Tag: Community

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

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

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

According to the World Health Organization, around 285 million people worldwide have moderate to severe vision impairment that can make it difficult for these users to access all of the content across the web. 

They can access parts of it and large parts of it, but there might still be parts that are difficult for some users to reach. I feel like web designers are thinking more critically about building more accessible websites these days, and it’s been a hot topic in the WordPress community. I believe more accessible websites make the web more inclusive, but they also make the web a better experience for all users, even those that don’t identify as visually impaired.

Today we’re gonna talk to Bud Kraus, the Chief Education Officer at Joy of WP. He’s also been a Contributor at TorqueMag.io. Bud recently gave a talk at WordCamp Europe titled “Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress.” And in his talk, Bud demonstrated the tools, methods he uses to surf the web, but he also talks about how his experience has made him a better WordPress educator.

So I’m excited to talk with Bud about this, Bud. Why did, why don’t you kick us off by just telling us how you got into WordPress?

Bud Kraus: Well, thanks Doc, and thank you for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate it. It all started back in 2009 when I was having lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central New York City where a client said to me, you know, Bud, you ought to learn WordPress. And I said, no, I’m a rage against the machine kind of guy.

And he looked at me seriously and he said, no, you’ve got to learn WordPress. Here’s my username and password from my website. Go in there, fiddle around with it, see what plugins do. And I did, and I set up my own WordPress site. And once I realized, oh, maybe a year later that you could do something called a child theme and make WordPress your own, I was hooked.

And little did I know what would happen years later too. So that’s how I got started with it.

Doc Pop: You were already teaching web design at the time, or did you get into web design through that?

Bud Kraus: Yes, I was. I was teaching at Pratt Institute in New York City. I was really teaching HTML and CSS and a little bit of JavaScript, and so I just didn’t see any place for WordPress, but eventually I did, and I started teaching WordPress at the Fashion Institute of Technology and teaching it online and doing all kinds of things.

And back then, this was the early, you know, 2011, 2012, there was a huge market. Everybody wanted to learn WordPress, so that was great.

Doc Pop: You recently gave a talk, and you also based it on a Smashing Magazine post that you did back in 2018, which is a great article. The talk is called Using Low Vision As My Tool To Help Me Teach WordPress. And I’m curious, you mentioned in the talk that you have moderate vision impairment through macular degeneration.

I’m curious about the tools that you use to surf the web, can you tell us a little bit about the tools that you use and how not all visually impaired users use the same tools and settings?

Bud Kraus: Well, that is absolutely correct because vision loss or any disability for that matter is very idiosyncratic, so not everybody uses the same solutions. And I always believe don’t use technology for something that you don’t really need. So I don’t really need a whole lot, but I do need things that, let’s say a normally sighted person doesn’t use.

For example, I do a lot of zooming in and zooming out so I can see things. I use a lot of voice overs so I can hear things, and really that’s about it. People who are more severely impacted use JAWS and other technologies like that, which are much more complicated to learn than what I use. 

Doc Pop: Yeah. I don’t have great vision myself, so I definitely use a lot of these accessibility tools myself, but for some reason, even though I’m using some of these tools, I still think of designing accessible web pages as being alt tags and making sure you’re marking headers instead of just doing like bold headers, you’re actually marking your things properly and kind of these sort of things. And so your talk was just a reminder that not everyone’s using a screen reader.

They all have different ways of using the web.

Bud Kraus: But if you use markup correctly regardless of your interest or lack thereof and accessibility, you’re doing things the right way and it’ll benefit so many things at Search Engine Optimization to mention one. So I’ve always taught people web design standards before there was really a term called web design standards.

It’s just the right way of doing things. So the best way to go. 

Doc Pop: So how has your experience helped you communicate and teach WordPress to others?

Bud Kraus: Well, there’s a couple things. One is I can’t go into a classroom and just wing it. I have to be super prepared. I have to know exactly what I’m gonna be doing that day and especially if it’s new material, I have to really rehearse. Because I can’t go into class and read stuff, I have to sort of memorize it, and that’s okay.

It makes you a better teacher actually. You’re really prepared. And that’s really something that I learned from just having a vision loss is no winging it. You’ve gotta be prepared. You’ve gotta have a good lesson plan going in and so there is a disadvantage if students say, well, we wanna do something totally different.

Or you say, no, we have to sort of stick to the plan here. And usually they do. So that’s not a problem. I mean, that’s just one. There’s other things too, like for example, there’s a principle in accessible design, grouping. We like to group things, making it easier for technology, for people to understand.

And so I group things too. Like I’ll teach things in groups, maybe we’ll do everything about pages, maybe we’ll do everything about posts, maybe we’ll do everything about themes. Sort of like to keep these things together. And I think it’s sometimes a little more understandable if you use grouping as an idea and that’s something I definitely learned from accessible design.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. So when you’re talking about grouping that’s a thing that you do for practicality, as a teacher. But that benefits students because it kind of helps keep things packed together

Bud Kraus: Yes. I think it’s more, instead of being all over the place that students understand where we’re gonna be, and if they have a syllabus, they can see today we’re gonna be talking all about pages, or we’re gonna be talking about posts, or we’re gonna be talking about images.

Now you can’t, from a practical standpoint, you just can’t put all these things in nice, neat little silos. We know that. But if you can, to a certain extent, keep that idea of grouping things like that, I think it’s gonna be helpful for the students.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. I was kind of curious about this as you were talking, we’re talking about your experience as an educator. I’m curious for students, have you ever had a group of students that themselves were maybe visually impaired, and how did that change how you taught them?

Bud Kraus: I’m going to change your question a little bit because I don’t think I’ve had anybody who was visually impaired, but I had a deaf student.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Bud Kraus: And I thought that was really interesting because what I learned from that experience was, when you’re deaf, you can’t just read the words in your mind.

Because that’s audio. So they don’t have the ability to do that. That’s what American Sign Language is all about. And that’s when I started learning, oh, now I get it. And in fact, this student who was very bright, who was a really good designer too, he brought a signer to class.

So, every time he came to class, somebody would sign whatever I was teaching, Which was kind of interesting and it worked. I thought that was a really interesting experience. I also tried to teach somebody who was severely impaired from a cognitive standpoint, from a visual and auditory standpoint.

And it was impossible. It was really, really tough. I wanna say there’s only so much you can do, and I’m not a trained person in that field, so maybe that was really on me. But you can see where this can be very difficult in some in a very, very tiny minority segment of the population.

But there are people that are severely impaired who want access to the web. And one thing I’ve learned over time is if you make things accessible for people like me, you’ll make it better for everybody. And that’s really to me, the key to accessibility, which is really, who cares about making websites for me?

Don’t you wanna make it better for everybody else? And the answer is yes. And the way to do that is through accessibility.

Doc Pop: Yeah, absolutely. The analogy I always appreciated was when they built sidewalk ramps for wheelchair users, it ended up benefiting everybody. If I sprained my ankle, now I have an easier way to get down. iIf I had a baby and I had a stroller.

It just sort of makes the experience better for everyone.

Bud Kraus: Absolutely. And it’s the same thing with curb cuts, that kind of thing. I mean, don’t we want curb cuts? It’s just so much easier to step off a curb or ride a bike or whatever. Well, sure. And also to wheel somebody down in a wheelchair, same thing. Again, the concept of making things better for everybody.

Because my vision impairment, I sort of look at it as a gift actually, in that I can see things about accessibility and usability that other people can’t see. And so, I don’t look at myself as poor me. I sort of sometimes think, lucky me because I get to see things in a different way and understand things in a different way, not saying better or whatever.

It’s just different.

Doc Pop: And that’s a great spot for us to take a quick break. We are gonna come back and continue our discussion with Bud Kraus about the conversation that he had at WordCamp Europe about being a presenter and just educating WordPress in general. So stay tuned for more WordPress news after this break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Bud Kraus, the Chief Education Officer at Joy of WP, who’s been teaching web design for many years, and recently gave a talk at WordCamp Europe. Bud, you mentioned at the end of the talk that this was a dream of yours.

Can you tell us about that?

Bud Kraus: Oh, I certainly can. So, in like 2015, 16, 17, I’d be watching the stream of WordCamp Europe and I’m sitting at my computer thinking, God, wouldn’t it really be cool to go to WordCamp Europe? I mean, what an experience that would be. So I don’t know what got into me, but last year I started thinking, well, I’m gonna apply to speak at WordCamp Europe.

What the heck? They’ll never pick me, so I don’t have to worry about anything, you know, just apply. And I did. I chose the one topic I felt like I had one story in me to give. And that was how I using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. And I applied and I waited to hear, and the day I heard was March 31st. I’ll never forget, 6:15 in the morning, I go into my office, I look at the email and the first there words were “We are thrilled.”

And I stopped right there and I knew, and I said to myself, oh, they must have made a mistake. This is sent to the wrong person. And I kept on reading and it really was me and I was very tempted to wake up my wife. And tell her, because she’d been wanting to go to Greece and Santorini forever. She got up and when she saw it, she did a double take. And she said, I guess we’re going to Greece. And of course I had told everybody that I applied, but the chances of me getting picked were like, one in a thousand. And it turned out not that bad of an odds, but pretty slim odds.

So I’m forever grateful to the WordCamp Europe organizers for choosing me.

Doc Pop: Up until this point, you had never even been to WordCamp Europe, which is one of the largest, if not the largest WordCamps in the world ever. And your first time going, you gave a massive presentation. Kudos on that.

Bud Kraus: Well, my wife said I did a really good job and she’s a very tough critic, so if she said I did a good job, I’ll take it. It was really an honor of a lifetime. It was an experience. It’s impossible to forget. And I don’t wanna forget it. And I met so many people that I already know, but more important or as important, I met a whole lot of new people that I sort of met in the weeks leading up to WordCamp Europe. I was reaching out and meeting new people on Twitter and LinkedIn and elsewhere. And it was great. I feel like, geez, I’m so fortunate to have done all this. I mean, I get to go to WordCamp Europe and really just talk about myself.

Now, if I may say, I gave this talk in Boston a couple years earlier, and I was terrible and I would’ve booed myself off the stage. And I said to myself, if you ever give that talk again, you better do a much better job. So really, I rebuilt the whole thing, and I think I did a much better job.

Doc Pop: Awesome. And so now that you’ve got this under your belt, are you getting ready for your pitches next year? Are you gonna try to give a talk at WordCamp Asia?

Bud Kraus: Well, that’s funny you should say. Though I haven’t had the drive to go to WordCamp Asia, but I’m thinking like It would be kind of cool to go to Taiwan. So I am starting to consider, but then I’m thinking like, well, what would you talk about?

Well, I actually have two ideas. I mean, the one I gave at WordCamp, Europe is definitely one of them. But would they cross check to see if I gave that talk already and who knows. What’s the harm in applying? There’s no harm at all.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Bud Kraus: I have to say too, when I applied to speak at WordCamp Europe, I really spent like no time at all putting the topic together because I just felt like why waste a lot of time here?

They’re never gonna pick you. But it happened.

Doc Pop: Well, let’s go back a little bit to your experience as a web designer and someone who’s been using the web for a long time and got into WordPress and really found home here. As a visually impaired user yourself, how do you feel about WordPress as a tool for other users?

And have you heard from other members of the community about their experience?

