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.

Doc Pop: Advanced Custom Fields is a popular plugin designed to enable WordPress developers to have more control over their custom field data. And it’s also a two time Plugin Madness winner. Recently Advanced Custom Fields released version 6.1. With this version, site developers can now register custom post types and custom taxonomies from within the plugin.

To talk about these new features in ACF 6.1, we’re joined by Iain Poulson. A product manager at WP Engine working on Advanced Custom Fields. Iain, you’ve been on the show. It was about a year ago that we had you on maybe a little less when you released 6.0. So I know we’ve already gotten to this, but can you just remind our listeners, how did you first get into WordPress?

Iain Poulson: Oh yeah. I started building plugins a long time ago, and then eventually moved from freelancing, building WordPress sites for clients to working for Delicious Brains, a WordPress plugin development company. And along the way we acquired ACF and I became the product manager for ACF. 

And then just under a year ago or a little bit less than a year, Delicious Brains and the plugins were acquired by WP Engine. And so here I am now as ACF product manager within WP Engine. The ACF product is going from strength to strength, which is great.

Doc Pop: Do you remember what version ACF was when you became product manager?

Iain Poulson: Oh I thought you were gonna ask when I first started using it, but it was 5.10 or something like that. We were working on what was next. We were trying to get our feet under the table with just the product and building new features. As the new team working on it, I think 5.12 was our bigger release, which was the REST API integration.

It seems like a long time ago.

Doc Pop: Yeah. And so like I said, we had you on in October talking about 6.0, and 6.1 is out and it’s a huge release. It seems to be one of the most exciting Advanced Custom Fields releases I can remember. Can you tell us what are maybe the one or two biggest features of note in 6.1?

Iain Poulson: You’re totally right, it’s a really big release. It’s a big release for a number of reasons. It brings the ability for people to register custom post types and taxonomies in WordPress in the ACF admin, which is kind of like a huge thing that people do all the time.

People do it with other plugins, they do it with code. And ACF users have always been doing it. It’s one of these things that you typically do when you’re building a site that just has some other data other than posts and pages, which is pretty much all the time. People need custom post types to build their sites.

But it’s always something that ACF hasn’t done, and it’s worked with whatever solution, and it’s been predominantly around adding fields to those post types or taxonomies. 

But it became so clear that the workflow around building a site, creating a custom post type and then adding fields to that post type was so sort of entrenched in how our ACF users were building sites that it just seemed like a great idea to put it into the plugin. 

But it’s the first time the plugin’s kind of moved into doing more than just custom fields. I talk about it in the release post jokingly to say it’s now we’re probably referring to it as ACF now, rather than Advanced Custom Fields, because it does more and talking about the plugin as Advanced Custom Fields, Post Types and Taxonomies is a bit too much of a mouthful.

So yeah, it’s a change in the approach of like, we’re trying to improve the workflow around custom fields, around custom data, around content modeling, around building WordPress sites, structured data with WordPress sites, and making it better for our users. So it was a big shift there, but it’s also a big chunky release.

There was a ton of work that went behind the scenes under the hood. Refactoring how the admin of the plugin worked. Moving just from the registering UI of custom fields to now to incorporate custom post types and taxonomies and making that whole UI and all of the engineering work that goes on. Making that reusable so we can then move onto other things later on, which we’ll probably talk about in the show. 

So yeah, it’s a big chunky release. It’s been well received. I think that there’s a ton of people out there that have just gone, “Yes, I’ve been waiting for that for a while.” 

And it just makes my workflow much easier. I can use one less plugin, for example, or even if I’m still registering post types with code because I wanna put it in version control or having it on the file system, I can use the ACF registration UI to go and have complete control over the post types that I’m registering.

We expose all of the different settings, but make it quite simple so you can get away with the quickest amount of settings, tweaking to register a post type, or you can really delve into all of the advanced settings. And you can then take that definition and export it to PHP, and put it in Git or version control, or you can use our JSON export and sync that we have for field groups so you can make changes and push them up to your production site.

So it kind of fits in the same workflow as field groups, but just in the ACF way with post types and taxonomies. So it’s really cool.

Doc Pop: And this is available for free? These two main features that we’re talking about are available for pro and free users?

Iain Poulson: Yes, exactly. This is not a pro only feature. This is for everybody. This is kind of like the bedrock of creating data heavy sites with WordPress. We wanted to make it available for free. It’s great to have out there for sure.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. According to your blog post about this release, you said, and this is gonna be quoting from your blog, “Registering CPTs and taxonomies has been on a roadmap for quite some time. When Delicious Brains acquired the plugin from Elliot, the first email we sent our users was to ask them the top three things they wanted to see in the plugin, CPTs, and taxonomies in the plugin was right up there and the top five requests.”

