky’s the limit. In terms of, in terms of any moments. Um, you know, I was gonna say good, bad and ugly, but let’s just, we’ll, let’s just keep it or good or bad because I don’t have time to cover ugly.

Um, Mihir, um, what have we left out here? What did we not mention that you think could, could be mentioned real briefly?

Meher Bala: Uh, recently Michelle has created a side WP speakers.

David Bisset: Ah, yeah.

Meher Bala: So this. I see this helping the organizers with finding out, uh, speakers in their areas or n nearby do not go and approach them. So that is one thing which just came across my mind right

David Bisset: now. Yeah. Kudos to her for that initiative. She does so much now, the job things on Wednesdays and all her, all her community work, which we don’t have time to go into here. That’s fantastic. Yes. So speakers of speakers project. My, um, Robert, anything we might have, we haven’t touched on at all briefly?

Robert Windisch: Yeah. Um, so small thing, um, the time when W P C L I became a make project, Because it was a project outside. And, uh, it’s really like if, if people like, cause the people who work, um, professional with WordPress sites and like on local, on local, um, machines and like automating stuff like the W P C L, I be becoming like a, a real make project with all the um, good and bad things around it. It was really, really good for the project and for Daba P c I to jump the simply make sure it stays around

David Bisset: wp I, yeah, develop. If, if you’re a developer and you’re not familiar with that, slap your face twice and get reading in the documentation. Tammie, what have we not mentioned here at all?

Tammie Lister: This is almost like project management, but I’m gonna say in core, when started to have more organization core meetings and recognizing roles for releases, I think that that started to allow people to see where they could be part of it.

Um, and. Gave enough order to those meetings that someone could follow along, you know, you can follow the agenda. Um, so those kind of things. Having enough project management, uh, so that someone could belong. So just being able to have a call. We didn’t do that. We didn’t have calls for releases and Oh, yeah.

And people being part of it and, and having like, Hey, would you like to have these roles? And people been able to step up and have those roles, that’s really important. And it’s not that far, but we’ve had that. So I think that is really, really important for us. Yeah.

David Bisset: You take that stuff for granted sometimes, not realizing how you do, it’s never been, and

Tammie Lister: it’s not just like tech, it’s like documentation and it’s growing.
Right. The options that people can step up and be part of. So yeah, I think that,

David Bisset: and that’s what some people that have come into the WordPress community in the last couple of years, they haven’t known a time before that. It’s kind of like

Tammie Lister: no. And Core Chats used to be a lot, there used to be a lot to be part of and try and follow and keep up with. Um, and it would put off a lot of people. So this is an incredibly welcoming, so yeah, more inclusive.

David Bisset: It’s trying to explain what a V H S tape is to my daughter today. Yes. That was, there were times before digital media. So Simon, what? And one or two things briefly. We may not have covered that. Yeah. Could see.
I can see your gears turning. Sorry.

Simon Kraft: No, no. I have something, uh,

David Bisset: stuck in your teeth . Oh, um, oh, I’m sorry. I thought I could read, I thought I could read people. God, what else? You got anything in the tank?

Simon Kraft: I would like to give a shine a light on a make team that I think has its work a bit undervalued sometimes. Um, the accessibility team. Uh, you do like a really great job speaking of inclusivity, um, in making sure that more people can use WordPress, and I think that’s part of democratized publishing. So they do very, very important work.

David Bisset: Yeah, I can’t argue with that. I, I am always amazed at the new, it’s especially so much harder now with all the more complex technologies, especially in the admin, right?

And that’s still a work in progress. I think all the initiatives that we’re doing today, you know, ev moving forward, I, I want, I wanna, I wanna see more attention to them, um, because a lot of accessibility needs that kind of attention and just like performance or anything else. And so many times accessibility is, is not a first brain thought type of a thing.

So I really think that deserves a real good shout out as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got three random things left. I, we’ve talked about acquisitions in the previous. Shows, but I always thought the Tumblr acquisition really stood out to me in terms of a potential that it has for WordPress moving forward that isn’t WordPress.

Um, Gutenberg is supposed to transcend WordPress. Maybe, maybe that’s, uh, Matt’s made that comment a couple of times, so it’s interesting to see where that might go. Um, P two. Speaking of things that, like some, somebody just said, does he need to do at the restroom? No. The letter p and two. Is a, if you don’t know what that is, Google it.

But because, but when, when, when Tammie said something about the structure of, of, of backend WordPress organization, um, it is a blog that Matt and Matt actually talked about this a number of times, and I think they have a new version called oh two. Um, I’m not sure if that’s out yet in terms of a, like a plugin or a theme you can download. I think, I, I can’t remember. All I remember is it was, Cutting more cutting edge in them. But we used to,

Robert Windisch: it’s a hosted version on wordpress.com. Yes. The

David Bisset: hosted version version. It’s like halfway. It was halfway. They’re like, you can’t get it, but you can. You can get it because it’s hosted this place. So if you don’t know what those are, just go ahead and Google ’em.

But P two was fundamental to the organization of a lot of WordPress stuff, even it as it exists today. So like as early as last year, I remember like Word camps, having a P two doc with people organizing writing notes in there. And Matt was always a big, big fan of P two in terms of like, you know, because it’s basically more or less a block for teams, right?

A big, big, big use at automatic. And I’m pretty sure it still does. And finally, I have elevator advertising at work camps, and we’ll just leave it at that. So thank you very much for everybody. Um, Mission here wasn’t to cover everything. That’s impossible. But I wanted to cover things from your brains, cuz all you I respect and are unique and I you brought the game today.

Thank you very much. I greatly appreciate it. So, um, let’s go around and then do your, do your, let’s, let’s say we’re people, I was gonna say do your closing remarks, but this isn’t a talk. Um, where can people find you, uh, on social if they want to cont if they wanna follow you, because these days we, we, it’s, who knows? It’s social blog, whatever you want to, whatever you wanna share. But here you go first.

Meher Bala: Uh, I’m on Twitter, me, I’m on LinkedIn and my website meher.com.

David Bisset: Yes. And we’ll also put these in the show notes too, so I don’t have to worry about spelling everything out cuz I can’t spell. It was very nice to have you, um, Robert, um, the, yeah, if, if, uh, yeah, go ahead.
I was gonna say, where can we buy that hat? But I don’t think that exists anymore.

Robert Windisch: That’s very like with pins or without. Um, so it’s, uh, it’s nubis on, on Twitter and otherwise it’s nubi it on the WordPress profile.

David Bisset: Thank you very much, Robert. It’s good to see you in the hat again. And, um, if you ever wanna sneak into a Word camp, just don’t wear the hat and people won’t recognize you. Um, Tammie, uh, where can we find you?
Tammie Lister: You can find me at karmatosed on all the things.

David Bisset: Yes. Pretty much still and don’t What about, yeah, well, we’ll just put show notes. Just that. And well, people will find you again. You also have a, um, you also have you started a new blog recently too, or am I, I have now next slab.

Include that in show notes as well, because we’ve been, I’ve been reading, I’m, I, I, I’ll, I, I be ashamed to admit, I don’t know when you started it, but I’ve been picking up the last couple of posts, so they’ve been very insightful. It’s only been a couple of weeks. Thank I’m so God. I put myself out there and it will work.
I’m sorry, go ahead. Yeah,

Tammie Lister: I’m just starting to write just generally about where could WebPress go in the now and the next. Oh yeah.

David Bisset: Okay. I’ll throw that into show notes as well. Just some thoughts. Yeah. Well, you’ve always had some good thoughts. I think it’s worth sharing. Simon, where can people be finding you?

Simon Kraft: I think the easiest is https://simon.blog/ . Yeah. Yeah. I was an early adopter.

David Bisset: Um, you don’t have to rub it in, but Okay.

Simon Kraft: And I think I’ll link to basically all the other things from there. So I won’t try and, uh, spell out my masteron username and domain thingy.

David Bisset: Sorry. Please don’t, because it sets off my Amazon Echo for some reason when you start saying master on things. Nope, we’re good. All right. We’re fine. Uh, yes. Yeah, Simon Dolo. Wow. And you’ve got an English translation too. Oh, that’s great. Last crappy Twitter in beds, please. Ooh, I’d like to read that one. All right. So Simon Dolo for you. So, um, just if you’re hearing this and you wanna follow me, um, best place to go would be either david bis.com or David bi.social.

But thank you all for coming. Your time is precious. Greatly appreciate it. And, uh, we will talk later. Thank you.

Simon Kraft: Thank you. All right.

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the 20th anniversary of WordPress.

Today is a little bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s an episode all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens and Jess Frick, with David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

They cover many topics, and it’s great to hear so many varied opinions about what’s been of importance in the evolution of WordPress.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you, David Bisset, Sarah Gooding, Aurooba Ahmed, Masestro Stevens, and Jess Frick. 

David Bisset: Well, welcome everyone. Uh, thanks for coming. This is the one of a few podcasts to celebrate the 20th anniversary birthday, christening, whatever it is you want to call it, of WordPress. Uh, yes. 20 years old. That’s it’s, it’s just barely attending college at this point. Isn’t that great? We have four sweet people with me here that I wanna introduce tonight.

We are going to do a, kind of like a news draft. So we are going to pick the favorite WordPress moments of a couple of categories, and we are going to pick them so that if, um, So if somebody picks something that, that, that the another person had on their list, that person that comes after them is gonna pick something different.

So you’re gonna hear unique things coming out of every one of our guests this evening. So let’s, let’s start our introductions. By the way, random.org picked our, picked the order. This is going in so that I am not playing favorites. Aruba, you are first on our panel. Tell us about yourself. Hi everyone.

Aurooba Ahmed: I’m excited to be here with all these lovely people.

I’m Aruba, I’m a WordPress developer. I build plug-ins, websites, all that kind of good stuff. And I’m up here in, uh, by the Rockies in Calgary, Canada,

David Bisset: the Rockies. All right. Next on our list is Sarah Gooding. Hello, Sarah. How you doing?

Sarah Gooding: Hi, David. Thanks for inviting me. Um, I’m Sarah Gooding. I’m the editor at WP Tavern.

I’ve been there, it will be 10 years in September. Um, I live in Florida. I moved there two years ago, um, during the pandemic when my husband’s job changed and we moved down here and yeah, still love WordPress. After 20 years

David Bisset: you’re well working. Yeah. You know what, um, Aruba, how long, when did you first, uh, get into WordPress?

Aurooba Ahmed: Um, I would, I think it was 20, it was 2008 or 2009.