Bud Kraus: Yeah, fair question. I am not at all plugged really into the WordPress accessibility community. Because I’m a stakeholder, but I’m not really, you can see I’m kind of struggling to articulate this.

I don’t really consider myself impaired. I mean, I know I am. In the year 2000, I was teaching a course at Prat Institute called Accessible Web Design. So it’s not like I’ve never heard of this stuff. Okay. I mean, I was teaching it when browsers didn’t support it.

People didn’t know what the heck I was talking about. What does that mean accessible design? What does, so it’s not like, I don’t know the subject, but I am not an expert. I couldn’t tell you all the ins and outs of the web content accessibility guidelines 2.1 or whatever it is now.

I know it exists and I know the fundamentals of it. I’m a stakeholder and it’s a subject that interests me, and I certainly know when something is not usable or accessible and there is a difference between the two, but it’s not something that interests me, let’s say on a professional level. 

So I made the decision quite a while ago that I wasn’t going to become an expert in accessibility for the web. And I’m not by any means. So can I tell you all about how accessible Gutenberg is? No. I cannot tell you.

I’ve heard lots of things and I have not heard good things, but I’m not an expert at all, so I don’t feel myself qualified. Whenever I see something that I think is just, just terrible, I’ll say something to somebody in the community, but that’s about it. Accessibility is not a specialty of mine, let’s just say that, but I certainly have familiarity with it,

Doc Pop: That’s a good spot for us to take our final break and when we come back, we will talk with Bud a little bit more about some of the other projects he’s working on and some news he might have in the future. So stay tuned for more WordPress news after this quick break.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Bud Kraus. We’ve talked about his experience teaching at WordCamp EU and his experience as a WordPress educator for many years. And now I wanna talk about the things, Bud, that you’re working on now.

What are some of the projects that you have going on this year, now that you got that talk out of the way?

Bud Kraus: Well, one thing I have to say is, I am not a site developer, okay? So I don’t have projects like that. In fact, I call myself a reluctant site developer. What I am doing these days, and this started about six months ago, is providing WordPress content for WordPress businesses.

So a company like Insta WP will say, will you do some videos on something like how to convert an elementary site to Gutenberg? Sure. Or will you create a course for us? Let’s say this is OS Training that has a lot of training on WordPress courses and I just finished something called Elementor 101 for that. or will you write blog posts?

Like right now I’m working on or about to start one for GoDaddy, which is about how to use ChatGPT to spin up a custom post type plugin, which is really cool. I mean, I just love that and it really points the way of how developers will work going forward. Now, I’m not a developer, but what’s so great about it is you really don’t have to be, you just have to know how to use the prompt in ChatGPT and then maybe how to do some edits in the code.

But it’s not very difficult. It’s very cool. So I’m excited about doing that. And other projects. I will be doing a webinar for the Learn WordPress initiative. It’s called “Demystifying the Navigation Block,” which everybody seems to be struggling with, for good reason if you ask me.

So I’m always looking for opportunities to either write, create videos, any kinda WordPress content for WordPress businesses. So, that’s gonna be my thing from now on. And I must say too, it really leverages all the contacts I have in the WordPress community. ‘ve been very fortunate to meet and know a lot of people in the great community.

It’s sort of like by accident. I said, I could work with these people. I would love to work with these people. So that’s really what is really happening now with me. And I’ve sort of turned away from developing websites cuz if you do it long enough, you’re just gonna eventually hate yourself and hate web development.

Doc Pop: And you’re, you’re gonna be at WordCamp US, not giving a presentation, but you said that you were gonna be part of the Community Summit.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. I’m excited to be going to the Community Summit because number one, I really don’t know what it is. I know that it is something that’s been restarted after Covid. I believe it’s basically gonna be two days of talking about how to strengthen the WordPress community.

And I’ve pitched an idea to the organizers about what we could talk about. But we’ll see. It should be great. I mean, I know that I’m gonna be in DC for like five days now because of the community summit. And I won’t be at Contributor Day, but I will be at the two days of WordCamp US.

I’ve been very fortunate this summer because I started out at WordCamp Europe and then two weeks after that I went to WordCamp Montclair, which is a small community in New Jersey. And saw a lot of the WordCamp Europe people there as well, and then onto WordCamp US in August.

So Wow. I really feel like I’ve been at WordCamp all summer, which is great.

Doc Pop: Let’s wrap this up here. What’s a good spot for people to be able to follow the project you’re working on? Reach out to you with any questions they might have.

Bud Kraus: Sure. If you wanna contact me, I have a contact form on my site, which is JoyofWP.com. It’s really easy to remember now. And you can also email me, which is Bud@JoyofWP.com. So I don’t make it hard to get a hold of me. It’s really easy to get a hold of me.

And please do.

Doc Pop: And, and I just wanna reiterate, because you said this too, but I just wanna say anyone listening, if you are looking for some content, you’re looking for videos, you’re looking for articles, Bud is taking orders now, now’s a good time to reach out to you, right?

Bud Kraus: Yes. Thanks, Doc.

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

The post Press This: Being a WordPress Educator with Bud Kraus appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

Today we have a very special guest joining us. We’re thrilled to have Hari Shanker, an open source program manager at Automattic and a key contributor to the WordPress ecosystem. Hari is currently focusing on improving the experience for WordPress contributors and Hari has been instrumental in developing the Contributor Working Group and the Mentorship Program. Today we’ll dive deep into those exciting initiatives and explore how they’re shaping the future of WordPress. Welcome to the show, Hari. I want to just ask you from the start, how did you get into WordPress?

Hari Shanker: Hey Doc, excited to be here. So my WordPress story is pretty interesting. I’ll try to keep it as short as possible. So I was a college student. I was doing some freelance work on the side. This is way back in 2007, and I was helping out a couple of friends doing a startup and we were hand coding websites in html.

That was our side gig while we were in college. So my friend showed me this web application, which allows you to create websites without having to write a line of code. And that was WordPress and I got hooked ever since. I was also blogging on the side. I was on Blogger, so this got me to move to WordPress.com, which eventually got me to self hosted WordPress.

Then I was building websites on the side and I got hooked on the entire ecosystem. It was my first foray to open source as well. And ever since I’ve been on it. Then WordPress has led me to different ways. So even after college, all the jobs that I did were related to WordPress. I was freelancing, I was doing some journalist work on the side, but even though that was my focus, I did try to have WordPress in my life one way or the other.

Then briefly, I switched paths. I was working in a bank. I moved away. So I’ve done a lot of odd jobs, but any opportunity that I had, I always had WordPress. So eventually, somehow that journey brought me to Automattic where I joined as a Happiness Engineer. 

And as of 2020 I moved my role. I’m currently working full-time on WordPress Open Source because I believe the open source software is very close to my heart. That’s what it’s literally given me everything that I have today, and I’m immensely grateful. So I’m excited to be working full-time on WordPress.

I was a community deputy. I still am. And from 2020 through 2022, I was supporting WordPress events helping WordCamps and meetups. So from 2022, I’ve been working on what you mentioned about me before. I’ve been an open source program manager, and I’m trying to improve or support the WordPress Contributor ecosystem.

To help Five for the Future on one side and to help volunteer contributors or selfs sponsored contributors. And one of the initiatives that I’m working with, the Contributor Working Group is to create a mentorship program. So that’s my story in a very capsule type format.

Doc Pop: Yeah. And I wanna say you’ve had a very interesting life. I read your story on the Hero Press post. So if people wanna hear a little bit more in your own words about how WordPress changed your life and made you so passionate about WordPress and Open Source, they can find that on Hero Press.

You mentioned the WordPress Contributor working group, and we both talked about it a little bit. What led to the development of the WordPress Contributor Working Group and what are its main objectives?

Hari Shanker: Ooh, that’s an excellent question. So the Contributor Working Group was formed as a result of some major gaps in the workforce Contributor ecosystem. So since last year, folks working on contributions, they’ve identified some issues with Five for the Future and what was contribution in general?

So these are things that have already always been talked about. So as part of my work, I decided to do research and I spoke to a lot of contributors. I read a lot of posts. I did some of my own experiments and I published a WordPress Contributor journey post in the make project blog, and I asked for feedback.

So the idea is I was trying to showcase how the contribution flow currently works in WordPress in that post. And the feedback that I got was that there’s currently a problem. So people come into WordPress, they want to contribute. But they get stuck at some point. So what is the blocker? The blocker is that there’s too much information or they’re unable to find guidance.

So that seems to be the biggest problem. And a couple of the recommendations that we got from folks, in fact, that actually stood out from all the feedback that I got, so this post is actually in the Make project blog. So if you look at the comments, the major theme that stood out was there’s a need for mentorship, there’s a need for people, there’s a need for contributors to support other people.

So there’s a bunch of other things that can be done to improve the contributor experience, like improving the tooling and improving the overall UI/UX of contribution. But mentorship seemed to be something that really stood out. So I thought about it a bit, and I discussed it with a couple of community members. So there was a WordPress Contributor working group that was created during the pandemic for the make community team.

So I spoke with the folks who used to organize that and I’m proposing that we relaunch this working group with the idea of creating a mentorship program. So this was a proposal I was not expecting a lot, but I was overwhelmed by the positive response to that proposal.

So following that we set up a working group. We launched a working group. We put out a call for volunteers, which also got an overwhelming response. And in the meantime I thought about this a bit, and created a framework for testing this out. We know that mentorship is important, but we need to see if this works right.

So the working group was formed and in our first chat I shared an example of what this would look like. And again everybody seemed to be interested. And together we started working towards that. We started iterating on it, and we created a pilot. So yeah, but that’s the story of how the working group came into place.

And we are currently focusing exclusively on mentorship. So mentorship as a way to improve the entire contributor experience for WordPress.

Doc Pop: And in the next segment, we’re gonna talk about the Mentorship Program more in depth. But I wanna go back to that proposal and the research you were doing where you found out the blockers for new contributors was just knowing how to contribute and that’s what led to the Mentorship Program.

I’m curious, were you seeing that this was a unique problem to like individual contributors versus contributors that are sponsored by Automattic or sponsored by a company as part of Five for the Future or was it pretty much the same problem across the board?

Hari Shanker: That’s an excellent question, Doc. So I would say that this problem is faced by everybody. Even if you’re a sponsored contributor or a volunteer contributor, you face this issue because I spoke to several sponsored contributors who faced the same problem and they were able to get through it because there was somebody in the company that they were working for to support them, right?

Volunteer contributors did not have that luxury. They would try contributing, but they would get stuck at some point. So for some teams, it’s fairly easy to contribute, for many others it was very difficult. So I would say that both sponsored and volunteer contributors had the same problem.

Sponsored contributors had the advantage of having somebody who is already in that company who also contributes being their mentor. But for volunteer contributors, it’s an entirely different story. They do not have access to this kind of mentorship, which often causes them to drop off.

And there’s a lot of things that we can do to improve the contributor experience. But since workers is an open source project, that takes a lot of time and work. But mentorship seemed like a low hanging fruit for lack of a better metaphor. Because we already have a very active community of contributors, many of them who’ve been contributing for a long time and they know the ins and outs.

So if they could help somebody who knew who was coming in, that will definitely make the process easier for them and help them to stay long term. So that is the idea, which brought us to mentorship. And yes, it is relevant for everybody.