So I’m kind of curious, we talked about things like your history with the plugin, why if these were the most popular things, why did it take such a long time to be able to finally integrate them?

Iain Poulson: Yeah, I mean, I think obviously there’s a sort of a longer history of ownership with Elliot having it for so long, he was the founder, he was the creator, he was the person that did so much heavy lifting and hard work with it. I think he potentially had a different view on what it should do. And that opinion was different to perhaps how we viewed it. 

And we now view it differently even at WP Engine compared to Delicious Brains. So I think these things are subjective, right?

You can have some of our users say, well, I don’t want ACF to do that because I use another plugin to do that. Or I’ll use my tried and tested method with code. And they don’t see the need. And then there’s five other users that would just be like, yes, this is exactly what I need.

We’ve taken that approach with it. There’s also a piece with headless. WP Engine’s Atlas platform is built on modeling data in WordPress, creating custom post types. Creating custom fields, and exposing those all through WP Graph QL requests, and, um, making that data available on the headless front end.

So ACF is working within that platform to give users the ability to model data in the UI quickly, easily without mucking around with PHP code or other plugins. It’s playing into the fact that ACF and WordPress can create great editing experiences, great content editing experiences, and create good headless experiences as well for WordPress builds.

Doc Pop: That’s a great spot for us to take a quick break. When we come back, we are gonna continue talking with Iain Poulson about what is coming in future versions of ACF, as well as talk about a few more features that we haven’t gotten around to yet, and this release of 6.1. So stay tuned for more Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. My name is Doc and I am joined by Iain Polson, a product manager at WP Engine working on ACF, which just released ACF 6.1. Before the break, we talked about some of the powerful new features that have been released with ACF 6.1, including registering custom post types and taxonomies.

Iain, I think you were just about to kind of touch on something here that I was curious about. These are new features and powerful new features with a lot of options and a lot of complexity. And you’ve even mentioned that it’s sort of changed the way the whole product is being thought of.

And, Advanced Custom Fields, in a way, is almost too limiting. And allowing yourself to think of it as ACF, you can explore more of these possibilities that are out there and not being limited to just certain ideas from the past. But the thing I’m wondering is when you’re adding so much power to a plugin like this, how is that changing the experience for new users?

Is this maybe accidentally making the plugin kind of harder to use for more basic users?

Iain Poulson: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think since the 6.0 release, which had the new UI, we’ve been trying to think more purposefully about how we onboard users and have a better experience when you install the plugin and you activate it and you have an empty state with things. You don’t have any field groups, you don’t have any post types, and you don’t necessarily know what you need to do. 

There’s more work to be done there for sure, but something we did put into 6.1, which I’m really pleased how it turned out and I think it’s, it’s already proven valuable for people.

It’s a better way to select and choose the field type that you need. So when you are defining your fields and you’ve created a field group and you are defining the fields that you need, you need to choose what type of field is it? Is it text field? Is this gonna be a WYSIWYG Editor?

Is it gonna be a page link? Is it gonna be more of a complex field type? Is it a repeater field, a flexible content field, a clone field? But actually what are they, what do they do? 

And previously in versions before 6.1, the field type selection workflow would be you go and use a dropdown, a very basic HTML dropdown and select your field type.

And you would have to know which one you’re looking for, know which one you want and what it does, and try and glean all that information from a select field. So now we’ve kind of added this Browse Fields button next to the select, which we’ve improved a little bit with Better Search as well and just better visibility about what you are picking.

But this Browse Fields button brings up a modal, which is a field picker. It shows you all of the fields, and it’s categorized them, so you can sort of tab through the different categories of either a basic field, a choice field, the relational fields and things like that, like the layout fields.

It’s trying to help new users, but existing users as well to understand what are these fields. What are the 30 field types that they’ve got at their disposal and why they’d use them. So we’ve got kind of a sidebar of the modal that has a description about each field. There’s almost like a visual representation of what the field would look like the edit screen.

I mean, it’s a bit of a pseudo UI element. It doesn’t show data, but it just gives that example of what it actually will look like. And there’s documentation links and there’s also tutorial links where we have them for field types and you can kind of like click in and get some more information.

So hopefully it’s making the experience of defining fields easier for people who don’t perhaps know what they’re looking for. But there’s 30 different field types. Some are named in such a way that it’s quite hard to understand when and why you’d use them. And there’s some fields that are extremely powerful, extremely useful to people. But they’re not very accessible. 