David Bisset: Okay. So about, about the same time as me. So I don’t know, somebody will do the math in the second. Sarah, how about you?

Sarah Gooding: I think it was around 2006 for me, but that was maybe just like trying it out. Okay. So like, um, when I started working in WordPress, it was 2008, 2009, so that’s when I started in years.

Yeah. Making websites for clients and. Things like that.

David Bisset: So, uh, yeah. So like, so Jess, you are up next. Can you tell us in your introduction to how long, at the end, how long you’ve been with WordPress? Absolutely.

Jess Frick: Uh, I’m Jess Frick. Thank you for having me, David. Um, I am director of operations for Pressable, and I have been playing with WordPress since 2008, working professionally in it since 2010.

David Bisset: Wow. It’s 2010, so we are, so it’s the oldest I, I’m per, well, I’ll introduce myself a second. Maestro. Yeah, you’re up, you’re, you’re, you’re fourth, uh, in the order. It’s chosen by random.org. So why don’t you introduce yourself, sir.

Maestro Stevens: This is random.org that you keep pointing to.

David Bisset: Yes, I am not. Thank you, David.

Maestro Stevens: Yeah. Uh, my name is Maro Stevens. Um, I guess I am the preemie, the youngest person on this panel when it comes to WordPress. I started my, um, Uh, WordPress Journal in 2018.

David Bisset: Maestro, can you put yourself a little bit closer to the mic?

Can you hear me? Can you hear me better now?

A little bit better, right? Guys?

Girls? Mm-hmm. People. Humans. Yes. Okay, go ahead, Maestro. I’m sorry. So, yes,

Maestro Stevens: I started in 2018. Um, so I guess I’m the youngest person on the panel when it comes to WordPress and uh, I’m an agency owner of the Iconic Expressions.

David Bisset: Great. Well, yes, young, young Whippers now, but, but that, that does give us a perspective though, cuz us old timers like to, like, to remember the, the good old days.

So we need, we need some young blood. Um, so let, oh, that makes me fifth in the, in the rotation. In case you don’t know me, um, consider yourself very fortunate, but for those who may want to learn more about me, I’m David Bisset um, I’ve been worth, I think I’ve been with WordPress since about 2006 or 2007 ish.

Um, 2008 is when I founded with some help. Where? Camp Miami. So I was with about WordPress for about a year and a half prior to that. So that’s kind of like how I do the math. Uh, I currently work at Awesome Automotive. I currently had a project, uh, WP Charitable, um, which was required by Awesome Automotive last year, but it’s a, but for the longest time I have been a freelancer.

I’ve been a employee, uh, employee and owner of a number of companies. Um, also a member of, uh, uh, post status. So I’ve been doing, I do, I’ve done a whole bunch of things. So that is our panel for this evening. Um, so why don’t we get started? And again, we are looking at the last 20 years of WordPress. So when, so that is certainly a lot of history to cover.

And of course some of you are gonna be aiming for certain years and others will be aiming for others. So I’m gonna be very surprised tonight if any of us snags someone else’s picks in terms of news. And what we have this evening is that we actually have three categories that we are going to try to cover this evening.

And, um, I kind of, I usually don’t like to give categories or, or, or themes per round. If we have time after these three, we’re gonna do arou, uh, I’ll bring out your dead or, or, or whatever is left in our pockets type of a thing. But I thought with 20 years of WordPress, That is so, um, that is so broad to cover that I, it was almost impossible probably to, I wanted to make it a little bit competitive, so I kind of narrowed little things down to at least three categories.

So the first category that we’re gonna cover is a, a memorable WordPress release or something within a WordPress release, any WordPress release. Then that was our first thing that we wanted to cover. So, Aruba, let’s start with you, um, category WordPress releases. So what, what was your pick for your memorable WordPress release in the last 20 years?

Aurooba Ahmed: That would be Thelonious WordPress 3.0, which was really the first WordPress release that I paid attention to when I first started using WordPress. And it made a big splash in the world of blogging. I remember there was this really big blog called A Beautiful Mess. They came out with this course called Blog Love Design, and it was all about like using the new 2010 theme, which is when those, you know, 2010, those style of theming for default themes started.

Oh. And using that to customize it and uh, create something really cool and you could now create custom menus for the very first time. And multi-site was merged. I mean, it was a really, really intense release that paved the way for a lot of what we think of WordPress, like core default. Of course WordPress has this sort of features, you know, but before that it didn’t have them.

David Bisset: I totally forgot about multi, uh, multi-site. Um, and I, and I didn’t know that three cuz remember prior to that, um, it was two separate products, which was kind of weird. Yeah. Right. If you wanted WordPress, it’s weird, you wanted to download WordPress, fine. But if you wanted to download WordPress M U.

That was a separate download

Aurooba Ahmed: and it was like a whole thing to try to set it up. And with WordPress 3.0 it became a lot easier to make the switch if you ever wanted to turn a single site installation. It’s, it was still a process, but way easier with WordPress 3.0.

David Bisset: Who remembers, who remembers WordPress when that came out?

Jess?

Jess Frick: Oh yeah. Aruba skunked me on the first one.

David Bisset: Oh really? Yes. You got sniped. Really? You were gonna pick three? Pick 3.0 Wow.

Jess Frick: It’s literally the first one on my list.

Aurooba Ahmed: Oh. Milestone release. Yes.

Jess Frick: Incredible taste

David Bisset: and, and a nice round number too, which for WordPress you can’t always guarantee. Right now there’s another round number that I’m not gonna talk about that, that’s probably pretty significant too, but, okay.

So Aruba Robot, WordPress 3.0 is your, is your first pick what in a snipe right out of the gate. So congratulations on that. Alright, so Sarah, you’re up next, me and, um, your memorable WordPress release.

Sarah Gooding: I think probably one of the most memorable ones for me was 5.0

David Bisset: and that’s the other one.

Sarah Gooding: Yeah. Um, 5.0 is such a, a big release.

Um, Especially leading up to it, all the agencies and freelancers are trying to get their themes and plugins ready so that they’d be ready to go with the, you know, with the latest and greatest that WordPress had to offer. And it was such a, it was a big leap. Um, and then the, the timing of the release was like right at WordCamp us, and I think it missed some of its, its dates and so they had previously identified, um, like, if we missed this date, we’re gonna push it to January so that we’re not doing the release while everyone’s traveling.

But then, um, Matt switched it, I guess at the last minute. He’s like, no, we’re going for it. And yeah, there was this up, there was just, you know, a, a huge outcry with, you know, people who were frustrated and they’re like, why do we have to push it so hard? And it was just, it was like, It was like giving birth.

I think, you know, it was, you’re, you’re just going through this process and it was, of course, it’s gonna be difficult at times. And, you know, eventually everybody’s on board and everyone’s working together, um, releasing their tutorials, their open source stuff to help people, you know, get on board with the block editor because it was, it’s probably the, the largest technical leap that our communities had to navigate of, of all time, I think I would say.

And, um, it was an exci, it was really exciting time. I mean, I was, every day there was, there were articles to write about what people were thinking and feeling at the time, and there was a lot of frustration, but also it was, uh, it was just something that needed to happen because our editor had been, had been looking dated for so long and we needed to make that big jump.

So I think that’s probably one of the most reme memorable ones for me in, in recent memory.

David Bisset: Yeah. I’m gonna go on, on a limb. For me personally, say that was probably the most controversial WordPress release. Period. Yes. I, I worked for a plug-in company at the time and I was literally making changes to our plug-ins release to get into the repo in the ho in my hotel room.

So I’ll just kinda leave it at that in terms of how much stress that, uh, and I think a lot of people were doing pretty much the same thing. So I have to say that I think, uh, the number one most stressful word press release was for me, 5.0. Uh, I can’t imagine it was probably stressful for Matt and everyone else too.

Most controversial though, I think, at the very least for, for that. And I think it’s still 5.0 down to this day. You just remember the, the nu the version numbers just branded into the My brain, so 5.0. All right. Great. So now it’s gonna get interesting. Sarah. Swipe my number two. So Jess, um, can you think of a enough it literal second one.

Poor Jess.

Jess Frick: I just wanna say though, for, you know, WordPress three, what was cool was the, the editor changed. Mm-hmm. And that was what made me go full-time and WordPress. That’s when it started to be pretty enough for me to play with it. Purdy. And then it was pretty though, and it got prettier. Um, I have a note here that it was 3.7 when WordPress became the most popular CMS in the world,

David Bisset: huh? Accord, according to Matt,

Jess Frick: uh, according to WordPress history.

David Bisset: Okay, that’s fine.

Jess Frick: Um, I think it was built with, it was through, built with. I’ll take

David Bisset: their word for it.

Jess Frick: I’ll find the link for you for the show notes. But yeah, that, I thought that was significant because that was just when I feel like the entire editing experience changed.

Um, But then also agreed for WordPress five. Um, I remember, uh, WP 1 0 1 was one of the big sponsors, and they pulled out of the show because they had to redo all their videos.

Sarah Gooding: It was, it was chaos.

David Bisset: So, to be clear though, yes. Are you picking which WordPress version are you picking? Or have you

Jess Frick: Well, they, those were my two.

David Bisset: Oh, those were you too. Okay. I’m sorry.

Jess Frick: Talking points, but since I can’t pick either of those, I’m gonna say the first all women and non-binary release of 5.6. Ah,

David Bisset: okay.

Jess Frick: That I feel like we’ve got another one coming up too.

David Bisset: Mm-hmm. Yes. We can’t talk about the future.

Jess Frick: That’s, I know we’re, we’re looking

back right now.

We’re just looking back.

David Bisset: Yeah. So WordPress 5.5 0.6 was a major milestone too. In terms of, in terms of that. And I think it’s set, set pretty much a, an example of how those are going to roll in the future. Like we have a second one coming up. Um, did anybody here participate in that? No. Okay. Kind of, well, we kind, we were rooting for the side, but there was, there was so much diversity in that release.

I was, I was very glad to see that, not, not purely from a diversity angle, but as much as just there was excitement and contribution in general because of that. Yeah. And the more that you can expose contribution in general, I think the better off the WordPress project is even when we quote unquote went back to, after that, we went back to, I, for lack of a better word, a normal release or a, a standard release theme, which is no theme at all.

It’s, it’s basically, I went say hand. So Jess 5.6, excellent choice. Maestro, we come down to you. I, I I, I w I’m very interested to hear what your pick’s gonna be cuz this, these were the top three I could think of off the top of my head. But, uh, go ahead. I haven’t been sniped officially, but, uh, because I knew there were gonna be people that picked it anyway.