Doc Pop: We are going to take a short break and when we come back, we’re gonna continue talking to Hari Shanker about the mentorship program that is coming for WordPress to help bring people in to contributing and make it easier for them and share what they’ve learned already. So stay tuned after this break for more Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Hari Shanker about the WordPress Contributor Working Group and the new mentorship program. Before the break, we talked about the blockers that new contributors face, and those are largely just learning how to get into WordPress, how to contribute. 

And as part of the research that Hari’s been doing, he has found that the best way to solve this is through a mentorship program. So we talked about that in the beginning of the show. Hari, can you elaborate on the pilot for the mentorship program and what are the expected outcomes?

How does it work? Just give us the rundown.

Hari Shanker: Oh, absolutely. So. Well, we decided to do the pilot as an experiment. So as part of the research that I did and from all the feedback that I got from folks both inside the contributor working group and from the community, we identified the problem and we know a solution which is mentorship, but how do we test this?

What is the best form of mentorship? Mentorship itself is a huge topic, and there’s so many ways that you can mentor folks. We need to do this quickly because I personally believe that WordPress is in a very unique space in history where it needs more new contributors coming in.

And we need to test this out. We cannot wait to build an ideal program. So, which is where the pilot comes in. We discussed this and we identified a test or a pilot or an MVPR, a minimum valuable product. So that’s where we are coming from.

And in this pilot we are attempting two types of mentorship. One is a cohort based mentorship and one is one-on-one mentorship. So we are gonna put 10 people, volunteer contributors and new contributors. We have a mix of  some folks who are slightly experienced. So these are mentees, these are folks who will get mentorship. We’ll be trying to pair them with 10 mentors. So these mentors are ideally veteran contributors who’ve been around for a while. They know their way around the project, and they work together for four weeks in asynchronous way. This happens in the Make WordPress Slack. We will be creating a dedicated channel for this.

So in these four weeks, for the first two weeks, the folks, the mentees, learn about the project. So they find out about how the project works, what are the different Make teams and, and certain skills, like how are decisions made in the WordPress project and like different other aspects of the project.

Like for instance, WordCamps and meetups. And how to communicate in the project, how decisions are made and essentially the ins and outs of how the project works. So one thing that I wanna state is this is a very low effort program for the mentor and the mentee. And so it doesn’t take more than three to four hours a week because we understand that the folks coming in here are volunteers. Both the mentors and mentees, so we don’t wanna take up a lot of that time. 

So in the first two weeks they get a very good idea about the project. And so there’s two types of mentorship, as I mentioned. There’s cohort based, like a group mentorship, which happens, and each person is connected to a mentor.

So every week the mentee chats to the mentor. The mentor provides them guidance and support, and they help them identify the teams that they wanna contribute to. And by the end of the first two weeks, they will have a good idea of what the project is and they will decide which team or teams that they wanna contribute to.

So for the pilot, we have six teams, so that would be the core team, the test team, the Polyglots team. We’ll have the docs team, the photos team, and am I missing something? Yeah. So yeah, there’s about two more teams, which hasn’t come to my mind real quick, but yeah, we have around six to seven teams in our pilot.

So we have mentors from each team inside the cohort. So all these folks, by the end of the first two weeks, the mentees will have learned a bit, a good idea about what the project is. And in the next two weeks, they actually start contributing to the team of their choice.

So this is where mentors from the specific teams come in. At this point, mentees pick whichever team that they want to contribute to. And the mentors representing those teams, they work with the mentees and help them make their first set of contributions. So they learn the ropes.

As opposed to a typical Contributor who sort of comes to the project and doesn’t know which handbook to look at or which Slack channel to join, there’s a mentor to guide them, to onboard them through the project to help them make their first contributions. So for the next two weeks, they will either make a contribution or a series of contributions to the make team or teams of their choice with the help of this specific mentor.

And by the end of the four weeks, every participant in the program, our hope is that they will get a very good idea of the project and they will have made a first set of initial contributions. And these folks, as they work with the mentors, the mentors will give them a very good idea of how things are, they will have built a very strong bond among themselves and they’ll feel a sense of belonging to the project.

And you asked about metrics. So as of metrics, our hope is that if at least 50 to 60% or even 70 to 80% of these people will decide to stay and contribute long term, I would consider that to be a win, but that is a hope, actually. And we are actually viewing this in a very experimental sense.

This is essentially a huge experiment and I’m hoping to learn from this as much as possible to see how we can iterate this program and build this into something that is more scalable. And I hope for the future where every new contributor coming into WordPress gets access to mentorship.

Doc Pop: Are you familiar with any other open source projects that are doing some sort of mentorship program like this?

Hari Shanker: Oh, absolutely. In fact, many major open source projects have mentorship of some sort. I believe the Linux Foundation definitely has that. Google, not just the open source projects, the Maps program and the local guide program. They have mentorship.

I know they’re not open source, but those are very good programs that I’ve looked at for inspiration. And many other major open source pro programs like Drupal. Several big projects. They have mentorship of some sort built into them. And for this program, we’re trying to build something unique because many of those mentorship programs have one-on-one relationships associated with them. So we are trying a cohort-based approach for now, and my hope is that we have mentorships associated with each Make team. So, yeah, several open source projects have this built in, which is something that WordPress has not had so far.

And that’s the problem that I’m trying to solve with this Contributor Working Group.

Doc Pop: WordPress is a very complex thing. You’ve got the docs team, you’ve got a performance team, core team, people working on Gutenberg. I’m sure I’m leaving out stuff, but you’ve got a lot going on. I am wondering if the fact that we might need mentorships to help people contribute is a sign that it’s too difficult to contribute to WordPress, or do you feel that WordPress is pretty much as optimized as it can be? 

And this is just when you have something so large and so multifaceted, you’re gonna have to have some sort of solutions to help onboard people.

Hari Shanker: So I agree with the part where you said that WordPress, at this point, it’s not very easy to contribute. I mean, the process has become a lot easier over time and there are ways that folks who are very new also can contribute. For instance, there’s a photos team where all you need to is to click a photo and if you speak a different language other than English, you can contribute as a polyglot contributor.

But overall, I would say that if you are new to WordPress, if you want to contribute, the process is not exactly super easy. Which is where mentorship comes into the picture. So, I’m trying mentorship as a way to see if having somebody to walk you through the process of contributing solves that problem.

But there needs to be an overhaul of the system as a whole to make the process a lot easier. I don’t know the exact, the best way to do that. One of the objectives behind this program is to try and find out what we can do to improve. The WordPress Contributor ecosystem as well.

So the feedback that we get from new contributors is very, very important. So, the feedback loop is built into this pilot, and I hope as we do more of these experiments, we will have the feedback built in. So the feedback that we get from these new contributors who come in who say that, Hey, this is not working, this handbook is very difficult to follow, that will help us give the feedback to the Meta Team.

The meta team is a team that helps build WordPress.org to improve the Contributor ecosystem, to make our tools easier, to make our processes easier, and to generally work with other teams to ensure that the process of contribution, the barrier of contribution gets lower. 

Doc Pop: I totally agree that sometimes when you’re going through something, you’re learning how to do something. You may not be taking notes on what’s painful or you may not really have a good idea of what exactly is painful until you kind of talk about it. And I kind of feel like this is a good opportunity for the mentors and the mentees when they’re talking about stuff, and then the mentees to go and talk to the rest of the program about it.

For these ideas to get vocalized more and expressed and described in more detail in a way that maybe will help the project be easier to contribute without mentors. But that’s kind of a nice side effect of this program. 

I wanted to ask you, we’re talking about a pilot program. It sounds like it’s about two weeks of kind of educating the mentees and maybe a four week project kind of overall. I think I’m kind of close on that. What is the goal for next steps once this program is done? Once the pilot’s done, what do you think the next steps are gonna be in what has already happened so far?

Hari Shanker: Cool. We have big plans. So immediately after the pilot is over, which is to clarify two weeks of learning about the project and two weeks of contributing. So a total of four weeks, our hope is that our contributors learn everything about the project and start contributing to a make team.

The first thing that we are gonna do, when I say we, I’m referring to the Contributor Working group. Our goal is to evaluate how the program went because we are really viewing this as an experiment. We want to learn what worked, worked well, what did not work well, where can we improve. So we are gonna try and get this information as much as possible from our mentees through a survey and through conversations with mentors and both mentees. So that feedback will be very critical. 

So that’s exactly the reason why we’re doing this, as I mentioned. So we know that mentorship is a requirement, but we need to test to see what is the best way to mentor folks. So we are actually approaching this from that mindset. So once we have that information, we are gonna try and use it to build our next cohort, which we’ll hopefully have at least one cohort in one more cohort in 2023. 

And to use those learnings to improve the program or to make changes. And to keep iterating on this to see where things go. Another area that is our immediate next step is to see how our contributors are performing. So folks who have graduated from the mentorship program, are they motivated enough to keep contributing? Do they keep contributing or do they stay or do they go away? And of course there’s another important metric, which is whether they complete the program. Cause this is a volunteer program and everybody joining, both our mentors and mentees are volunteers.

We need to see if folks do complete the program, which I hope they will because we are designing it that way. But yeah, essentially this is an experiment and our focus is to make you pick up the learnings from this experiment and use that to build more cohorts and more mentorship programs.

And our hope is to keep on iterating, do more cohorts, and build a system at some point in the next two or three years where any new contributor coming into WordPress gets an opportunity for mentorship. It could be a one-on-one mentorship. They could have an opportunity to be assigned to a mentor or maybe there could be ongoing cohorts, which happen in a certain period so they could join one of those cohorts and get mentored.

Or maybe each team each make workers team has its own mentorship program. So some teams are actually experimenting with this. I believe the training team has just put out a blog post on implementing their own mentorship program. And my hope is maybe all teams have that. Maybe somebody who just wants to contribute to core but doesn’t really wanna learn about the project, they can join the core team’s mentorship program.

So I hope to pick up all the as much learnings as possible from this program and to pass it along to the good folks who maintain all these make teams and to improve the entire contributor ecosystem. So those are the goals of the working group.

Doc Pop: And that’s a great spot for us to take our final break. When we come back, we will continue talking to Hari Shanker about the WordPress Contributor and mentorship programs, as well as Five for the future and what agencies need to know about contributing to WordPress. So stay tuned for more after this break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. I’m talking to Hari Shanker today about the mentorship program and the contributor working group that has been brought back to life as a way to help bring people, in particular new contributors, into contributing for the WordPress Project.

And I mentioned Five for the Future. I think you brought it up a few times as well. This is a kind of program that’s not enforced in any way, but it’s sort of a goal that everybody who’s profiting, everybody who’s benefiting from using WordPress, hopefully will give back 5 percent of their time. And if this is a successful company, that they would have like 5 percent of their workforce or working time, would be contributed to making WordPress better because they’re benefiting from it.

And I think that kind of ties into this because there might be small agencies out there, or web developers who make a living off of designing websites and maybe feel like they should be giving back to WordPress or maybe even feel like they a passion project that’s part of like an open bug or something that they want to get involved in.

They selfishly want to make WordPress better not just out of the kindness of their heart. And I guess what I’m getting at is this sort of program is aimed towards the Five for the Future goals as well as just people who want to kind of get started with WordPress.

Is there anything else that these smaller groups, like individual web developers or agencies, is there anything else that they need to know about contributing at the moment for WordPress? Is there any other good programs to kinda get them started?

Hari Shanker: That’s a great question actually. And just to elaborate a bit on Five for the Future. So the goal is up to 5 percent. So not everybody, and especially when we are talking about small agencies with 10 people. So for a 20 person agency, 5 percent is one full-time employee, and they may not be able to dedicate that kind of resource towards WordPress.