Like the clone field, for example, is very hard to understand when you first look at that as a name. What that really does and the flexible content field is very similar. So we are trying to call out and make it easy to understand what these things are and have more information around it.

There’s some really good tutorials that the team are putting together and we’ve got folks from the content team, the Dev Rel team working on tutorials around the clone field and we’ve got them for the flexible content field, which are really powerful fields that people who are building sites rely on. Some of them are pretty much turning into page builders with the flexible content field, creating layouts for clients. But it’s so hard to understand if you are a first time user. 

So yeah, this is about discoverability trying to understand the best time to use it.

And it calls out the great fields that we’ve got. So yeah, I’m really proud of that piece of work. It looks great and it works. It works really well, and it’s having the desired effect.

Doc Pop: I think about Gutenberg and its many stages kind of being released and finally in WordPress. 6.2, I think we’ve gotten the most full and kind of final version of the site editor. Do you think that these changes are gonna be seeing a lot of drastic changes or do you kind of feel like y’all waited to roll them out in a way that this is probably gonna look the same in version 6.3 and 6.4 of ACF.

Iain Poulson: Yeah, I think for the most part, especially the field picker probably won’t change too much. I think we definitely try to take an iterative approach on some things where you need to get to a point where you ship some stuff and you will come back to it and improve it. 

And a really good example of that is that in the custom post type registration piece, when you are registering a post type, you need to give it a menu icon if it’s gonna be a in the left hand side, in the admin menu.

And other plugins and other ways of doing that give you perhaps a better experience than we’ve got right now. You can supply a URL to an image. You can supply a dash icon class that will use the same type of icon, from the Icon library that is in the left hand side of the menu. 

But, that’s not a great experience. So we are working on improving that and that nicely ties into actually what’s coming down in a future version that we’re working on at the moment is, taking this idea of, you can register things in code, like a custom post type but actually making it easier to do that in the UI.

A prime example of something that we’ve had in ACF for a long time is, the options page feature part of ACF Pro. So it’s a premium feature, but it gives people the ability to create fields and stick them in a page in the admin that is a global, it’s like a site settings page or an options page. So it’s not part of a post type or anything like that. 

And it stands alone. And you put global settings in there of fields that would be used across the website. And at the moment, ACF Pro allows you to create these options pages, but you have to register them in code first, and then you define your fields and say, I want these fields to show up on this options page.

So we are working on a UI for this options page registration to make things just so much easier. And a lot of the work that went on with the custom post type piece, the refactoring that the team did behind the scenes kind of paves the way for us to build out more UIs. To help register other things, and the options page is gonna be the first thing.

But the reason why I’ve brought that up is that, again, with the options page, when you say, right, well, I want this page on the left hand side, and if it’s a top level menu item, you also wanna pick a menu icon to sit similar to all the other menu items that are on the left hand side. 

And so the designer Dale, he’s been working on a much better picker experience that will be used for the options page, and we’re gonna port it back onto the custom post type stuff as well.

So we’re slowly improving things that aren’t perhaps as polished to start with, but I think, you don’t wanna get into that trap with software development where you only ship when it’s perfect because perfect is a moving state and you never get there. So you have to get it out and keep moving forward.

So that’s what’s coming soon in 6.2, we hope. And we’ll improve the options, the menu icon picker in the custom post types as we do it.

Doc Pop: That’s interesting. And I know you’re predicting when things come out, so we won’t talk about timelines. This is just a random question that’s been on my mind, we mentioned you took on ACF at version 5.10 or 5.11 and 5.12 was a major release.

I’m just kind of curious, Iain, can you tell me real quickly, when do you know it’s time to go bump up to the next number? What made 6.0 a new big number release?

Iain Poulson: Yeah, I think it’s normally either a big feature, that’s a big project in itself, like the custom post type taxonomy. That’s a big item that really deems worthy of a big release. 

There’s some cases where like 6.2 is probably not gonna be as grand in the sense that it won’t have this major feature, but it will have two or three things that altogether are pretty large and are gonna be kind of important and improve the quality of life of the developers that altogether make up quite a good sum to warrant a major release. 

And then things like 6.0 with the new UI is a big change, so it felt like that was the right time to make that jump from 5 to 6. But yeah, I think we kind of follow the WordPress versioning system a little bit.

So 6.1 is no less important than 6.0, even though 6.0 is greater than a 5 kind of thing. We are not doing semantic versioning for releases. So we will go to 6.2 and that will be our next major release. And hopefully we can deliver enough value in that release that people just can look at it and go, yes, that’s a big one.