But Maestro, what is your favorite, or what is the most memorable WordPress release for you?

Maestro Stevens: I feel like I just got sniped right now. Um, two times. Uh, Jessica hit one on the head, um, and you kind of was alluding to one, but I’m gonna go with 5.5. If we gonna go with points. Let’s go with the point system.

I’m going with 5.5.

David Bisset: Okay. Um, that, that’s a, that’s a release. Points of releases.

Maestro Stevens: Points of releases, right? The point of release. Yeah. So, oh, I’m gonna take a different direction and go with 5.5 because it was, it was a release that I felt affected a lot of people’s reason for, you know, being, uh, hired or paid for maintenance because it involved auto updates and once that came out it screwed up a whole bunch of people’s, you know, um, source of income or reasoning or opportunities because I know there was a lot of resistance and pushback when people were saying, well, I don’t need you anymore cuz I can auto update my own site.

So, um, that’s what I would say was one of the biggest ones for me.

David Bisset: I, I actually had someone who went along that same path, but fortunately they used, they used bad plugins, so they’re, so they turned those auto updates off pretty quick. It actually reminded me, and I don’t know what version to this is off the top of my head, but I remember when auto updating WordPress itself was a big controversy.

Um, and I don’t, I’ll figure it out what the version that was, but I remember na for you, for those of you who may remember Nathan, he’s still with us. He’s just not with the WordPress project anymore. Directly for over like a year and a half explaining the concept of WordPress auto updating on major versions.

There was a lot of. Controversy, um, pushback a little bit in terms of do we want to auto update this much of the web? So I, so I can understand that for plugins, right? You know, I, you know, it’s, I think it’s taken time because people paid for WordPress updates too. Like, they’ll just say, Hey, can you just update?

And, you know, they would probably update the plugins at the same time. So, yeah. But you know what, I think in this day and age, there comes a time to evolve. I don’t think, I think auto updates aren’t on many sites for very good reasons, especially probably governmental and educational sites. But 5.6 auto updates did cause a blip in the timeline, right?

So that’s a good choice. I think that’s pretty good. And I totally actually forgot about that.

Aurooba Ahmed: So I, it was WordPress 3.7 when WordPress could auto update.

David Bisset: See that? That to me would’ve been my second choice because it’s now, now, now it’s, I guess it comes down to me, my turn. Um, that would’ve been my second choice because I remember going to so many conferences going to the conference in Arizona, that name, now I’ve Page Lee conference and I’m forgetting in the loop.

No, no, it’s, although they think they talked about it there as well, but, um, yeah, I’ll think of it in a second. I’m just drawing a blank. Uh, it’s, it was PressNomics. PressNomics. There you go. Um, I think it was PressNomics, but I do remember attending a couple of conferences and Nas was there on stage or something, trying to explain how they have been talking to a whole bunch of people about WordPress updates and auto updates and people were scared, so, uh, not scared, concerned, whatever word you wanna throw at it.

And everything’s fine now. So the plugin thing is gonna stray now, but, Because remember, I’ve been with WordPress a long time. I noticed no one went back to the one point WordPress releases. So I’m going to pick WordPress 1.5, which which came out in February, 2005. That release came with pages, comment, moderation, tools, and Kubrick.

Does anybody remember Kubrick? Maestro? You probably don’t. That’s okay. But Kubrick.

Maestro Stevens: Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick, or

David Bisset: the theme was named after him, but Google Kubrick and turn on Google images and you’ll see a blue. What the internet basically looked like in terms of blogs for like, for like seven years, cuz everybody was using Kubrick.

Um, when WordPress came out, this was before like the two thou, the, the, the year themes came out. You’ll see it, you’ll see it. Um, it, not only that, but it also came with a new theme system. That’s when WordPress themes came out in WordPress, 4.1 0.5. And Matt announced themes with these words. And I quote in WordPress 1.5, we’ve created an incredibly flexible theme system that adapts to you rather than you expecting to adapt from it.

You can have your entire web log. Remember those words, run through a single file just like before, or you can literally have a different template for every single different category. How far we have come from a site editor today, from to February, 2005 when WordPress 1.5 came out. I mean, for me, Paige’s was.

The biggest deal, um, because I, and this is the version by the way, that I actually jumped on board WordPress full-time with, was WordPress 1.5. Um, coincidentally because I think prior to that I was trying, I was just at the point when trying out other brow browsers, it was movable type. There was PHP, nuke, I forget what else was out there, but like, I needed something, but I didn’t need a blog.

I needed something to build a client’s website with. And you really couldn’t do that without pages. So when 1.5 came out, pages was the chef’s kiss back then, really young chef’s kiss back then. So anyway, my pick is WordPress 1.5, so that was round one. A little bit of more, uh, sniping than I thought was was gonna happen.

But let’s go ahead and just not waste time and moved around. Two, our round two category that, uh, we picked out was, um, I think most memorable WordCamp. So just to clarify this for the audience, um, this could have been a work camp experience or it could have been the, the work camp itself. Maybe, maybe the atmosphere around it, the community around it, whatever.

Um, as long as it was a memorable, your, your most favorite WordCamp. Memorable experience. So, Aruba, we’re gonna start with you on this. Sure. And if anybody gets sniped on this, I’ll be blown away. But go ahead, Ruba. You go ahead. Start.

Aurooba Ahmed: Okay. I’m not sniping anyone with this one. I’m pretty sure. No, I’m like a hundred percent sure it would be word pit.

WordCamp Calgary. So my hometown’s WordCamp in 2016, which was the very first time I spoke at a WordCamp. And it was also the first time I realized that WordPress was more than just software. There was this whole community around it. And the vibe was, I. Like it was more about more than just code. There was a lot more going on underneath the surface that you might not know unless you are participating in these kind of community events.

Um, and I feel like, and it could just be because that’s when I entered the time, but that’s when community efforts really started to become more of a thing in WordPress world. You know? Uh, I think work, the first WordCamp US was just like a year before that and, you know, things were starting to gain steam.

So for me that was a very, very memorable time, very personally. And if it wasn’t for that WordCamp, I don’t even know if I would be here in on this podcast. So yeah.

David Bisset: I’m looking at the 2016. It’s, the theme was make period WordPress, period. It’s sing period. That was the theme of the camp. Mm-hmm.

Aurooba Ahmed: Because our Calgary theme for that year was music.

Okay. We had a city theme going on that year for a lot of stuff. And so the WordCamp, um, sort of theme sort of fed into that as well.

David Bisset: Make sure to include all, make sure when you provide me the links for all your items to include the mm-hmm. URL to the work camps. I’m assuming that, assuming that there’s still exist, this one does, uh, work camp, work camp, uh, websites were so, so straightforward and simple back in 2016, which Oh yes, is really, to me, that’s not that far.

That’s not that far ago. I’m getting old. It was a two day event on May 28th and May 29th, 2016. And this was your first, I didn’t even have a avatar.

Aurooba Ahmed: I didn’t even have a avatar at the time.

David Bisset: Do you remember your talk? They don’t have your gra Yeah. Your avatars missing. Yeah. Do you remember your talk?

Aurooba Ahmed: Yeah.

At the time, uh, it was, I think it was on theme development using Git. So like how to push your theme from your local environment to your hosting environment. But with just git, you know, deployment was not like a very sophisticated thing in the WordPress land at that time. Um, and I was using get hooks to create this sort of custom workflow so you could like push everything up.

And that’s what I did my little talk on.

David Bisset: Yes. It took a while to find it because shame on them. They’re schedules are graphics on the WordCamp website, so I couldn’t search through text. They’re JPEGs, so yes. Shame on you. Yes, they’re shame on you. All right, so hey, we were learning, we were learning. Moving, moving, moving on here before anything Sarah.

So what is your, Sarah, what is your. Best or most memorable Word, camp moment or work workout? No.

Sarah Gooding: Does this, this include, does this include WordCamp announcements or just like major announcements that were done at WordCamps? Or does, or is it just meant to be your favorite?

David Bisset: Most memorable. Most memorable to you.

And some people can take that is, I was there when this historic thing happened, or, you know, something personal to you. Now keep in mind our, what our next round will be, which I won’t spoil. So if it’s more closely related to that, then that’s the only thing maybe. But you know, I’m putting you on the spot here, I realize.

So just go ahead and share. As long as it’s, um, legit, legit work camp event. I, uh, event of some sort.

Sarah Gooding: My first WordCamp was WordCamp Vancouver in I think 2012. And I was a speaker there. It was a, it was also a buddy camp. And so I was speaking about Buddy Press and I think I talked about like how you could add little jQuery animations to make it cooler.

And I hardly, I can hardly remember because I was so hungover. Um, oh,

David Bisset: I just, oh, what year was this? What was the year was this year? This was 2012. Oh, so this was before the ch before the child.

Sarah Gooding: Oh yeah, before I had kids. And then I think the next year was Buddy Camp Miami or was that 2014?

David Bisset: Oh, don’t, don’t even get me started.

Sarah Gooding: And I brought my dog to that WordCamp and it was my first time in Miami and somebody offered me like a hundred thousand dollars from my dog, or they offered my husband and he wanted to say yes and, but he knew that I’d be so angry.

David Bisset: Um, I can see why that one came in second place though.

Sarah Gooding: Yes, buddy Camps were my first entrance into Ward Camps and those were the ones that I tried to make it do and, um, really enjoyed the most.

Meeting all the people I’d met through, uh, buddy Press and in the forums and contributing and I miss. And, uh, those were very memorable for me.

David Bisset: I miss Buddy Camps, so if anybody who doesn’t know what a Buddy Camp is, is basically like a conference within a conference for Buddy Press. If you don’t know what Buddy Press is, go to buddy press.org.

But it’s software that’s still maintained by, officially by Automatic. It is a social platform. It is the sister project. I, I’ve always considered it’s sister project of BB Press, which is a form plugin, but we don’t go into that. But yes, we did. I forget we had for one or two years Buddy Camps in Miami too, but Vancouver 2012 where Sarah gave her first talk, can’t remember it cuz the brain cells are destroyed, so she’ll, we’ll have to take her word for it.

That’s great. That’s, I always like it. What was, what was your favorite WordCamp? The one I can’t remember. Dude, well, I

Sarah Gooding: remember, I

David Bisset: remember it, but alcohol poisoning here.