So, I understand that companies work differently, so the goal is up to 5 percent and whatever an agency or a company or even a freelancer feels comfortable with, they can contribute, even if it’s one hour a week. That’s totally fine. That’s very valid. 

So you were asking about programs for agencies or ways agencies can work on this. One of the things that I’m working on, apart from the mentorship program, apart from the contribute work group, is to create a space where agencies get guidance on how to contribute.

So, this was mentioned in the research post that I published back in the day. So even if you’re a company and you pledge to Five for the Future. You go to the website, you sign up, or you’re an individual, you edit your profile and you pledge X number of hours towards contribution.

That’s it. I mean, it shows up in your profile, but you do not get any guidance on how to contribute at this point. The project doesn’t do that, right? 

So this is the problem that I’m trying to solve, and specifically for agencies. I spoke with a lot of folks,but I actually noticed a few agencies, a few companies who had signed up but who were not making a ton of contributions.

I reached out to a couple of them and the feedback that I got was that they did not get any guidance on how to contribute. So our problem is not lack of information. We have too much information. So this information is buried in so many different places.

It’s in the handbooks, it’s in make blogs, it’s in Slack. It’s so hard to find, especially if you’re a new person into this contributing ecosystem, which is where the mentorship program comes into the picture. So, the thing to do as part of my work is to solve this problem. So to create something, to create at least for starters, maybe something like a detailed overview of how an agency can start contributing.

There’s so many ways that you can start contributing. Like for instance, you don’t really need to dedicate a certain number of people who work full-time towards this. Even if you’re an agency, you don’t even need to start contributing code.

So if you take a few pictures and if you put it out on the photo directory, that’s a very valid contribution, right? So to share that kind of information and on how to organize contributions as a company. So many companies do this in different ways. Some folks, they do this on their own time.

They dedicate a certain number of hours. Some folks, make contribution part of their sprints. So my hope is to create something which provides all this information to companies and individuals so that they get an idea of how to contribute.

Doc Pop: And I think that’s a great spot for us to wrap up this episode today. Hari, thank you so much for joining us. If people wanna follow you and learn more about the project you’re working on, what’s a good spot for them to do that?

Hari Shanker: Thank you, Doc. I’m Hari Shanker on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I’m definitely on the make.blog. All the Five for the Future News goes out in the make.WordPress project blog.

And I just wanna take a quick minute to thank you for inviting me to this talk. I really enjoyed this conversation and you’ve asked me some excellent questions. So it was so much fun discussing what is really close to my project with you. So thank you so much.

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

The post Press This: Unlocking the Power of Contribution appeared first on Torque.

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

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

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

Today we have a very special guest who is an expert in virtual reality, augmented reality, XR, metaverse, whatever you wanna call it, and its intersection with WordPress. But before we dive into the fascinating world of VR, Let’s start off with the big news. You probably heard Apple made a significant announcement that they are about to shake up the virtual reality space.

They unveiled the much anticipated Vision Pro headset, which promises to deliver an immersive and groundbreaking XR experience. This development has sparked a renewed interest and enthusiasm for the Metaverse, VR, whatever you wanna call it. And it holds great potential for WordPress developers and agencies.

So let’s jump into the heart of today’s episode. I’m delighted to introduce our guest, Anthony Burchell. Anthony is a software engineer on ACF and he’s the brilliant mind behind the innovative Three Object Viewer plugin for WordPress. Now, this plugin empowers website owners, WordPress website owners, to run virtual reality experiences, spatial experiences directly through their WordPress website, all while managing the content within a virtual space very familiar to WordPress users. It’s the WordPress dashboard. With this amazing technology. So without further ado, let’s welcome Anthony Burchell to the show. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us. Let’s get started by just telling us how you got into WordPress.

Anthony Burchell: Yeah. Well actually it relates to how I got into the 3D web. I started out when I was very young. I used to make flash games and that naturally progressed to making flash websites, and then I started making 3D flash websites and ironically enough, Apple kind of killed Flash, and I kind of stopped making 3D websites.

So, I started looking into the next thing and at that exact same time WordPress was taking off with Custom Post Types and it was starting to get seen as a formidable way to make websites, not just a blogging platform. Imagine that. Kinda worked out.

Doc Pop: During the intro you probably heard me stumble over exactly what we’re gonna talk about, and I just wanna address that because I didn’t practice this. We’ve got: VR, we’ve got AR, we’ve got the Metaverse. I believe now there’s XR. What is the preferred term that you’d like us to use for this conversation and can you describe what that term kind of means and embodies?

Anthony Burchell: Yeah, so I think XR is probably the one that over the years has stood the test of time. And over the years I mean, like since 2018, I think that people were starting to say that. I think spatial computing is a really good way to say it. And yeah I think that there’s just so many terms.

I think XR is the nice one because when I think of virtual reality, I think of not only being fully immersed, but having like blends of immersion where you can kind of get some of your world inside of a virtual space, but still feel like you’re somewhere.

Doc Pop: And what does XR stand for?

Anthony Burchell: I think the agreed definition is extended reality or something like that.

Doc Pop: Extended reality. Well, it’s definitely the key thing, I think, to all of these technologies, whether we’re talking about VR or AR, or the metaverse or XR, I think spatial is a big component to what we’re talking about,

Anthony Burchell: Yeah, actually I wrote an article back in, I think it was 2019 in WP Tavern and the title of it was, I think it was something like WordPress in the Spatial Computing Future of the internet, just like very buzzwordy title, but that is essentially it. Spatial computing, 3D internet.

Doc Pop: Being able to move around spatially to navigate something is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about spatial computing. And with Apple’s entry into XR, how has the space changed since Apple made their announcement?

Anthony Burchell: I think one of the things is there was a big sigh of relief, at least in the circle that I’m in. I build on the WebXR standard, so that means everything that is happening spatially is happening from a browser and there’s a standard that many browsers, I think all browsers, most browsers have accepted and accommodate.

And this allows you to, from the browser, click a single button and enter. I think there was a big sigh of relief in this community just because Apple, they waited a day. The second day after the announcement, they announced that WebXR will be supported, and fully immersive WebXR. And I found it really interesting because Apple showed nothing, virtual reality, nothing fully immersed where the entire environment you’re in goes away and you’re somewhere.

What WebXR allows you to do is exactly that. So I found it really interesting that the best canvas we have is going to allow. Fully immersive experiences. So yeah, I think the general feeling is not that everyone’s gonna go out and buy a Vision Pro and drop $3,500 on it, but it does show there’s confidence from Apple in web-based standards and in spatial computing in general.

I think that’s the biggest takeaway. And I personally was really excited because my plugin, I’ve already tested it in Vision Pro, using their SDK and everything seems to be working and matching up with the WebXR standards that work with like the Quest Pro, the Quest and the Vive headsets.

Doc Pop: And there’s always been this space, this idea in the XR community that you don’t have to have a fancy headset to be able to experience some of this stuff. There was this idea that some users would maybe just hold up their phone and kind of use it to spatially navigate something by looking at their phone, but pointing it and moving it in different directions.

And so the hope may be that Apple Vision Pro might be good for the Apple Vision Pro community, but it might also bring some interest in to people who might wanna navigate with their phone because it’s gonna support the same standards.

Anthony Burchell: Well, that’s one of the interesting things that’s still yet to be announced by Apple is if they’re going to allow the WebXR standard to work with Safari on the mobile handheld browser. Currently they’ve kind of not to be negative, but they’ve kind of held back a lot of innovation in the WebXR community just because it hasn’t been accepted on the phone, which would allow you to do that sort of like navigating by picking up your phone and walking in a space and that sort of thing. 

Currently you could only do that with an Android device. The plugin that I build, I’ve got a way for people to do AR as a target to display a 3D object. The problem is it only works on Android. So I think that’s one of the things that’s yet to be determined. 

But the clear good signal is that the Vision Pro will accept this WebXR standard in a flag that you can turn on the Safari browser. So it’s a good signal in the right direction and I don’t find it hard to believe they would not allow this on cell phones in the near future.

Doc Pop: When we’re talking about the XR standards, the WebXR standards, I’m just kinda curious, is Apple kind of signaling they’re gonna be creating their own standards for some things? And are there bridges between these standards? 

Anthony Burchell: Yeah. Well, WebXR allows you to sort of have a unified way for having controller input, a way to enter an experience. So like that button that you click enter VR, just having a standard way to know when you’re entering an experience and when it should take over the page.

That’s what WebXR is specifying as a standard, and Apple hasn’t really put out anything as far as like they wanna be a standard. What they’ve instead signaled is that they want to adopt what the current 3D apps are doing, which a majority of them are being built in Unity.

And I found it really interesting when they announced the Vision Pro that they announced it with a Unity logo and said, we are going to support all of the developers that want to build in Unity to bring their creations into the Vision Pro. So they’re kind of just going with what’s working for the industry right now. So I found that really awesome. 

But they didn’t sort of heavy handedly say, this is your standards going forward.

One thing that they have been putting a lot of effort into is the 3D file type that they natively support, which is the USDZ Standard. And this is the Pixar file format standard. Think of it as like the Photoshop file, but for 3D assets and they have different versions of these files that can be like a compressed version, or a zipped version that has all of the assets bundled inside of it. So they’ve been really, really focused on that file standard. 

The file standard that I personally have put all of my effort into is the GLTF standard, cuz it’s more of an open standard. It’s easier to participate in the working groups that define these standards. So, yeah, there’s all kinds of different directions and people are working in these different focuses, but they’re all coming together with this idea of we need to figure out these interfaces.

Apple kind of was opinionated in saying, this is kind of a stationary device. It seemed like they positioned it as a stationary device because the rooms that they were showing was just a person sitting down mostly. So I think what they’re trying to focus on is the 2D interface interactions and just having a stationary person while companies like meta are trying to do full body tracking and like deeper ways to express yourself and more points of tracking so that you can do that.

Doc Pop: This is a good spot for us to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re gonna keep talking to Anthony Burchell about what Apple’s announcement could mean for the XR community and what WordPress developers need to know about and tools they can use to get XR running on a WordPress environment. So stay tuned for more after the break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. Today we’re talking to Anthony Burchell, a software engineer at ACF and the creator of 3OV, Three Object Viewer for WordPress. Anthony, we were talking about what is XR before, and we basically said it’s the standard term is VR and AR and some of the other terms metaverse have kind of come and gone.

XR seems to be the long lasting one. So let’s talk about. What WordPressers need to know about XR? Is there existing XR support in WordPress?

Anthony Burchell: Not natively. You’ll have to go with the plugin. Again, I actually sought out to explore this a year ago, I think in March of 2022 is when I released the Three Object Viewer Plugin. And the plugin was sort of the answer to that question. It was like, what is missing in WordPress right now to get to a bare minimum just 3D object displaying in my site.

And maybe you can click the enter VR button and have it wrap around you. And that was in March of last year. It’s since progressed into an actual world builder with. 3D blocks that you can compose a scene with. To get started now, you could just install the Three Object Viewer Plugin. Another alternative is you could build with the rendering engine that I use in the plugin is called Three.js.

You can very easily embed Three.js inside of a front end web page just right in the header of the file and quickly compose some scenes with JavaScript to allow people to] enter in VR and have a fully XR enabled website. 