Sarah Gooding: I met so many people there for the first time I met Matt Mullenweg, j Tripp, and you know, like there were a bunch of lead developers there just back then, like not, you know, the work camps weren’t huge.

They were really small and it was exciting to, you know, meet the people who were working on WordPress. For real.

David Bisset: Yeah. Back then, the WordCamps were so few and far between when you went to one, chances are most of the core contributors we’d be there. You know, it was because we had to travel. Um, and the website is just as does still exist, October 13th, 2012, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM at a, at Barnaby campus, Bernabee campus.

However, and by the way, when, when, if you’re listening to this, go look at these, um, old work camp websites, links that we’re sharing because you want, I’ll, you’ll get a kick of the people that we’re sponsoring them too. And their logos, if they still exist today, you get to see their old logos and if they don’t exist, you get to see who was uh, sponsoring work camps back in 2012.

So, Sarah. Yeah. Work Camp Vancouver gets my thumbs up because it’s got a buddy camp attached with it. Eventually we will get to a work camp in the us. So Jess Jessica, is that gonna be you? It’s gonna be me. Okay. We’re, what were camp is most memorable to you.

Jess Frick: So I actually went outside the box on this cuz I didn’t know how it was gonna play out.

And so I’m coming at it from a different side. Favorite themes and the swag that got away. Favorite themes? Hmm. Favorite themes. I absolutely loved WordCamp Orlando. I’m a fellow Florida in here, Uhhuh. Um, I absolutely loved WordCamp Orlando 2015, which was Harry Potter.

And then 2018 was space with nasa.

Cool. So, yeah, definitely my favorite word, camp themes. But then the swag that got away, I wanna honor you, David. It was those WordCamp Miami lunch boxes.

David Bisset: Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Jess Frick: Oh no, you’re gonna tease me with it.

David Bisset: I’m telling, find it in a second now. You see, I’ll find it in a

Jess Frick: second. All the cool swag everybody has.

And those were the ones that I was like,

Aurooba Ahmed: oh, I don’t know where,

David Bisset: where they’re within or where somewhere. Yeah, I, I will put a link, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but I’ll send it to you. I, we actually have a, um, I have a picture of them on my old blog. Um, so if anybody’s wasn’t aware, so I’m, I’m confused.

So the Harry Potter one is the, is the one you want, right? Is is your pick. Right. But you’re

Jess Frick: Well for theme,

David Bisset: for themed. Oh.

Jess Frick: For theme the way that you, you know, cuz most of the WordCamps will have like a cool theme. And so obviously I’ve gotta stick with my hometown glory and go, you know, Harry Potter versus NASA Thai.

Um, but for the swag that got away, definitely WordCamp Miami.

David Bisset: We had an eighties theme that year. That’s why the lunch boxes Yes. It back you. I’ll see it, I’ll see it in a second.

Jess Frick: Um, it was like a Miami Vice thing, right?

David Bisset: Yes. There were multiple lunch boxes, so it depended on what you saw. We, we kind of put a lot of, um, not to turn this into Work Camp Miami discussion, but we put a lot of Easter eggs into our work camps.

So if we have a theme, it’s like, if you didn’t see the one sponsored poster of the Breakfast Club, then you. Didn’t you, you wouldn’t have known about it, and it was just special for that. But yes, so I, you know, we can only pick one. So I’m putting you down for Orlando 2015, but I’m very honored that your, that your backup, that your second place was WordCamp Miami. I’m, ooh, where? Camp Miami. What year was that? I like to say it was 2018. It was 2018 was it? I think for our 10th year. Um, yeah, but I was supposed to be there and I wasn’t. All right. Well, Maestro, uh, so far nobody’s hopefully taken your picks. So, um, what would, what WordCamp would you put up as your, as the one that you, uh, remember fondly of?

Oh, wait, we can’t hear you.

Maestro Stevens: Since I never technically attended a WordCamp. Um,

David Bisset: not even virtually.

Maestro Stevens: So I spoke at Work camps virtually in 2021, but I didn’t attend work camp as a attendee.

David Bisset: Were you a ghost?

Maestro Stevens: But I’m gonna take it to the left a little bit. Um, I would say no, I was not a ghost.

David Bisset: Okay. But you attend if you spoke, you attended?

Yeah. You just didn’t physically attend?

Maestro Stevens: I didn’t physically attend cuz that was the year that we had to virtually attend. So, um, yeah, uh, it

David Bisset: was north. Oh, so it’s a seance you attended, I mean, you, you were there?

Maestro Stevens: Yes. Yeah. Yes. Uh, attended, um, Northeast Ohio work camp in 2021. So, and what I mean by attendance, I’m talking about like, I didn’t just go there to go or attend, I was speaking, so that was the big part of my attendance versus just going to a world camp as an attendee, if that makes sense.

David Bisset: So that’s the one who stood out. What was your talk on?

Maestro Stevens: Uh, my talk for 2021 was, um, five. Look at my notes here. It was, uh, about modern marketing for, uh, minority and underrepresented businesses using WordPress.

David Bisset: And was that the first one you physically attended? The one you spoke on? Virtually? Virtually.

I’m sorry. Virtually, yes. I’m sorry. I’m getting my, see, that’s why my blood sugar’s low. I’m, I’m, I’m fasting right now and my doctor said as it wasn’t a good idea to come on a podcast while that was going on, so forgive me, but how did you speak at any virtually, have you spoken virtually before at anything before that?

Maestro Stevens: Never. Never a WordPress specific, uh, topic based scenario, but other things I had, yes.

David Bisset: Okay, so you did, so it wasn’t your first real, it wasn’t your first rodeo. Just a just a little bit different speaking in front of a different audience though.

Maestro Stevens: So prior to then, so I’m 36 years old. I feel like I gotta put this out here.

I feel like I don’t judge, I’m real young here. Like you, you try to call me out with the Stanley Cooper thing. So I’m saying I’m 36. My, uh, I, you’re

David Bisset: younger than me, sir. So you take, well, I’m, you take the ball and

Maestro Stevens: run with it. I’m saying this to say, um, I, I started the WordPress late, so I didn’t even know WordCamps existed prior to 2018, which all of you were well endowed into the WordCamp WordPress system.

So thank you. It was totally new for me at that time.

David Bisset: Well, are you looking, are you planning on tending another one?

Maestro Stevens: Do you want me to drop a secret?

David Bisset: Oh, yes, yes. I need the ratings.

Maestro Stevens: So, um, hope, I don’t know when this is gonna air, but, um, I actually am hosting a workshop at Work Camp Europe. Athens. Greece.

David Bisset: Well, there you go. Wow. That is a Well, that escalated quickly. That’s what, that’s amazing. Well, congratulations. Don’t, don’t say anymore cuz we don’t want to get you in trouble. So you are going to be, have you ever spoken out of the country before? No. Oh, so it’s gonna be, wow. I’m gonna watch the, uh, cam, I’ll, I’ll have to find someone to point a camera at you cuz get, get, get you in your most nervous moment.

Tune into an animated gift because my therapist says that’s what works best for me and my condition. So, very good. Very well done, sir. Okay. Well, northwest Ohio, they need some representation. So, Northeast, excuse me. Northeast. No, we don’t wanna, no,

Maestro Stevens: they’re, we’re serious about that now. N eo

David Bisset: now we serious about that.

We don’t wanna represent the northwest. Those sons of motherless goats, those people. This, that’s a, I can’t swear on this. All right. Northeast Ohio 2021. It is. And welcome to the, welcome to the 2020s. So, Uh, work camps on our list. So last ends with me. I’m gonna go with, uh, I I I didn’t wanna pick, uh, any work camp Miamis.

Um, I think that would’ve been way too easy if, if, uh, cuz I, I, I’ve been involved in the organization of that for a decade. I will say though, that work Camp Miami, I think Pat we already mentioned 2018. I, if I had to pick one of that, if I had to pick a second place, that would’ve been it. We had a thousand people at the FIU campus.

That was also the same year. The bridge collapsed. There was a bridge collapse at, at the, um, at the campus. Uh, there was some in like a day before the conference, a bridge spanning over a highway collapse that connected the school with the parking lot. And it was major pana. It was, they had to close the school.

Um, fortunately we were able to keep open. It was just pure madness. Uh, we had to coordinate with the. With the WordCamp committee to, to, to make sure things were okay. And communication got out and people were, it was, it was just a, for the first day it was really a big mess. And it was very sa It was a sad occasion too on top of it, cuz some people did, did lose their lives.

But on the, on the, uh, what helped, what helped deal with that is that we had over a, still over 1,011 hundred people attend that conference, which was the largest work camp Miami in one of the largest non regional work camps up to that time. We think that’s the one with the, where we did have our 80 eighties theme.

We had people dressed like, uh, various eighties stars giving, giving talks. So we asked, we kind of had a costume contest at the same time, um, and the swag. But since I can’t pick a work camp Miami, I’m gonna go ahead and pick work Camp West 2016. Just, I just, this is, um, I’m kind of cheating a little bit by going with the, um, Go.

Well, let’s see. Going with the, sorry, I’m just doing, I’m gonna have to edit this out.

It was the very first one, right? Actually, I got my picks mixed up. I got my, oh, I got my picks mixed up. So anyway, um, don’t worry, I’ll edit that part out. But we’re the, actually the work Camp Miami 20th 10th anniversary was my pick. I will find a way to edit this to make it sound coherent, but yes. Work Camp Miami 10th anniversary.

I got to pick my own work Camp Miami as my most memorable moment. And just to repeat myself, because I’m gonna edit out the part, I’m gonna delete the last part. Um, I got my work camps mixed in. So like I said, there was an 80 theme. We had over a thousand people come. There was that. That was that unfortunate incident.

The bridge collapsed. Um, so we got off to our rough start, but everybody, we, we couldn’t, we didn’t have our pre-party because of that incident, um, at the work Camp Miami. But Friday our workshops went off with a good start. Um, we had three workshops, I think like a couple hundred people came to those. Um, we had Matt show up for Work Camp Miami for the 10th anniversary.

Uh, he was in the neighborhood. He decided to drop by and we had at the very end, one of the most attended closing remarks, um, ever. We have a really great picture of it. I’ll, I’ll try to remember to put it in show notes. It’s a really good PR picture for any work camp, but especially for us. We also had like a two day kids club and anytime someone says, um, like, like what’s a good example for a kids club?

And for me personally, it was that two day kids club that we had at Work Camp Miami. And it, it really, like a lot of good things happened at that work camp from an organizer that I’m very proud of. But I will always look fondly at that 10th anniversary. The kids, the kids’ club or the kids’, um, workshops were the highlight because they, we had, we actually split it up between young, young kids between, I don’t know, between five and 10 or five and 12 or six and 12.

But we had one for the teenagers, the high schoolers, and the first day on a Saturday, they actually learned how to use WordPress. But on the second day we taught ‘EM marketing. So not only do they learning how to build WordPress websites, e-commerce websites, specifically on day one, but on day two they were taught how to market those websites.

Um, And that to me is a model for the getting the younger people more interested in the word in WordPress going forward. It’s not just, this is how you blog or this is how you move a block. Yes. But you really, these days especially need to teach the young people how it really applies to them when they, when young people, I’m gonna throw out some young kids’, kids’ terms here when they’re on the tos, when they’re on the tu toots, whatever, over in the Instagrams, like for, they’re not very hard concepts or networks.

Right? But, but even more so is like, how can I use this platform either to entertain myself or how to make money or how to get myself popular? Which hopefully when you get old enough, eventually it turns into how can I make a living off of this? Or how can I use this to my advantage? And the technology comes second to those priorities, right?

So, Our kids camp. That was the whole point of teaching kids, okay, this is how you build something. But tomorrow we’re gonna show you how you can market this and sell. If you wanna make any e-commerce story, this is how you market it. This is how you get into the search engines, or this is how you use these plugins.

This is how you create a business plan, which was actually part of the course. So anyway, work Camp Miami 10th anniversary, the eighties theme just ruled. Um, I wish I had a poster, um, but I’ll share the link in the show notes to a lot of the posters we took, like we had a back to the future theme for our sponsor posters.

It was just a really great time. So anyway, I digress. Hopefully I’ve covered over some of my mistakes and now you know what my next gonna be, but we Camp Miami 10th anniversary 2018 was my, was my pick on that. Alright, so now we’re in round three. Thank and this is why we didn’t do it live people. Round three last category, Aruba.

We are going to cover now the state of the word announcements. So you didn’t have to be there in person. Just to clarify, you didn’t have to be there in person. You didn’t even have to be into WordPress at the time, technically speaking. But if there’s anything historic, anything that stands out to you. Um, the favorite, Matt Moway, so this is Matt.

Matt was giving these in person up until Covid. So I believe his last in-person WordCamp, uh, state of the word was 2019. And I don’t think he’s done in-person state of the word since. Sarah could probably back me up on this probably, but I think he’s done virtual ones ever since, starting in 2020. And uh,

Sarah Gooding: I think he did, didn’t he do one in New York City or one or two?

He did in New York City with a small audience. It wasn’t like at a WordCamp, but it was like, yeah, yeah, you’re right. You’re technically, but, um, yeah, it wasn’t attached to a WordCamp.

David Bisset: You’re right. I, I misspoke. So not attached to WordCamp. Not a WordCamp. Yes. Used to be a U WordCamp Us. Um, Tradition.

Exclusive. Yeah, yeah. Tradition at the end, everybody would line up, get into the room, get into this big room, and people would approach the mics. Um, some infamous people would’ve questions every year. Um, and if you, sometimes you, sometimes you couldn’t answer, sometimes you couldn’t get to all the questions.

So, and then in 2020, I know he did a couple of virtual ones every year, and then I’m gonna guess 2021, he probably started, um, having them in the Tumblr office. I could be wrong on that. Mm-hmm. But it was a small audience. But ever since then, they, they were disconnected from WordCamps in 2019. Now your favorite, um, this is the announcement.

So you can pick, you can you all pick and pick the same state of the word, but you can’t pick the same announcement during the state of the word. So that’s, so that’s that, those are the rules. So Aruba, in case any of that made sense, What would you like to tell us would be your best, your, your, your favorite, most memorable state of the word announcement or a state of the anything mentioned at State of the Word, I should say.

Mm-hmm.

Aurooba Ahmed: So the very first WordCamp I went to, that wasn’t WordCamp Calgary was WordCamp US 2019. And that was very memorable for me. So it was the very first time I also saw a state of the word in person and the thing that really I still remember to this day. And it really drove home for me. What we are now doing with WordPress was when Matt told us that the slides were all made inside Gutenberg.

Wow. That every single one was using and they had just sort of finished live coding it. You know, Ella, one of the core contributors, she had built this plugin and it lets you basically use reveal js and have this block. And so each slide was just a block in this single document where Gutenberg page and it was full screen and it had like really lovely design, even had a little bit of animation and it was like, wow, you know, this, this is, it was such a clear demonstration of what we were capable of, what we were trying to aim for.

With the block editor and I just, it was, it was, it was a core or a press memory for me for sure.

David Bisset: I’ll try if, if you, when you send your links, if you, um, you people have done so much work enough, I really appreciate it. If you can, if you can find the video and find that timestamp to that mm-hmm. When you made that announcement, that would be great.

I almost wanted it that point to have WordPress be a slide maker. I’m surprised no one has really come out with the plugin for that since, or maybe they have, but that must be There is a plugin. Oh. To make slides out of

Aurooba Ahmed: the original plugin is in the repo and since then there have been multiple other plug-in plugins that, you know, let you create slides with WordPress that are out there.

Yeah. Well that’s, I’ve done it for a presentation myself. It’s really cool. Lots of fun.

David Bisset: Okay, so that was work Camp US 2019, right? Yeah, that’s right. The last in person one I, I remember. Mm-hmm. I remember. Mm-hmm. Being in the audience. I can’t remember that specifically cuz I was probably tweeting too fast.

Okay. Well great. That’s fantastic. So we still, we have the Gutenberg. Hey, turns out these are slides announcement from Work Camp US 2019. So Sarah, so you I’m sure covered a lot of state of the words at the tavern over the years. What was the one that stood out to you? Or what announcement or something brought in the state, in a state of a word, stood out to you the most?

Sarah Gooding: Yeah, I usually do a writeup every, every year for the state of the word. And, uh, 2014, um, in, at Ward Camp San Francisco. It was the last ward camp San Francisco. And Matt announced this is the last time we’re gonna be here and, uh, we’re next year we’re gonna continue with Ward Camp us. So that was like a, a major change.

Um, And it was kind of like WordPress was stepping into its global destiny, I felt like, because, um, he also at that time announced that it was a big turning point for the project because, um, the number of non-English downloads surpassed the number of English downloads of WordPress. Yeah. So the software was just getting more of a global user base.

And, um, he announced that basically they’d outgrown their flagship WordCamp and we’re moving it to a whole, a bigger one. And, um, we out, we outgrew I R C and we moved to Slack that year. So that was kind of a big thing. It was a major change for the project’s, communication tools. Um, and at that time, I think Fiber, the future had just started.

So he, he said during that address, this is what’s gonna take us from 23% to 30% or 40%, 23%. And it was so ambitious at the time. It was, I mean, who, who could imagine at that time that, that WordPress would be 40% of the web? And um, it was just an exciting time to be a part. I was, I was there at the WordCamp, um, but there was so much energy because WordPress was growing so fast and it was every year you’re gonna expect it’s gonna grow and grow and outpace all its competitors.

And uh, it was a great, it was just a great time to start getting involved because um, the energy was, was so good at that time.

David Bisset: Yeah, I remember the excitement about award camp us cuz it definitely, there wasn’t anything beyond a city level at that time. Maybe, maybe, maybe a few regionals, maybe, you know, along those lines.

But it was nothing on a continent. Well it’s not a continent, David, you gotta go back to school on a country.

Sarah Gooding: I think they might have, they might have done WordCamp Europe by then, I’m

David Bisset: not sure. Was Work Camp Europe first. I think it, yes, I think it was so,

Sarah Gooding: and there was kind of a rivalry for a while.

Seemed like, you know, WordCamp Europe is bigger, or WordCamp US is bigger. And then remember just back and forth every year.

David Bisset: Remember I remember WordCamp, I remember Matt saying that he wanted WordCamp us to be bigger than that. I, I didn’t think that, I didn’t think that was gonna be possible cuz just on geography alone, um, just because Europe is just so much bigger in terms of, in terms of that than a, than a US would, would, would be able to.

But yeah, so we did have Work Camp Europe, but, but really regardless of size work, camp US is a, is the flagship event of all the work camps, at least in my mind. And it’s not just because of size, it’s just because it was, I, I think because of that. Day in 2014 where it’s like, and I guess maybe, maybe it is a, maybe it is a United States centric thing for me, cuz I live in the US but it was kind of along the lines.

I’ve seemed like that was Matt’s home WordCamp. And as WordCamp US kind of progressed, taken two cities every year. Was it? It was, yeah, it was the same city two years in a row. Move on to a different city. Matt just seemed to embrace the, remember the boot on stage in Memphis. Um, he just seemed to embrace the, I mean, where Campy West was Matt, and it’s not, it was, it was not it, you know, the two seemed pretty closely linked together and although he did attend work Camp Europe, um, I don’t remember him giving a state of the word at work Camp Europe either moving forward.

He always did it in San Francisco and then kind of did it at us, um, for a while. So that to me was always like the home work camp because Matt was always. They’re doing his state of the word. That was, that was the, that was the central thing. And of cor of course, Europe was, was bigger, but it was, it was the WordCampy west that always seemed to be a special home for that.

So I, I guess that, does anybody ever, did anybody ever attend the last one in San Francisco in 2014? I, I was there. Yeah, I was, I was there too. I think that was the one where they had the fire alarm or the medical emergency or something too. Mm-hmm. And, uh, yeah, it was very tightly packed in there. Um, the state, when Matt did his state of the word, people were sitting, like, I, I was, I had, I had to get like there an hour before just to be in the front row and super glue myself to the seat.

Which was embarrassing because I didn’t bring a change of pants. So anyway, that’s a different story. I so work camps San Francisco 2014 when we announced work camp us among all the other things that Sarah mentioned too. So that is a very memorable war camp and what I can appreciate cuz I was there. All right, Jess, keep this train going along here.

What work camp, or excuse me, what state of the word announcement sticks out in your mind?

Jess Frick: Also exciting, but in a different way. 2018

David Bisset: WordCamp US 2018. Yes. It

Jess Frick: was as if the entire stage was surrounded by gasoline and half the audience had pitchforks, like the tension was palpable in the room. And everybody’s like, oh my God, what is he gonna say when he gets on the stage?