So there’s nothing really stopping WordPress today, aside from,  the file format for the web is, has been kind of agreed to be GLTF files. So you’ll need to add support for GLB files, which are the binary files of a 3D object. And that’s something that the Three Object Viewer Plugin does is in the media library, you’re allowed to upload GLB files and then also an avatar format called VRM, which is very similar to GLB files, but it has more avatar featured metadata and extensions inside of these characters.

So yeah, that’s sort of like how you could compose. In my plugin, you can just open up the 3D Environment Block, which has a bunch of inner blocks that you can select things like models, NPCs, videos, images, and then position them in a 3D scene all within your editor. And it’s all done very natively in exactly the same way that you would build in block-based templates.

So that’s one way. The other way is you could just straight up build it inside of a program called Blender. And there are many artists out there that are looking for work to build blender scenes. And you could just very easily create a simple one object scene and put that on a page using something like Three.js or the Three Object Viewer and allow people to go into it.

Now, that’s the part where it gets a little more difficult, cuz you need player controllers and all kinds of logic that’s what I’ve been focusing on for the last year. So it’s kind of what you wanna build. Like it comes down to what problem are you trying to solve?

And right now the spatial web doesn’t solve a ton of problems cuz we’re still trying to figure out what it is. But I see a future where we’ll have things like shops and permanent AI agents hanging out inside of our shop selling for us, which I’ve already got. If you go to 3OV.XYZ, at the bottom of the page, you can load in my AI that knows everything about the Three Object Viewer Plugin, and you can chat with her and ask her questions about it.

So that’s kind of how you can think about building is I like starting with a problem and going from there. 

Doc Pop: I feel like we could talk about front end and back end and I feel like on the front end, and maybe I’m misusing those terms, but I feel like on the front end we’re talking about like the website that visitors come to and it’s got Three.js, so that’s what powers the 3D rendering and the user might have the Apple Vision Pro or they might have a phone or some sort of VR headset. 

What I wanna talk about is the, the backend, cuz this is one of the things that always blew me away about Three Object Viewer is basically when you have a spatial scene, you have content, you have a wall, you have another wall, you have ground, you have a character, you have audio, you have objects on the wall or objects floating and the best way to manage content would be in WordPress, it seems, right, a very easy way to just create a bunch of content and manage it, a content management system, and I really like that that’s basically what you’re kind of really leaning on WordPress for, is for managing all the content that makes up a scene and then you’ve got this thing that kind of does some magic and now enables that to be shown on the front end.

Is that kind of a good description?

Anthony Burchell: Yeah. You’re using the Block Editor to compose 3D scenes. It’s exactly that. And the catchphrase of the plugin that I’ve been using and something I’ve been saying for a very long time is a post is a place, and up until now, a post has only been an asynchronous place where you can go and leave comments.

But now it’s becoming a thing where it is a place where you go visit a website. And somebody else might be there with you. There might be an NPC and it might feel like that NPC is real and in the room with you and interacting with you  and making personalized recommendations based on you being logged in and in what it knows about you.

So we’re entering this new blank slate really, of the web. It’s an evolution of the web where we can finally break out of these screens and kind of go to the outside and kind of put something in. One of the things I’m gonna be working on soon is AI agents where you can put ’em in mixed reality.

So if you are wearing the Apple Vision Pro and they’re claiming it’s something you can wear all day and they’re aiming, it seems to be a monitor replacement. But the way that I’m envisioning this, is that you could be working on your Gutenberg template, your block template, and then right next to you on the side of your desk, there’s your AI agent making recommendations or maybe holding up signs with a bunch of content recommendations or ways that you can reword things or meta descriptions or just any information. Maybe you got a meeting coming up. 

So that’s kind of the way I see the future of WordPress and XR and then with collaborative editing coming soon to WordPress, that’s something that I’m gonna fully utilize on the front end so that I could allow people to collaboratively 3D edit.

I’ve got a working prototype of that today, but I wanna see what WordPress does first so that I can maybe just use that.

Doc Pop: If a client heard the news about Apple’s Vision Pro, got really excited and wants to talk to their agency or talk to a web developer about how can we integrate XR onto our website? What are some tips you have for that seamless experience and for like first time people building an XR website.

Anthony Burchell: Yeah, well one thing I do is don’t put it at the very top of your page. It’s one of those things, it can become a trap. So I like to put it at the very bottom because cursors can click into it and get locked inside of the space. And it’s just not a great experience right now. The UX are still figuring out how to properly get people into experiences.

And the way that I compare it is the mobile web transition. When desktop websites were mobile responsive, were now going to have this new future web where they’re going to be 3D responsive. And for a long time, mobile responsive websites were not very mobile responsive.

People were making separate websites to even handle the mobile traffic and things like that. So we’re gonna do it wrong for a while. But right now the way that you would do it is it would be like a frame. The way the Three Object Viewer does it is you set a preview image, and that’s the image that kind of shows people what room they’re about to enter. And then it has a button in the middle that says Load World. And you click Load World and it’ll render inside of that container, the world. And then at the very top of the screen, it’ll say something like, enter in VR or Enter in AR.

And then you could click that if you were in a device, in like a headset, you would just use your in the Apple Vision pro your hands or your eyes, and look at the button and then do the click motion with your hands. And then it would click the button and then enter you in virtual, fully immersive virtual reality.

And then when you’re in there, hovering above you at all times is a little arrow. No matter where you turn your head, the arrow follows you. And you just look at that arrow and click with your hand and it’ll open a menu to exit the immersive experience and go back to the webpage 2D flat, like a monitor would look on your laptop or on your desktop.

Doc Pop: That’s really cool that you have this like experience with Apple’s headset that we can talk about after this next break. Before we do, Anthony, what is your favorite VR, AR experience you’ve had so far? Like, just a real quick, what’s your favorite thing you’ve done in this world?

Anthony Burchell: I like world hopping in VR chat, just kind of bouncing room to room with friends. That’s probably my favorite thing to do. There’s a conference that it’s called VCAT, the Virtual Market, and every I think summer and winter, they gather a bunch of creators in VRChat and give them a booth where they can kind of express themselves and show their work.

And I love going there with friends, just kind of bouncing booth to booth, trying on the little hats and things that they’re making. I even have a booth for an upcoming VCAT that I’m working on. I think VR chat’s just the best experience right now for the Metaverse. It’s truly the, the, the full package. It’s got full body tracking, all of the features you want.

Doc Pop: Well, we’re gonna take one last break and when we come back we’ll wrap up our conversation with Anthony Burchell about XR experiences and his experience with the Apple Vision Pro. So stay tuned for that.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Anthony Burchell, and right before this break, Anthony was telling us about his experience using the Apple Vision Pro SDK and Anthony you have not actually used the headset yet, but you have used the SDK and you kind of have a pretty good feeling of maybe how it’s going to feel.

Anthony Burchell: Yeah. So, Apple just, I think like maybe five days ago released, Xcode 15 Beta 2, and this version of Xcode introduces the Vision Pro SDK. And inside of that it also adds a simulator. And the simulator can essentially do everything that the Vision Pro can do. 

It essentially is the device. You can get a feel for the interfaces today. The very first thing I did was I opened up Xcode. I opened up the simulator and I went straight to the 3ov.xyc website and I went to the bottom, clicked the load world button, and that’s how I was able to find out if it’s going to work there. And so far the only thing that I haven’t been able to test, and the only thing that they haven’t really implemented an emulator for is in WebXR an input you like the clicking of your finger, that doesn’t, that doesn’t exist yet. So teleportation isn’t working, but it will work once it comes out.

The thing I’m lacking right now is just the headset to get the input controls. But from my understanding, if they are fitting to the WebXR standard, then they’re just going to use the eyes as the laser for where the controllers would be pointing a laser, and then the tap of your fingers as the click.

So it’ll probably do exactly the same thing that the current experiences of other headsets where you hold the controller, you point the laser where you want to go, and then you click the trigger to go there. It’ll probably be that, but they’ll separate the laser and the trigger, so you’ll have two inputs, your eyeballs and your fingers to use those

Doc Pop: We just have to address how crazy that is. So there are existing headsets out there, but what’s really being done with the Apple headset that may make it kind of stand out, may make it the thing that kind of crosses over. It’s definitely the thing people are most excited about is the combination of gestures and inputs.

The inputs are these cameras it has around your eyes, around your face, and it’s actually tracking what you’re looking at. And it’s actually anticipating, I’ve heard, it’s anticipating that it actually knows before you click. So the click kind of confirms it or whatever. But from what I’ve heard, the research that they did at Apple kind of shows that they can actually tell when you’re about to click before you even move your hands.

But the input is gonna feel like your hands are doing something and your eyes are just kind of looking in a direction, and that’s a thing you haven’t been able to test out yet. But everything else you’re saying is kind of working. You actually experienced the WordPress website through the SDK.

Anthony Burchell: Yeah. Yeah, it totally works. And it’s worth noting that the Quest Pro does have hand tracking, and it’s very similar, where you close your fingers to click to go somewhere and I was actually recently at the Meta campus doing a hackathon because they wanted people to be building with the hand awareness and also table awareness and things like that.

So I built a hackathon where we had butterflies that were flying from table to table because it knew that there were tables. So the only difference, it’s gonna be between the Quest Pro and, and the Vision Pro is the hands in the Quest Pro are what you use to point the laser and you just click your finger to go there.

And that currently works with 3OV. So if you want to get a kind of a feel of the interface, you could do that in a Quest Pro today. But yeah, Apple’s really taken it to the next level by separating those and doing kind of I guess behavior analysis on what you’re doing while you’re browsing.

From what they say, it all stays on device. So that’s a good sign. It’s just a really exciting device. I hope I can get my hands on one. They have the developer kits opening up in July. So if any agencies are wanting to start planning things out in July on Apple’s website, I think you can just Google “dev kit Vision Pro”.

They will be opening up an application so that you could get a dev kit. And they’re famously a company that will retrieve their dev kits once you’re done. So you won’t be getting a free Vision Pro, but you will have some comfort knowing that you can start activating on it.

Doc Pop: Well, Anthony, I really appreciate your time today. It’s really fun talking to you about this new space. If people wanna learn more about what you’re working on, what’s a good way to do that, and where can they find out more about Three Object Viewer as well.

Anthony Burchell: Yeah, if they want to find out more about what I’m working on, I blog on the 3OV.XYZ. I blog there a lot. and if you want to get started with the plugin today, it’s a free plugin in the WordPress Plugin Repository. Just search for Three Object Viewer.

I think you can even search Metaverse and it’ll come up, and install that and then make a new post and add the 3D environment block and you’re already started, so yeah.

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

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

The post Press This: XR and WP– WordPress-Powered Spatial Computing appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

Last week was WordCamp Europe 2023, one of the largest WordPress events in the world. This year’s event was hosted in Athens, Greece with thousands of attendees. My guest today, James Dominy, was one of those attendees who also gave a workshop titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love our AI Rulers”. James is a Technical Architect at WP Engine, and we are gonna talk to him about his speech. And as someone who is still very much concerned about AI and WordPress, we are gonna ask James to help, alleviate my concerns or confirm them. I guess we’ll find out in this episode.

James, thank you so much for joining us today. Let’s start off with just give us a brief description of how you got into WordPress.