And he starts with this video of people just talking about how crappy the interface was on the old WordPress. And we’re like, yeah, actually he’s, he’s not wrong. And then they show. Guttenberg. That was when Morton got up and brought up some really reasonable questions about transparency, and I think that was the first time a lot of people really started thinking about, you know, how much transparency is there for contributors?

And, you know, what do you have a say in? And honestly, like, I don’t wanna turn this into like a Matt Fangirl moment, but honestly that was one of the times where I most admired Matt’s leadership of the project because I felt like he really stood in front of the team and took the bullets and then said, Hey, I hear you.

I feel you. Feel free to get involved and make, you know, informed opinions in our dev meetings and we’d love to have you, but otherwise maybe just hang out. Um, I, I feel, and that’s of course me cribbing it, but I thought that he handled it with. Grace and elegance. And I thought that at the end of it, people were a lot more, I feel like the vibe was a lot more relaxed and excited about the go forward.

You know, most of the WordCamp had, you know, built up this tension and it definitely felt a release after that. Um, yeah, I, I had been to other state of the words, but none really shined quite like that for me. Um, now Matt’s, Matt’s a great leader and I’m not just saying that because he’s, you know, essentially my boss, um, but also because he is my boss.

Um, but it really was a really great moment, I think, for the WordPress project. And that was when I really wanted to get involved into contributing. Um, cause you know, if you’re gonna cry for transparency, you should probably do something with it.

David Bisset: It took a lot of guts to probably get up there because like you said, this was the same event.

Where a couple of days before people were in their hotel rooms coordinating with teams to get their stuff ready for Gutenberg. Right. Um, controversy going forward and like, wait, I, the amount of discussion, because remember, you know, this was before where camp started, so once I think, I think when I think we got out of that mode of rush, rush, rush, rush, like updates happening every, you know, probably on Twitter we were just monitoring the, the entire.org forms was, was just nuts.

And, um, slack was nuts. Um, I think it was, it was Slack then I think, right? Yeah. It was whatever form we were communicating with, it was, it was, it was nuts. And then work camp started and then you had that. Like he’s taught, like that wasn’t the fir, that was the last thing at work camp us. Right? So you had hallway was, I remember having hallway conversations about the, and I won’t, I won’t go into it.

I mean, it was, it was more just nervousness than negativity, but it was just like, you know, people were on edge. And for Matt to have that state of the word and like in that kind of, um, I, it, it took a lot, it took a lot of guts to, for anybody to do that and, um, for anybody to ask questions. And that did lead to conversations with Morton and then from thereafter about transparency.

Does any, does anybody remember, um, that particular feeling in the community at that time?

See, seeing some nods there? Yeah, that’s, that’s okay. I wouldn’t have answered that question either vocally and been on the record. That’s fine. Uh, there’s too much, uh, uh, I, I think people forget. Like how hectic it was then. And I think because of the way Matt handled that, even with probably looking back on it, I think some things maybe could have been handled better in hindsight.

But, but you know what, what, when you look back on something, what’s, how does that differ from anything, anything else in terms of how you can handle anything better? I did make a notable, he did make a notable comment about more transparency. Yeah. Um, because honestly, up to that point in time, the reason why things weren’t so hectic is because it’s not as transparent as things are today.

And that’s, that’s how I looked at it. If everybody feel free to, you know, jump into here, I’m, but now that with especially Josepha, um, over the years being more transparent, the things on.org, I think a lot of that transparency would’ve taken us over time, a lot slower to evolve if it wasn’t for. How Matt handled that and the people asking him questions deserve as much credit as that.

But that was a very difficult time too, because the media, there was a lot of media attention on that state of the word outside of WordPress too. And I’m not sure if people remember that, but, um, I remember like news organizations and I, I don’t remember the, the ones that existed then probably don’t exist now.

So I don’t know what, but a lot of news organizations, this was in the news, is that the one where the mayor came on stage? I can’t remember. But this was on, this was in the news. This was, um, this was big news to the, to the entire internet that WordPress, whatever market share hold the time has launched This Gutenberg editor and Matt Longway was in the news was, was on lot of tech websites that were not WordPress related.

It was a big deal. So that probably was the most media attention, media focused. Hectic nervous ball of nerves type of state of the word that probably I can ever, ever think of. So that was definitely one for the history book. So where camp u s 2018 in Gutenberg.

Sarah Gooding: I think all that, that controversy was so healthy though, because you had all these really high profile contributors and business people who were like, no, this isn’t ready to ship yet and you’re giving us three days notice.

And it was, it was, it was a discussion. And, and Matt was very present there. He was in the dev meetings and he, he was back and forth and, and you gotta remember like all these people really grew up together in their careers. I mean, this is, some of these people have a 20 year history together. Yeah. You know, at least 10 or 15 years for a lot of the people who own the, these big businesses or have been contributing a long time.

And you know, some of ’em are real brave to speak up and be like, Hey, this isn’t cool. We don’t want releases like this in the future. And, um, You know, the, it’s amazing to see how the project, the project has changed over the years, and especially Josepha has been just amazing. But, but they, all these people have grown up together and they’ve, they’ve matured together and the project has matured and it’s, it’s really a cool thing to watch.

And, uh, I think controversies like that are, are good because it means that people feel free to talk to each other still. It’s not just some, some cold corporation style thing that the, you know, it’s a family and people are gonna speak their minds and, and it’s healthy and it, and I like that. It was an exciting time.

David Bisset: I’d be honest. I mean, to me, I think some people stuck I, the further away we get from that moment, which is, it was 2018, so that’s like what, five years from, it’s, it’s a distant memory now, but I know some people look back and instill with a bit of anxiety. Uh, so

Jess Frick: I don’t think 2020 and 2021 were real. So it really was just like two years ago.

David Bisset: Whenever some, i I, this will always be a word can, well, it’ll always be a time where somebody’s gonna say, well, you know what, back then this happened and it wasn’t great and blah, blah, blah. But it, it kind of like, it was definitely a, like a growing up point in terms for the whole community. It’s time to put our big person pants on.

And yeah, some Matt admitted some things were not, were his decision, but they weren’t, they weren’t right. But they were his decision. They took responsibility from ’em. And we have some of the things today. We have the trans, we have the transparency today and things today because of the conversations that came from that.

So, Um,

Aurooba Ahmed: we also have more contributors now because of it. I mean, I’m one of those people who was affected before that. I had never contributed to WordPress before 2018. You know, uh, the, the merging of Gutenberg decor was not just a moment of like a chapter change for the software or even for the folks who were growing up.

It was also a moment of it created space for new blood, which I don’t think really existed before. And I still think that, you know, we’re also doing work to make contr, uh, contributor stuff easier for everyone. But that was for me, a really big, like milestone. Like looking at it from, as in just coming into that community at that time.

Like, oh, okay, I, I could actually do something here too. You know? I don’t have to just wait for all these other people who’ve been here for the last, like, many years, these, uh, the legacy folks and, uh, and wait for them to do something. I could maybe do something too. So, and you’re walking. That’s something.

That’s how I remember looking into it.

David Bisset: Yeah. And you’re walking in brand new, like, why is everybody so nervous?

Aurooba Ahmed: Well, it was still nerve-wracking, right? Like it was also one of those things that affected, it was an economic. Problem because it affected people’s livelihoods in a very deep and impactful way that other updates didn’t necessarily do, or other updates before They did create that impact, but it was almost always a little bit positive.

But this one was like, it could be positive, it could be negative. It’s like a, like we took something that was like this and we said, oh, okay. It’s like this now. Like, what, what’s going on? Took a leap. So it’s different.

David Bisset: Yeah. And there was also the four phases of Gutenberg and very, mm-hmm. And then which, which, which kind of laid out the entire plan, which we are still going, we’re entering phase three as we speak.

So anyway, Maestro, we want to get to you, um, state of the word announcement or anything you want to tackle there.

Maestro Stevens: I’ll segue the, um, the phases of Gutenberg. I think that for myself and then with Aruba, what you were saying as far as the, uh, contributing to like bridge them together. I think it, I don’t know if it was 2020 or 2021, so anybody can help me out.

But I got really excited when Matt started talking about the collaboration. Um, that was something that, it was just super cool bringing Google Docs type features, you know, um, to WordPress. And for me, um, as a new contributor, that was, uh, in essence, um, I would say a part of, um, how I feel like other people can contribute that aren’t really WordPress savvy by being able to at least collaborate with other word pressers.

Um, that was awesome. I believe it was 2020 when he was, if I’m not mistaken, the, uh, instead of the word, um, when he had mentioned it. Cause I started watching them after they were, uh, they weren’t, you know, attributed to the WordCamps themselves.

David Bisset: Yeah. Collaboration’s big. Uh, we’ll find the, we’ll we’ll see if we can find the time set.

I honestly can’t remember. Like the four phases were always laid out and collaboration was always phase three, but I can, but there was very little detail in the very beginning, like 2018, what those phases were actually gonna be. So 2020 sounds about right cuz I, um, I remember sitting virtually getting more information about the collaboration stuff and over, over the years it’s gotten a little bit more detailed, but what about, well, Maestro, since uh, I, since you’ve been, you’ve been humbly listening to all of us Jabber about our old days.

What specifically about the collaboration stuff stood out to you the most? Why, why would you be excited about that particular phase? Why did that stick out in your mind?

Maestro Stevens: Well, I felt for a while it was kind of annoying, um, having to

get permission or kick somebody out. Of being able to edit the page. Ah, and that would like that, that hurt a lot of production time. Um, it made people have to communicate a lot more. It made you have to wait, um, if you are patient or not patient. It made you have to practice patience. Like you got kids. Um,

David Bisset: I kicked them out of their blogs all the time.

Maestro Stevens: Yeah, right. You know, so it was, it was, uh, for, for, for me and for some people that I knew, it was definitely a great, uh, aspect of them being able to work alongside. And so that was different for, um, me working with a designer and a developer. The fact that they can both, like if they can both be in, when he announced that if they can both be on the same page at the same time along with myself and we’re all kind of doing our own thing, we just have to wait for each other.

That to me was just invaluable. Cause I’ve been using Google Docs forever and I think a lot of people have, um, have, have gotten used to being able to like edit things in real time. And it was the real time factor that I thought was so cool. I had no idea. Word Press. Was going to do or could do?

David Bisset: Do you think that could be the next wow factor in terms of Gutenberg?

I mean the, I mean, we, full side editing is big, but to the outside world, I don’t think it has been as revolutionary because well, side editing exists, right, exists outside of WordPress. But I, correct me if I’m, I’m this, hopefully we get this out in a video form, but I, in case you’re listening to the audio, everybody’s nodding their head yes.

I just want to let that, I just wanna make that clear. Uh, but I’m imagining the collaboration more than just editing a Google Doc type of a thing. I, I’m hoping, I’m hoping that collaboration also means I’m seeing someone drag a block here while I’m dragging a block over there on the page. Big, my like.

Yeah, that’s the level. Like we think of collaboration as Google Docs, which is fine cuz we’ve grown up with that. Google has nailed that functionality and over the years other people have caught up. Even, you know, apple and other people took a while for them to polish that out. That wasn’t their strength.

But now, but now it’s, you know, like that’s table stakes now in terms of if, if you’re collaborating, if there’s any collaboration at all. Like unless you’re a journal app that is just you or the author, there has to be some sort of sharing or collabora, you know, live, you’re seeing someone else’s cursor on your screen, right?

It was built into Apple’s os later on. But Google pretty much set the, set, the standard moving forward. But you know, so that is a standard. So if that is done in WordPress, editing a document, editing text, uh, I’m hoping there’s more and I hope WordPress gets that, that wow feature factor. Kind of back, which is difficult to do when you do open source, cuz it’s not like you’ve kept, you can’t keep something hidden.

Right. And then release it, because that’s not, you’re not gonna get open source con contributors doing that. It’s all gonna be out in the open. So it’s not gonna be a surprise to us. But I’m hoping that you can start dragging blocks and building pages, like seeing things being built in front of you and just like, um, I think it was, was it was, was it, I forgot.

I’m sorry. What? Who was who? Who was com Uh, I think Jess said, I think it was you about like when go, that video started that guttenberg about all these people complaining by the editor and then you saw the new editor. I want to see a video like that when, when the, when the collaboration tools come and you just see live on a video or even live like this is, this is this whole, how about the slides were, somebody should just like, you know that that meme with the dog and the, and the, and the railroad tracks from a walls and grot.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know how he’s putting down the railroad tracks really fast. There’s a tr as he’s building it as the train goes. I would like to see that in slide form, in WordCamp, state of the word maybe, or something along those lines. Some live demo or live presentation or really slick video of really cool collaboration tools.

So I think,

Aurooba Ahmed: I think if you put collaboration and multilingual together in one video, it’s like p

David Bisset: yeah. It’s, I can understand multilingual and I understand people’s, like, why don’t you put multilingual before that? Because we really need it. We really need it. I can understand why it’s the last one because I think that’s the most complex part.

I think that could be the most complex of all, everything. And you, you wanna map your things out probably before you start breaking things up in terms of translations. But yeah, just imagine esp uh, I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves, but like, I, I, I’ll, I did like a what would be a, um, ooh, there, there’s a good question.

We could, we could probably end on real quick. Um, a spot on question, um, for me, Just real quick, um, my state of the word, um, was basically, uh, 2016 state of the word Matt. Matt, um, was featuring, uh, the year before 2015 was, and I can’t believe anybody picked this, but I’m not picking it, but he did say learn JavaScript deeply, I believe in 2015 and then tw in 2016.

He, and that’s probably his most quoted phrase of any state of the word, was learn JavaScript deeply in 2015. That’s why no one picked it. Yes, all of you, all of you should be proud of yourselves, but that’s not the one I’m picking in 2016, what happened was after I heard that in 2015 where Camp Miami was like four months away.

So I came back as one of the organizers and I got with the team and we made a learn JavaScript deeply track at Work Camp Miami based upon what he said because back then there was not a lot of focus on JavaScript and we needed to get up to speak to it real quick. And that’s what we did through that track.

But then the following work, uh, after that at Miami in 2016, Unknown to me. He, he put like in one of his slides, like a, um, let’s see, hold on a second here.

I’m gonna put it in our chat so you can take a look. He took a screenshot of the, yeah, thanks. You can s if you’re gonna laugh, okay. Mute yourself. Thank you. Everybody right now is, God, I hate you all. That’s a lot of hair gel. David. The sad part is it’s not hair gel. The, the point is, is that he took a schedule of where Camp Miami and he put it up there, which was fine cuz he wanted to feature p you know, us getting into JavaScript and listening to his advice every year earlier.

But that he found the worst possible picture of me and put it next to it. Now that’s bad for two reasons. One, because that’s not, I don’t think a representative of War Camp Miami cuz it wasn’t just me. Um. Other organizers were involved, but two, that was just a bad picture. And I remember you look so happy.

Well, I was young and I, I don’t know if I had kids back then, but the point is, the point is, is that I was in the audience and I saw it and I was live tweeting at the time and like, you know, I almost had to change my pants. It was, it was just the moment. And I c it was just the, probably the most embarrassing.

And I had people looking at me going like, man, you, you look just as just like that guy. And I’m going, yeah, that’s me. And uh, but so I got to be on a slide, just, you know, next time, you know, I wish my PR people would, would’ve coordinated with his PR people. So anyway, I’ll include a link to that picture in the show notes.

But that was probably like the work camp 2016 I got on a slide and I don’t think that’s gonna happen twice. So that’ll be etched in history. I’ll never get a better picture. Yeah, I look better. You know, we could use another slide. But anyway, that’s, that was my story. All right. So we went from us. We, so we, we went from 2019.

All of these were work camp uss, of course, except for San Francisco in 2014. So I think that’s not a surprise there. Um, actually 2020 was virtual, so not, not work camp us. So anyway, that was, that was fun. Now as we wrap things up here, is there, I’m gonna go in order one last time or one last time. If there’s anything real quick you wanna bring up, just like we can’t be as detailed as we were before.

There’s gonna be rapid fires. Is there anything that we didn’t bring up one or two quick memories that didn’t fit into these categories? Aruba, we’ll start with you.

Aurooba Ahmed: Hmm. I can’t think of anything. I am very happy to not have gotten sniped and got all my memories in.

David Bisset: Okay, that’s fine. If, if you’ve got, if, if you’re happy, I’m happy.

Sarah, is there anything that, that’s, that, uh, you. That didn’t fit into those categories you’ve covered over the years that,

Sarah Gooding: uh, I have more that do fit into the categories, but, um, nothing outside categories. Uh, I had a couple other links that I thought were interesting, um, that were, that actually happened at WordCamp Europe.

Um, in 2017 in, in Paris. Matt announced that the Gutenberg plugin was ready for testing. And I thought it was kind of, kind of cool because he hadn’t been doing big announcements at WordCamp Europe. I mean, he was, he would usually save all the big announcements for WordCamp us. So that was like a major thing that the European WordPress community got to be first in on, or, you know, they got to hear the news first.

And then in, um, the next year, like one year later, I think it was June, 2018 when he unveiled the roadmap for how Gutenberg was getting into core. And it was just like months away, which started like every, all the people, um, were just scrambling to get ready at that point because he was like, okay, here it comes, we’re gonna go for it in 5.0.

And um, and that was an exciting time. I remember I contacted probably like 10 or 15 different people who had freelance businesses or agencies, and I said, what, what are y’all doing to get ready? And then I, I wrote this post about morphine. You know, some of, some people were like, I’m just gonna wait and see and I’ll see if anyone likes this block editor or not, and then maybe I’ll update.

David Bisset: Some people are still doing that.

Sarah Gooding: And then, you know, and then there are others who were like, oh, we’ve already dedicated an entire team to get us ready for Gutenberg. And we’re, we’re already, you know, they’re giving a very good, uh, just very good PR as far as their readiness for it. And, uh, that was a fun time.

So I thought that was cool that he saved, he had given both of those big announcements at WordCamp Europe years later. Once that was just, it was established as just, I think it was the biggest WordCamp for a long time.

David Bisset: Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. So, Jess, Jess, anything we missed?

Jess Frick: This might, this is probably gonna sound way cheesy when I say it than it is in

David Bisset: my head.

You’re on a panel with me. You’re safe because I’ll Okay, cool. Standing next to me, you are the opposite of cheese. What?

Jess Frick: So, you know, uh, Mr. Rogers, you know, he’s quoted as saying, you know, when he was afraid his mom would tell him to look for the helpers. And when I think about the history of WordPress, I think about the people in the community and the countless, you know, GoFundMe and somebody gets sick and they can’t work, or their kid gets hurt, or, you know, during C O V I D when so many different things were upside down.

And, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the really cool, about the really technology, but what’s been amazing to me is to see people that have come together over the years and all the cool things that they’re doing, um, to support one another. Um, even as recently as like last week, everybody was pitching in to help somebody who somehow found themselves homeless.

You know, it’s, it’s been really, really cool to see so many good people join together under the umbrella and all the good that we do for open source and personal. I told you it was gonna sound kind of cheesy. Uh, but I mean it,

David Bisset: Well, I, there’s so many different aspects of the WordPress community that could fit into, um, Kim Parsons is, do I have that name right?

Yes. Okay. Sh not the first ex, not the first example of, of a member of the community passing away, but I bel But it was, it was, she was well known by a lot of people and which started the, um, the WordCamp Scholarship. Scholarship. Right. I’m sorry. Thanks. Mm-hmm. Thanks. So, but she is just one example of so many, like we have scholarships for, for, for diversities now, now for other people.

There was, um, the, I can think of a half a dozen people that have passed away over the years too, that have gotten there every year. We remember them. Um, and that’s very kind of, Very unique for a community for to do something like that even on, um, regardless of the scale. So yeah, the community really kind of pitches together.

And we also kinda have fun too. We, we, we do podcasts like this, um, you know, you know, of our own free will except for that one person and blackmailing to be on this panel today. But other than that, we’re doing this because we are a tight-knit community. So, yeah, I think that’s great. I think that’s a great thing to keep in mind over the past 20 years, you know, and there’s, there’s, there’s drama, but I mean, it’s, it’s, we’re we’re still a collective group for the most part.

Um, so finally, uh, my

Jess Frick: Sarah mentioned earlier. People are growing up together.

David Bisset: Yeah. Bringing ki bringing their own kids to work camps. Right. Somebody, some, somebody supposedly conceived one at work camp I am at don’t that, so that’s not at the event. I meant during the weekend. Okay, we’re gonna have to edit that one out.

All right, moving on.

Aurooba Ahmed: Wait, wait. I take it back. There is one like length thing that I wanted to talk about

David Bisset: Uhoh, and that was when her eyes lit up. When soon as I started talking about conceiving children at work camps, her eyes lit up. You’re gonna have to go. Go ahead. Go ahead. You’ll ahead Back over.

Yeah.