James Dominy: So I am not into WordPress, actually, my wife is into WordPress. I share my affiliation with WordPress with you in that I work for WP Engine, but I have been involved entirely exclusively on the hosting infrastructure side. But I have on occasion helped my wife debug problems in the plugins that she writes for her clients.

She works for a small agency in Ireland.

Doc: And your talk about WordCamp Europe was titled, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our AI Rulers.” Are robots coming for the jobs of WordPress devs and content creators?

James: Okay. Yeah, it’s straight to the heart of the matter. 

Doc: Straight for it.

James: Yes and no. Let me just confirm your beliefs there. In brief, the take home of my talk was, AI isn’t there yet, and if you are in the WordPress community, actively doing things, whether it’s as a blogger, whether it’s as a freelancer, whether it’s as a plugin developer, a core Contributor, working in an agency, any of those things, you are probably already being exposed to AI like ChatGPT or Bard, and you are probably safe. 

I think we’ve all seen those memes going around of spectacular AI fails. Like, give me a synonym for journey starting with D and it confidently answers trip. So, I think for a lot of things we are safe as long as we ourselves learn to use the AI tools now. Because we’re going to be competing against other people who are using AI tools to accelerate their own jobs. 

I think the real danger lies in the incoming generation to the WordPress community. And I mean, a lot of what I’m talking about doesn’t actually apply exclusively to the WordPress community. It applies to so many jobs and lives and things in our lives beyond WordPress. 

But WordPress obviously was the focus of WordCamp. So the way I characterize it is we need to be careful not to pull the ladder up behind us. AI as it stands now is good at replacing the easy tasks, the boilerplate tasks. The go-to example for me at WordCamp was something like, Hey, my editor needs me to produce a blog article on “10 Things to do in Athens at Night” whilst I’m at WordCamp. That’s something ChatGPT is good at, but when you ask it to give you a hundred things, you are probably gonna find repeats. 

You might also just occasionally, because there is inherent randomness in the AI output, find that it recommends something really dodgy. Like, Hey, go and visit this Nazi memorabilia plate collection in some random guy’s house, because it happens to be on Google Maps or there was an article about it and that somehow accidentally got sucked into the training set. So, what that means is that the job now, without AI is generate words, and then they go to a sub editor. The job when AI comes in is gonna be generate words with AI, and you become that editor. You become the fact checker. And it’s much the same on using AI to assist in coding. 

Doc: Mm-hmm. 

James: AI is good at simple tasks. It’s not good at combining completed simple tasks into more complicated systems. Not yet it, it will get there. But what that means is that the job that you might have given, to your intern or your junior programmer, on the team would be, go and do this fairly boilerplate thing, come back to me and then I, as a senior engineer on the team, might go and check it and make sure that it works.

And I know in the first place to ask for that task to be done. Whereas AI doesn’t know yet that that is a task that needs to be done to fulfill a greater task. That’s what I mean by combining simple solutions into more complex solutions is one of the weaknesses in AI at the moment. But that will probably go away. 

What that means though is I get to the point where I can issues those tasks and know what tasks need to be done. I get to the point where I can read through an article and go, that doesn’t sound right, or that something’s wrong there, or, oh, I know I should not be recommending Nazi memorabilia in our particular magazine. That knowledge and those skills comes through having made the mistakes, doing the easy tasks. And what I mean by pulling the ladder up behind us is if those easy tasks are all gonna be done by AI in the future, we’re still gonna need people to direct AI. But how do we get new people coming into the community, into the field, who have learned on the basics?

Doc: Hmm.

James: And thus graduated to the point where they are able to use AI effectively for the more complicated problems.

Doc: I think I 100% agree with a lot of what you’re saying. AI is not quite there yet. It’s not gonna be replacing anybody yet. My bigger concern is more that, a writer will lose their job and get replaced by AI only to get rehired back to edit the AI and do just as much work, if not more work than they were doing before.

Or a coder for the same matter, right? 

James: Yeah, absolutely. 

Doc: Lose their job and then just end up rewriting, ChatGPT’S code or Co-pilot’s code. But that’s capitalism. That’s not necessarily AI. It’s just more of like AI being used as the excuse to kind of accelerate that behavior. But in five years from now, do you think that that won’t even be the case?

That like AI might be good enough to not think up a website, but code a website with very little editing afterwards?

James: Probably, it’s very hard to tell. I think that where we are on the AI curve. 

Doc: Mm-hmm. 

James: My personal belief is that it comes down to computation and memory, and the more that we throw it at, the larger the models we can create and the larger the models we can create, the more context the AI can use to generate its output.

And the more context it has, the better the results are gonna be. I think there’s some fundamental things that people perhaps don’t generally understand, that is, AI can’t innovate. They are trained and the way that they work, they spit out output that matches something they’ve been trained on within some random variation. That’s a very high level overview of it.

Can an AI write a new novel? Can it be creative? Not now. I mean, you can certainly ask AI to transpose your peom with the style of Shakespeare and that might make it better. Write me a peom in the style of Shakespeare about a jug of water on the table, because that’s what I’m staring at right now.

Can it do it? Yes. Is it being creative? That’s a deeply philosophical question. Will AI get better at solving complex tasks with more memory and more computation? Yes, absolutely. But it’ll only be able to solve tasks that have already been solved by a human or if not, it will need a human to ask them to solve the task in the first place.

Doc: And I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. I realize I’ve been talking about my fears so far this episode when we come back with Press This and James Dominy, I’m gonna ask James to gimme the good news about AI and cheer me up and let me know in a realistic sense, what are some of the ways that, WordPress can benefit from this.

So, stay tuned for more Press This right after the short break.

Doc: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I am your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to James Dominy, a Technical Architect at WP Engine, who recently gave a talk at WordCamp Europe 2023. The talk was titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our AI Overlords.” And I love that title.

Obviously we’re all fans of Peter Sellers. Right. And you saidcthe Simpsons reference was also in there. What’s the, what’s the Simpsons reference I’m missing

James: The Simpsons reference is the newscaster whose name I now forget, who has this recurring phrase whenever something happens, “I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords, or I for one, welcome, our new alien overlords,” whatever the flavor of the episode is. Whoever’s taking over Springfield.

Doc: And so on the first 10 minutes of this episode, I talked to you about some concerns I have and just other folks might have about AI and we mostly focused on, I guess, economics and how it affects jobs. This talk sounds like it might be optimistic.

I didn’t get a chance to see your workshop, but do you generally believe that there will be more opportunities created by AI than challenges?

James: Hard to say. I’m not sure that I will actually be dispelling your nervousness. To be fair. I think AI presents a massive opportunity for so many things. I think one of the things that I’m most excited about is the potential to use AI in the WordPress community to make WordPress more sustainable, more energy efficient, and part of that can be AI analysis of the code.

Again, it’s not there yet, but it will be in five years. The other thing is using AI in our hosting infrastructure to manage the way we do things and maybe move somebody’s WordPress installation from one company’s infrastructure to another because they are greener or something.

So like that for me is an incredibly exciting opportunity. I think that also there are a lot of other ways that AI can be used in terms of generating content. Like the idea with AI, one of the great things is I can write 10 articles now in the space that I could write one. And I can A/B test my articles, I can A/B test my campaigns and we’re already doing this manually, but the scope increases hugely.

So I think there’s gonna be a net economic benefit for people who make money out of WordPress as well. Assuming that they get on board, and they leverage the tools that are becoming available. That doesn’t take away from the fact that, if we mishandle the way that we do this, I’m not gonna say that there is disaster, but I think that, there are risks and I think, a lot of people are thinking about the obvious risks.

But I think the real ones that are gonna get us, are gonna be those nuanced risks. Like the nuanced risk for us at the moment for me is the five years time we’re not going to have a skills pipeline of people coming into the WordPress community because we haven’t handled this well. We haven’t engaged with it, we haven’t talked about it. 

And here’s the bit where I will dispel your nervousness. I was thoroughly encouraged by the set of talks and the schedule at WordCamp EU. AI was a hot topic, and we were talking about it, everyone was talking about it. And I think the best thing about it is that we weren’t talking about the obvious problems with the obvious solutions.

People were digging into the details, people were asking hard questions of the speakers, myself included. And that means that we are engaging with the problem now, and I think that as a community, WordPress will come out on top.

Doc: So, AI was obviously a hot topic at WordCamp EU  just because it’s a hot topic everywhere and I guess I’d love to know, what was the, the general vibe of the presentations you saw, but also the general reactions from the crowd? Do you think we have kind of a consensus forming around AI and WordPress at the moment?

James: I don’t know that we have a consensus, but we certainly have a consensus to talk about it. I think the reaction was positive. A lot of the AI talks that were there were, this is how I’m using AI, this is how we could use AI, and it was how we can use AI and agencies, how we can use AI to develop plugins, how we can use AI to optimize SEO I think was one of the ones, I didn’t attend it. I just saw the title. 

So people are talking about the opportunity and I think the response was positive. and a lot of the questions that came up, certainly in my talk, were how do we deal with it? I don’t have the answers.

We’ve gotta navigate that. but we are asking the questions, which means that we’re aware of it, which is the first step in solving any problem.

Doc: You are involved in the WordPress Sustainability Channel, and I know that sustainability and websites is important for you and I think that’s a really awesome kind of way to think about like how AI could be used. 

As someone who writes a lot of content, one of the things I heard about recently, a nice little AI fix. I cannot remember the name of it. But it was a plugin that had four main features that were all kind of SEO related. One of them was, it would help write, A/B tests for, headlines or maybe like, SEO descriptions based on your content, here’s a couple suggestions for titles.

If you like, we’ll do these tests and if you like the results of the test, you can permanently switch over. And I thought that was pretty cool. The key feature, the big feature for me in AI, and this is so nerdy, but basically it was, reading your article and then helping you write the Yoast SEO short description, which I don’t know why, for me, I could spend, you know, hours writing a thousand words or whatever in a post, and then it comes to writing that meta description, and I’m just like, no, I’d rather jump out this window than write one more description about this thing. So like the idea of having AI do that seems wonderful. So there are these kind of clever fixes for things. Yeah.

James: I totally agree with you. Summarizing something effectively is hard. It’s never been easy. And I remember like writing the abstract for my, stuff in university was, oh Jesus, like I thought I was done. I’ve written my three pages. Do I really need to write this paragraph?

It was always the hard part, and that’s one thing AI is absolutely fantastic at is summarizing stuff.

Doc: Yeah, absolutely. We’re coming close to the end of this first section. I did have one question I wanted to ask you, and I should have given you more time to answer this. WordPress is an open source, platform and everything kind of connected with WordPress is also supposed to have this kind of open source, GDPL licensing or whatever.

When we’re talking about open source and AI for coding, Co-pilot maybe in particular, what are the issues? Can developers use Co-pilot to help write WordPress code that’s supposed to eventually be open source?

James: Oh, gotta prefix this with I am not a lawyer. I don’t know. I think that that is probably one of the other issues that we have to solve, but I think it is one of the obvious issues. I mean that, that’s already come up. People are discussing how, OpenAI and ChatGPT was trained on data sets that weren’t open source.

And now technically the results are legally ambiguous, especially when it comes to using it to code, et cetera. I think that can be cleaned up fairly easily. I mean, I say easily. If we adopt a framework where we say if something is open source, AI can use it and AI can spit it out and we get commitments from the companies that run the big AI’s. 