Aurooba Ahmed: Yeah. Um, that was when Woo Commerce joined WordPress. That was a moment. Oh, it was a big moment, right? Because Woo. Commerce like woo themes, they were doing so well and they had become fast, become the fast, like the most popular e-commerce system in. Like e everywhere on the web and then automatic, uh, it was like the one, like a really big notable acquisition from Automatic before that there, I don’t know, I have no idea actually if they had done any other acquisitions before then.

But that one was like, it started the train of acquisitions a little bit and it was like, oh, we were Democrat democratizing publishing and now we’re democratizing e-commerce. And now it’s like democratizing like all kinds of other things, social media, et cetera. Right. But WooCommerce really, really began that sort of, um, moment in time.

Right. For automatic and like how it affected all of us in the WordPress community,

David Bisset: uh, au Speaking of acquisitions, I, you can’t go with 20 years of WordPress without talking about the acquisitions that’ve made in the last decade. Right. We saw the first decade of all these people that were starting companies like, um, like, um, Saed, Saed Automotive, but also Pippin and mm-hmm.

Uh, like all these people who I’m drawing punks on right now, the first 10 years you would see them at the work camps and then most of them have moved on or sold their businesses or become acquired. And who’s, you know, the last, especially the last five or six years, so many WordPress companies that we saw give birth in the early part of the WordPress days now are more mature or they’ve been absorbed into larger companies and people that were working out of their basements are now like managing like dozens of people at height level companies, um, and, and the hosting companies too.

Right? Remember when hosting was so immature in the 20, uh, in the early days? Oh, yeah. And, uh, acquisitions. I, when you, when you said that I remember, um, I think it’s more recent, but in August of 2019, Tumblr Joint Automatic, which was huge. And yes, I think we still have to see the ultimate fruits of that labor because we’re starting to see Gutenberg and Tumblr now.

Mm-hmm.

Aurooba Ahmed: And in day one, which was in the news pretty recently as well, the journaling app.

David Bisset: Yeah. So, and then I think that if anything is going to outlive, like what Matt said, if anything’s gonna outlive WordPress, it’s gonna be Gutenberg. Right. That’s, that’s, that’s the ultimate. So it’s so exciting to see how automatic is automatic’s non WordPress business.

Not directly. We used to think of word of automatic as wordpress.com, but over the years with its acquisitions, it’s, it’s now, it’s now so much more, but it’s affecting WordPress in ways that we never, I didn’t think we are, would realize, uh, 10 or 15 years ago. So, Micra, are you with us?

Maestro Stevens: I am back. Sorry about that.

My computer is freezing, so I had to restart it.

David Bisset: No problem, sir.

Maestro Stevens: It’s overheating.

David Bisset: Oh yeah, you’re, you’re, you’re just too hot. All right. So, Hmm. Okay. I’m gonna have to, I wanna, wanna bet with my wife just now. Just thought I’d let you know. Um, said something like that. All right. So maestro, uh, bring it home for us.

Is there anything about, uh, that we may not have, uh, touched on tonight in terms of your, of, of terms, of things in the WordPress history, especially from your perspective?

Maestro Stevens: I can’t think of anything. I think that we’ve touched on mostly everything I would say for me specifically, uh, back in 2020 when I was introduced to, um, o one of one of the plugins, themes and, and, uh, block plugins that I use in cadence, it was a very, um, revolutionary experience for me.

To say the least. I was using Elementor, I was using a page builder before then. People were talking a lot of crap about Gutenberg, a lot of controversy. I’m just keeping it real with you. Um, people were saying it was ready, it wasn’t ready. And then, um, you know, after testing a whole bunch of different, um, plug-ins and themes and they’re all, you know, a whole bunch of are, are so great.

But if I wanted to invest into an ecosystem, kind of like Apple, unfortunately, I thought my investment with Apple kind of suck right now. Cause I’m like, I got this expensive computer that just overheated, but I digressed. Um, uh, it was keep blowing. That changed everything.

David Bisset: Well, thanks. Okay.

Maestro Stevens: Yeah. That changed everything for me.

David Bisset: Well, that’s fantastic. Well, I mean, I think you’re, I I think we have a very good representation here and, and you especially because you’re coming in on the last couple of years and seeing it from that kind of different perspective with those kinds of eyes. Um, Is kind of, kind of now in 20 years, we’ll, we’ll be able to get from your point of view in like the mid midterm, you know, like the, the golden years, not the golden years.

The, uh, kind of a golden age we’re entering into, uh, WordPress right now. So very, very excited to have you back along with everyone else in a few years and see, and see if your MacBook survives so we can talk to you a little bit more. So I wanted to, I What’s that?

Maestro Stevens: Just, um, just to touch on what you just said real quick, I think that, um, based on what everybody has talked about, cause you just made a good point.

So if I can give any context, like I’m not an old schooler here, so I’m really trying to help with different type of, um, generation and new type of people. I’m just keeping them 100% honest with you. That’s the way, reason why I’m, I’m, I coin myself and I’m called the fresh Prince of WordPress because I’m trying to give a fresh perspective.

Oh, a lot people have no idea.

David Bisset: Does that make me the, um, Carlton I.

Maestro Stevens: Uh, that was a good one. I see where you’re going with that one. I know Will Smith here. I don’t slap people. Alright. Um, but still, uh, the whole point was is that people don’t know that it has evolved a lot and there is a lot of people trying to enter into, uh, WordPress without that understanding that it’s not what it used to be.

So I love having conversations with people like you all, cause I get both perspectives. I get people who have been there for 10, 20 years. Like if you have never heard of it trying to get it in and they’re like, I can’t do all that development stuff and all that code stuff and all that, and I have to teach them.

Like, it’s not that it’s not the same, you have that opportunity, but it’s not that. So I think that this is fun.

David Bisset: Yeah. And I, I. Maister and I, this is the first time we’ve been face-to-face. I, he actually reached out to an invitation that I left on Black Press, which again is one of the many examples of how the community is trying to address, um, all the different aspects of that it, that it can in terms of diversity and outreach and finding new people, young, old, whatever.

And I really appreciate you reaching out to me through there. Um, It’s, it’s great to have all these different kinds of channels. Um, at least it it, because not everybody is on post status. Not everybody is on Twitter. Not everybody is here for various reasons. We can only, we can only be in so many channels at once.

Right. And it’s personal to us. So, you know, I’m in my channels because it mean, you know, it’s because of me. My, my livelihood, my background. I’m in these certain places. I can’t be everywhere. And everybody else is different. But we overlap in such ways that finding you in finding you in that area was, was, was a very, very, very thankful that you reached out.

Um, cuz otherwise we wouldn’t have that kind of perspective and viewpoint from from, from that. So, anyway, I’m gonna go around and we’re just gonna close out. It was great having you all. And I want you, you can mention where people can find you on social or, you know, or, or, or whatever you wanna mention to bring up.

We’ll, we’ll start with Rupa first.

Aurooba Ahmed: All right. Well, I’m at Aruba pretty much everywhere, including a website, aruba.com. I’m also the co-host of a fun dev focused, uh, podcast called View Source, if you wanna check that out. View source.fm. And that’s me,

David Bisset: Sarah. Uh, it’s nice to meet you. I appreciate you Ruba coming on.

And I, I don’t mean to rush. I’m just, you get nervous when, when things close down and, um, you know that my kids are still locked in that closet and I, cuz and I really do need to feed them. So I’m, I’m not, I’m not pushing this along, uh, um, by, on purpose, but, you know, I’m getting a little nervous. Um, Sarah, I don’t know where, where people can find you.

Can you help me out on that?

Sarah Gooding: Uh, you can always find me at the tavern wp tavern.com and I’m on Twitter at Poly Plummer. I’m on Mastodon, Facebook, Strava. I’m on almost every social network, so get ahold of me any way you want. Slack. Um, I’m on post status and then the WordPress

David Bisset: Slack. Yes, I’m on a lot too.

Anything that doesn’t have my family, I’m there. I just wanna also say too special call out to WP Tavern. As far as l i when, I don’t know when it, I forget when it was established, but it was so early on. I think it’s, I think WP 2009, it is practically part of WordPress history. It should be put on a podium in terms of, of WordPress history media.

I think the tavern is, is top of that list. So I really, Sarah, you, we all the WordPress community kind of owes you a debt of gratitude. I know it’s not an easy job, believe me, I know Jeff was the one who, who started, we’re gonna have ’em on, on, on the other, on the other podcast. But you have been so instrumental over the years.

The entire publication has been instrumental over the years, covering the highs and the lows and the detail for the articles. You did a, did a terrific job. I’ll think Jeff on the other one. But I wanted to thank you personally here. You’ve been so much a part of the WordPress history just as much as the community and WordPress has.

Sarah Gooding: So thank you David. I appreciate that.

David Bisset: Thanks for that. Um, Jess, where people can find you. Oh God, I’m starting to sound like Yoda. That was barely a sentence.

Jess Frick: It was great.

David Bisset: Where people find you bee,

Jess Frick: where people find me bee, pressable.com, uh, pressable.com for work. Um, you can find me on the socials at renew.

Be, and I dunno, like, like the other ladies, I’m pretty much everywhere, so not hard to find. Okay. Not too many Jessica Fricks running around in WordPress. Oh, well that’s, that probab not too many Fricks in general, but

David Bisset: if, if I had enough energy, I could comment on that. Maestro. I know, Maestro,

Jess Frick: I tune it up for you.

David Bisset: Thank you. And I missed as usual, Maestro, where can people find you?

Maestro Stevens: I’ll piggyback off of Jessica. There’s not many people with the name Maestro Stevens. So if you Google me, I’m the one and only, um, and if you wanna find me, just look for me on LinkedIn.

David Bisset: Okay, that’s fine. Fantastic. You’re avoiding most of the socials like I should be doing right now.

I, and, um, I, if anybody wants to find me, um, as long as you’re not delivering papers to me, my, uh, you can find me, um, at david bi.com or David bi.social. Um, that’s where I pull all my social media into one WordPress website. So in case. Certain social media websites cease to exist, at least my post will be there.

You can also find me on post status and, um, I am doing a little, uh, news website called WP front.page. So, uh, with WordPress News with my daughter as we experiment. A little bit of that, if that’s, you may be able to, that still might be around by the time you listen to this, so go ahead and check that out.

Again, I want to thank my, my panelists. You’ve been great sports. We’re gonna have links to everything they talked about in the show notes for this. Um, and thanks again everybody. Thank you. All right, you have fun.