And everyone who writes their own AI model, because that’s coming too, because it’s gonna get easier. If they are more zealous and careful about the things that they train on, from a legal perspective, from a licensing perspective, and eventually it’s gonna be from a content perspective and a regulation perspective, that’s coming and it’s gonna happen, and there’s gonna be a couple of mines in the minefield that we’re gonna hit. But I think, that’s navigable. I think lawyers are gonna make a lot of money whilst it happens. I think on a day-to-day basis that’s probably not gonna affect most people.

As far as WordPress is concerned, there are probably gonna be cases where, we accidentally put some proprietary code into WordPress, and then that becomes a question of does the proprietary licensing of the code survive the transformation that it undergoes through an AI system? Because remember, AI outputs are random or randomized. And so what they’ve really done is they’ve looked at someone’s code and they have reproduced it. And by they, I mean the AI system itself, they’ve reproduced it with some random variations. 

That argument is a lot stronger for content and a lot weaker for code because coding languages have very strict grammars and there’s a lot less random variation that works. And as a result, AI systems are constrained in what they output when they answer specific questions. 

But again, the type of problems that we are gonna be using AI to solve for now are firmly classed in the utilitarian thing. AI is gonna be outputting boilerplate code. It’s gonna be doing transformations of markdown tables into HTML for us. It’s not solving complicated problems that have patents on them yet,

Doc: Mm-hmm.

James: I should emphasize the yet.

Doc: I can say that most of my concerns currently with AI could be resolved if we had some sort of system in place to keep content and basically if we just think about it as data, keep data from being scraped without permission and use without permission. I think that’s largely where most of my, my issues come from.

James: I think that’s that’s the easy first step. If we expand the robots start txt file, for example, or AI training systems. Honor that in some way. There are easy technical solutions to that problem.

Doc: Yeah. And I keep thinking about if Co-pilot was a little bit more like using Flicker where you can adjust your slider when you’re doing search, you can adjust a slider on Creative Commons. You can say, I’m looking for a totally free no attribution commercial usage photo or you can say, I want a little bit more variety. I’m not gonna sell this, so let me move this to non-commercial and I’m willing to give attribution, right? Like a little slider like that. If Co-pilot had something that was like, here’s the licenses that this corpus is using and here’s the license that this corpus is using, and you can kind of choose.

And if you’re going to output to open source, you can choose from the open source model. That would be such a no-brainer for Microsoft to implement.

James: I’d never thought of it before. I love the way you’re thinking though. That is fantastic.

Doc: Yeah. Well we are gonna take our final break and when we come back we’re gonna talk with James a little bit more about WordCamp EU, because I didn’t get to go this year and I’m looking forward to hearing about his experience. So stay tuned for more Press This right after the short break.

Doc: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to James Dominy, who gave a talk at WordCamp EU 2023, titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our AI Overlords.” We’ve spent the last 20 minutes talking about that topic and we haven’t really talked much about WordCamp EU.

And I guess just at the end of this episode, James, I’d love to just hear how was your experience this year? This was your first WordCamp, right?

James: My first WordCamp, my first WordPress meetup ever and it was amazing. One word, Athens, two words, Athens Summer. It was fantastic. 

But that’s not the only reason it was fantastic. I want to say up upfront, it was an extremely well organized and smoothly run event. I was so impressed and a shout out to the people, especially who helped the speakers.

It was the smoothest presentation I have ever done. Thank you very much to everyone involved. Huge praise. 

Again, like I said, AI was the hot topic. They, they were, I think the schedule and the talks were well thought out. Obviously you never get to attend everything. Because I was speaking, I missed like a half morning. But there were tons of things that I wanted to see and I can’t wait for them to drop on WordPress.TV so that I can see them after the fact. They were covering a wide variety of topics and I think the other thing is, in the closing, a couple of years ago, or more than a couple of years ago now, I think Matt Mullenweg’s sort of his mic drop moment was learn JavaScript deeply. And this time it, it’s gonna be learn AI deeply. I think he’s absolutely right. Lean into it.

Doc: Final question about WordCamp, did you hear anything that blew your mind about AI? Did you learn anything from anybody else during your talk? Like one cool fact?

James: Yes. More than one. I don’t know that there was anything mind blowing, but there were tons of little things where I was going, oh, I didn’t know we were using AI for that already. Like you just mentioned, we’re already using AI for A/B testing and for summarizing.

Great. And of course, the news about Jetpack was including AI directly, was big news obviously at WordCamp. It kind of caught me off guard in fairness was like, ah, damn, okay, they’re already on this. And here’s my talk about coding a plugin by yourself. No need for that anymore. 

I think the thing that really blew my mind is the pace with which it’s being adopted. Everybody was using it. Everyone had a way to use it. Every conversation that I had, someone came up with a way, a new way to solve a problem they were having. It’s not a problem everyone has necessarily, but that’s the scary thing about the tool or not scary, that’s the amazing thing about the tool. It’s so versatile and you can use it to solve so many different problems.

Doc: Well, James, it’s been great having you on the show. Thank you so much for your time and, thanks for giving a talk at WordCamp EU. If people wanna follow you, and learn more about what you’re working on, is there a good place to send them?

James: I am not a social media person, unfortunately. The best I can kind of give is my LinkedIn if you want to send me an invite request and I will generally accept, And catch my talk on WordPress.TV when it drops.

Doc: And catch you in the uh, WordPress Sustainability channel.

James: Absolutely. Hashtag sustainability on the make WordPress slack.

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

The post Press This: Our AI Overlords appeared first on Torque.

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

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

The WordPress Repository has always been a great place to find powerful and free tools to extend your WordPress site. You can find plugins, blocks and themes, and you can even sort by features such as block compatible. And as of this morning, there are 302 block compatible themes or block themes listed on the WordPress themes section of the repository. 

One of the newest of which is Frost and my guest today is Brian Gardner, a Principal Developer Advocate at WP Engine and the creator of Frost Theme. Brian, congrats on getting your theme into the repository.

And I know you’ve been on the show before, but let’s just give our listeners a reminder. How did you get into WordPress?

Brian Gardner: Well, Doc, thanks for having me back. Certainly glad to be here. I love talking about WordPress. I enjoy sharing my story. I don’t get to do it as often as I used to, so I’ll give the abbreviated version. Back in 2006, I was a project manager at an architectural firm, and I was by far one of the younger people working there.

And so by default, I became the computer guy. And so I taught myself a lot of things, back in the day. It was really right around Microsoft Office and all of that stuff. But, my curiosity about the internet and blogging, which was new back at that point, peaked. And so I started dabbling around with WordPress and wanted to just have my own blog.

And so through that experience, I figured out how to install a WordPress site and from there downloaded a free theme from a different repository, though it was, I think, deemed the official WordPress repository, but it was a different location. Grabbed a theme, started playing around, put it up, tweaked it. Created my own theme, gave it away on my site for links and downloads and email and exposure. And from that I started to land freelance work, people who wanted to have the theme customized. 

So I called the vacation money, right? Cause I still had my full-time job and just kind of nights and weekends. They would pay a couple hundred bucks to do a thing or two and then from there I had a guy, a real estate agent from Boston who wanted me to do a whole custom design for him, which I did. And it was overkill for him cuz he just wanted a blog. And this was more of a sort of a CMS based, brochure site looking thing.

And so, I asked my audience what I should do with it, and then I followed up and said, would anybody buy this? And, the resounding audience echo was yes. And so I followed that up with the next smartest question, which was, how much would you pay for a premium WordPress theme? And at that point, things became real because there was a lot of people saying that they would spend money on it.

And so I bundled it, packaged it, called it Revolution, and started selling lots of Revolution. And, that was my window into WordPress. And then consequently the eCommerce side of WordPress by selling a theme. That’s the real quick version. Obviously some ups and downs and lefts and rights along the way.

Doc Pop: You know, that has me wondering, I know that you have plenty of examples on your site of themes that you’ve made. And you’ve sold themes as well. We mentioned at the top of the show Frost WP theme, which we’re gonna get into in a second. But I’m just curious, is that the first time that you’ve uploaded a theme to the WordPress repository for like the free theme section?

Brian Gardner: So Frost is not the first theme. It’s the first WP Engine theme that we submitted. But ahead of that, within the last 12 months, I’ve submitted four different Full Site Editing themes. Almost hard to believe, right? Almost 15 to 18 years that is the case, but it is. 

So I personally have four themes up on the WordPress theme directory right now. All of them are Full Site Editing themes, and then Frost, of course, is the latest and the one with the most downloads already.

Doc Pop: Wow, congrats. And let’s just get into it. What is so special about Frost theme versus the other themes you’ve worked on?

Brian Gardner: Frost is actually the first theme I started creating that was a block based theme. I started about two years, almost two years ago, over the summer. And this was even ahead of my hire WP Engine when I realized the direction of where WordPress was going with at the time it was called Gutenberg Editor. But now we know Gutenberg as the exploratory plugin that brings the features into WordPress core. When I realized sort of what blocks were, how patterns worked and the trajectory of where this was all going, I got really excited. So two years ago I started creating this theme called Frost.

And at the time it was a Genesis based child theme. And so that was a little bit ahead of going and switching it over to a block-based theme. But shortly into my development of that, I realized, okay, I now get this and I now know where this can go. And so originally Frost was set up to be a very vanilla theme, but a powerful one because it had a lot of patterns and the idea behind it was sort of setting these patterns up as wire frames so that if you were an agency or a freelancer, it’d be very easy to build top to bottom pages of a website because each pattern sort of represents a certain section of either a homepage or an about page or a pricing page.

And so I was like, well, if I came up with a system, a powerful theme that had all of these sort of insertable with one click things, then people could then design with that opinionate them, add photos, images, change, text colors, and so on. And so Frost has, from that point, been arguably one of the most up to date and bleeding edge WordPress themes out there because I’ve obsessed over the development of Gutenberg, the plugin, WordPress core, and really sort of fine satisfaction in living on the front line in the bleeding edge.

And so Frost always supports and implements all of the things that were new as they came in through Gutenberg, which is okay, and we made that available once I came over to WP Engine. We brought Frost in, and it has been open sourced ever since, and available through GitHub and through the website.

But until WordPress 6.2 dropped, it was always deemed sort of experimental and not production ready and kind of use at your own risk, even though it was very, very stable. And so when I knew WordPress 6.2 was going to be arriving, I talked to our product teams and the vice president of product here at WP Engine.

I was like, look, I think Frost is like prime time and ready to go, and it’s my recommendation that we make it ready, put it on the repo, get more distribution out of it. Encourage people to use it, to learn from it, to fork it, to, to do whatever they want with it. And so we all collectively agreed and shortly after 6.2 dropped, we submitted Frost to the directory.

Doc Pop: I know you’ve always mentioned Frost as being kind of an experimental project, an experimental theme, boundary pushing, and I just always kind of thought of that as the things you were implementing in Frost were experimental. You can tell me if I’m wrong here, but I think what I’ve kind of come to realize is it was experimental in that it was just waiting for WordPress to get solidified.

It wasn’t that the features themselves were wildly experimental. It was more that you were waiting for WordPress 6.2 or something like it to come and say, look, this is a structure that you can build on now, and everything’s Stable and ready, ready for a theme like yours.

Is that a good way to put it?

Brian Gardner: Yeah, that, that’s mostly accurate. I mean, really what it came down to was, up until 6.2, the development of WordPress itself by way of the Gutenberg Plugin, Gutenberg is a plugin that’s now an experimental plugin that ships a new version every other week. And this is where they test and bring in new features that ultimately will land in WordPress core.

And so every two weeks you get a new version of Gutenberg, but WordPress core itself only updates on a three to maybe four times major release basis per year. And so what happens is within each of those three or four months, you’ve got all of these new things that are added to the Gutenberg Plugin.

So technically they’re at the disposal of people who wanna test them and play with them and use them. However, because it’s experimental, we always said Frost needs to be also cuz it requires the Gutenberg Plugin, which could at any given moment break. And it’s bad to encourage people to use something on a production based site that you know could potentially break.

And so the difference sort of between the development of WordPress Core and the Gutenberg Plugin kind of has slowed down because a lot of the features have arrived and are available. I realized, okay, now we’re at a point where WordPress itself is out there and the development of things that are new that could potentially break is slowing down.

Now is the time to do it.

Doc Pop: I think that’s a great spot for us to take a short break. When we come back, we’ll continue talking with Brian Gardner, a Principal Developer Advocate at WP Engine about the Frost theme and what makes it so unique in the WordPress Plugin repository. So stay tuned for more WordPress News.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and I am talking to Brian Gardner from WP Engine. He’s a theme creator who just recently submitted the Frost theme, which is a project that he made with the WP Engine team to the WordPress plugin repository. 

In the beginning of the show, we talked about that process of uploading it, and I think one of the things that stuck out to me, Brian, it’s felt very much like when 6.2 came out and you had this theme that you were very proud of, the Frost theme, you felt it was a really good way to kind of push the boundaries and show people what could be done with these themes. It really feels to me that WP Engine took this theme and decided to make it a flagship theme to really show people what could be done.

I’m wondering if that’s kind of how you think about this theme or what you think this theme serves. Both for the community, but also for like WP Engine, where you work as a developer advocate.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, so I talked earlier about the idea of it sort of being a wireframe theme. As it was originally built as we knew 6.2 was coming and as the release of what we call version 1.0, which is where we brought it to production ready. I did some design opinionation to it. So I’m like, okay, well now that this is actually gonna be in a place where a lot of people may download it, we really wanna encourage people to use it.

So it needs to actually be a little more interesting than it had been. So one of those things I did was I updated several of the black patterns that were in the theme to make them a little more usable and a little less just black and white-ish. I reset the color palette. I implemented an electric blue as part of the base color for it.

But part of WordPress now the capability is within a block theme. You can have what’s called style variations and that sort of gives it, we’ll call ’em skins, I guess is a good way to explain it. The ability for users to sort of change color systems for the theme. And so somebody could go in and choose the red version of Frost or the teal version of Frost or purple or orange.

And so there’s eight total, which I felt was a good place. And of course you can customize that to like the exact hex code you want also, right? That’s the beauty of the site editors being able to go in and change the color palette yourself. I opinionated the design. I made things a little more interesting and created a few more, what’s called layouts or full page patterns.

So if you wanted a pre-built homepage or an about page or a pricing page, or even a link page similar to Link Tree. Users could click and insert these sections all at once and then customize them from there. So I really tried to take it from sort of an experimental, educational theme to, Hey, let’s use this for something that people can actually, our customers at WP Engine or agencies, and freelancers and people could build actual websites with it.

Doc Pop: There’s two ways I see that you could have gone with a theme like this as sort of a big rollout of what you think a Full Site Editing theme should be. One is to have a very minimal page and just encourage people to build on top of it.

And the other is to really pack it with features and it feels like that’s kind of what y’all landed on is, is something for everyone. There’s Dark and light variations or as we kind of call ’em, like Developer mode variations for the views. There’s tons of patterns.

You’ve even got things that would be useful for things like testimonials, calls to action, things like that. Was there a moment, where y’all were kind of thinking about how do we know what’s too much to put in here? Or is the goal to just put in something for everybody so that if I’m opening up a bar that also has live music, I could download this and get it, but also if I was in a kitchen, I could do that.

Is that sort of the goal to cover everything or I don’t know. I’m rambling, but I’m just kind of curious how y’all went about thinking about that.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, that was always the problem, right? Like the idea of a monolithic theme. At least a downloadable single theme really is too much, right? WordPress powers 43 percent of the internet or whatever the number is. And there’s just so many different ways it can be used, which means like you could create a theme that just has 500 patterns and so much of that is not used on an individual basis.

And so for a theme that came with patterns and with colors and all this other stuff, It really was about maintaining a balance between, this is usable on several levels. Not all, but several, with common sections or patterns or things like that, that are pretty much you see on any kind of site, right?

Like a testimonial section can be used for a course creator or a food shop or a lawyer. So like trying to identify what are some of the types of sections that can kind of be used across varying niches. And so most of what’s in Frost is just that, which is a good place to start. It doesn’t have everything. It can’t do everything. But it’s enough to get most of the way there or at least show people how things can be done. And we’ll go from there. 

The cool thing about WordPress and the way the theme update system works is that you can add patterns to a theme update and then deploy that update across all of the sites. And it doesn’t break anything cuz all it’s doing is just increasing the library in which you could draw from. And so like that’s part of what version 1.0 was. Get a handful of footers in there, some call to actions, because everybody needs a call to action on a website. Let’s see where it lands and what people have requested and where it goes. And we can always add more if we need to. And so that was sort of the decision process behind it all.

Doc Pop: Over on WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding wrote that “Frost could easily be used for building agency websites, portfolios, business sites and more. It’s easy to see developers using it as a starter for multiple projects, given its minimal design.” She also mentions that there is a forked version of Frost, your Powder theme, and I actually didn’t know about that.

But, can you tell us a little bit about Powder?

Brian Gardner: Yeah, so Powder was just something that I ended up doing for my own sake. Every once in a while I’ll do something for a friend o rprevious client, like just a sort of side project, custom design or something like that. And of course I would at the time always use Frost. But in most cases I was like personally it would just be easier to just have a stripped down version of a WordPress theme, something that was so vanilla, so basic that it would be like literally the ground floor.

And so what I did was I actually forked Frost and obviously renamed it and made it Powder, but then I stripped all the patterns and all the specialness out of it, and it’s just literally like a black and white canvas theme. No special templates, no patterns other than the header and footer that need to be there.

And so I just personally wanted my own thing to have as a starting foundation, because I’m a creator and I love design and I have hundreds of ideas that run through my head on a daily basis, just on cool ways to do design. And so it’s like, well, at least if I had my own version of something, I could, one, put that on the theme directory, but also it allows me to just play around with like the child theme system and say, oh, here’s a fun design let me just see if I could just knock something out without having to like recreate the wheel every time.

Doc Pop: And so with Frost, you started this as one of your kind of personal projects. You’ve now handed it over to the WP Engine team to kind of create something new and bigger. What’s going to get added to this theme? It already comes pretty packed.

Is the next step gonna be adding more patterns, or is the next step gonna be listening to the, you’ve already got a thousand downloads already, or a thousand users. Is it gonna be listening to them and kind of like making tweaks and fixes for now?

Brian Gardner: The answer to that question is yes, pretty much to everything you said. In fact, this morning I was adding a couple patterns. I did a workshop last week around conversion focused patterns and how to build them. And so what I did was I built four new patterns to demonstrate in the workshop. And so I was like, wow, this makes sense now that I’ve built these and people have seen them. And they’re very lightweight. And of course they’re all things that I think were relevant to a website. So I’m adding them to Frost as an update that might go out tomorrow. Along with a little bit more just sort of work within the file structure.

The style sheet and theme JSON to get a little technical are two files that handle styles. And as I find more ways to consolidate code and to optimize kind of how things are done from a coding and style standpoint. I’m doing a little bit of reorg just on things that are sort of recent with WordPress 6.2, and so just kind of optimizing it and doing little tidying up, but also adding some more value by bringing in some patterns and then at that point we’ll see how people are using it and what they think and what they want.

Doc Pop: This is another great spot for us to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re gonna wrap up our conversation with Brian Gardner about the Frost theme and Full Site Editing themes. So stay tuned for more Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and I am with Brian Gardner today talking about the Frost theme that just went up on the WordPress.org theme repository. And Brian we’ve spent the show talking about the features of Frost and you can definitely pick up on how excited you are about Full Site Editing and about just theme design and web design in general.

I think one of the last things I wanted to ask you about is, this was a project that you started on your own, and then you joined WP Engine as a Principal Developer Advocate. How does releasing a theme like this fit into that role of a Principal Developer Advocate at WP Engine?

Brian Gardner: Well, obviously developer advocacy within a tech company is really all about educating the users, whether it be the software that the company itself produces or that the software is, is all based upon. So I was brought in part to sort of evangelize the use of WordPress. Continue to talk about how folks can, can use WordPress, can build with WordPress.

And of course, at the time Full Site Editing and block-based building, obviously something that’s very relevant. And of course we have our own products, right? So we’ve got, Local, the local development tool. We’ve got ACF, we’ve got obviously Frost, we have some of the Genesis products and stuff like that.

So it’s really just a mixture of these are our WordPress products and it’s our job to, to facilitate community around them, around the software. Some semblance of giving back, right? We have a core value of Committed to Giving Back. So there’s contributions back to WordPress in a way Frost and some of our other projects are examples of that.

And so it’s just our job to help educate and train and to foster the community. So, it’s the position I signed up for when Heather and I were talking about this, the WordPress side of developer relations did not exist at WP Engine. I was brought in as the first, and so it was really just an opportunity for us to kind of pave our own way and say, this is what we think this looks like.

And I think we’ve done a great job. We’ve got a couple members now, Sam Munoz, who’s a community manager with us, and Damon Cook also on the WordPress side of Developer Advocacy. And we just do our best to be as helpful as we can to support our internal products and to just continue to innovate WordPress.

Doc Pop: And this seems like a good spot to plug Build Mode, your weekly developer workshop. Why don’t you tell us about that?

Brian Gardner: So build mode is every Friday at 10:00 AM central time. It is something that Sam and I came up with last year and we said, let’s do something official. Let’s make this not a workshop or not a teaching thing, but more an interactive, immersive conversation. And so we usually have 20 to 25 folks every Friday morning.

It’s an opportunity for us to talk about things that are coming from customers or non-customers, just people who are building WordPress websites and have a WordPress based business. It allows us a little more insight and direct intel into pain points of this.

And it’s been a treasure chest of just insight, good market research, just all of these things. And we’re really developing a great community there. We have a lot of people who come back every single week. They make it a point to work their schedule around Build Mode because they don’t want to miss it.

And so we’re super pumped about that. Again, we talk about WordPress, sometimes what’s new with WordPress features that are coming, but also just sort of what services do you offer in your WordPress based business? So we get outside of the immediacy of building websites and just talk a little bit more about life and work balance and stuff like that.

So it’s great.

Doc Pop: And let’s wrap this up. Can you just tell folks where they can find more about you and Frost and build mode? What’s a good place for people to check out?

Brian Gardner: So personally my Twitter account is probably where I’m most active and easiest to get in touch with, which is @bgardner. FrostWP.Com is where you can see the Frost demo, where you can download it. You can see all the patterns, the styles, variations. And then Build Mode. If you go to WPEngine.com/builders, we have an events linked up in our menu, which then sends you into the build mode thing.

We usually have three or four weeks worth of signup, registration links ready for people. So feel free to go ahead and reserve your spot, and we hope to see you there.

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

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