Rather than going, is that it? It’s hard. It is a bit of a juggle between, keeping a good cadence of releases because we want to keep delivering value on a good timeline to the users, but we also wanna get the right things, at the right point to make it worthy of that release.

Doc Pop: I appreciate you answering that Iain and that’s a great spot for our final break. When we come back, we’re gonna continue talking with Iain Poulson about Advanced, Custom Fields and their huge victory that they had in March. We’ll tell you more about that after the break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and I am talking to Iain Poulson, a product manager at WP Engine, working on ACF. And before this break, I teased about a major victory, and of course, I am talking about Plugin Madness 2023, which is the annual bracket style competition that we run on Torque Magazine.

We started this competition in 2016 using user submissions for their favorite plugins. We weeded it down to 64 plugins so that we could have a nice even bracket, split ’em up into different categories at first, but they eventually weed down to just two finalists. 

And Advanced Custom Fields, back when, when Elliot was running it they were our very first winner of Plugin Madness. So they’ve always had a special place in our heart. And this year, 2023’s Plugin Madness champion was again, Advanced Custom Fields, or ACF. 

So Iain, huge shout out to you and your team. I just quickly was wondering, do you have any advice for competitors in 2024 Plugin Madness on how to get their fan base to vote for them in Plugin Madness competitions?

Iain Poulson: Yeah. I dunno. I think we didn’t really want to sort of mention it too much. We did speak about it a few times and mentioned it when we had some office hours and stuff, and we tweeted it a couple of times. I think you can take it maybe too seriously from a marketing point of view, but I think it’s great to see the the recognition that ACF has got again this year.

And it definitely means a lot this year to myself and the team, because it does feel like a nice piece of recognition. The product itself is still there in people’s minds as a valuable part of the community. It’s a valuable tool in people’s tool belts.

And obviously the things that we are doing and the releases that we’ve done recently are ticking boxes for people and it’s a nice testament to the team’s hard work and dedication. I’ve said that on the Torque Mag quote. It’s great and we love ACF.

It’s not just the product that we work on and release and try to improve we’re ACF fans ourselves and we certainly don’t think of ourselves as the team or WP Engine as owners. It’s stewards of the plugin because it’s such a big pillar of WordPress. And the ecosystem and as a developer tool.

It’s just great to see that recognition and people loving ACF because we do too.

Doc Pop: At Torque, we appreciate all the folks who voted and nominated their favorite plugins. I’m gonna give a shout out as well, we had ACF at first place, WooCommerce was second place for this year’s Plugin Madness competition and Managed WP Worker. These were all plugins that were user nominated and they are free in the WordPress repository.

So check those out. Check out that little buy, WooCommerce [laughs] you might not have heard of before. But yeah, lots of great results this year and we look forward to doing this again next year. 

And speaking of next year, Iain, it’s been great having you on the show. I hope it’s not another year before we have you on the show again.

It’s really fun hearing about ACF from your perspective, cuz you’ve been a fan for such a long time. If people want to follow what you’re working on, what’s a good place for people to be able to stay in touch, and see what’s what you’re working on right now?

Iain Poulson: We are pretty active on the ACF Twitter account. I’m also quite active on my Twitter, which is PoleVaultWeb. We are trying to be more out there with people, talking to the community, chatting to ACF users, and we’re doing these biweekly office hours at the moment which is, I think we’ve done about five now which is going really well. So basically, on a Friday afternoon, or depending on your time zone, we’d spend about 45 minutes with the team. So myself and two or three of the developers and some of the Dev Rel folks are on a Zoom and people can just turn up. If you’re using ACF, if you’re developing with ACF, if you want to know about a feature that might be coming or you want to talk about how to build X with ACF or you’ve got a problem.Come along, it’s our ACF Chat Fridays that we’ve been doing and we’ve had some good feedback and it’s just nice to chat to other ACF users.

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: New Features in ACF 6.1 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.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of WordPress. I doubt that when Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little started working on the CMS, they could have predicted that eventually WordPress would power over 40 percent of the sites on the web. Over the past year, AI powered tools like Dall-e and MidJourney have taken the world by storm, and it’s still in the early days of large language models and text-to-image generators. So it’s hard to tell which parts of this technology are actually game changing things we’ll be talking about in 20 years from now, and which parts are just novelties. But it does seem obvious that either way people are using AI already to help create content for their websites, to help build their websites, and possibly even how they’ll interact with those websites in the future.

So, joining today is my guest, Joe Hoyle, the CTO and co-founder of Human Made. We’re gonna talk about AI’s Place in a WordPress agency and Human Made’s upcoming AI conference. 

Joe, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you just get us started by telling us how you got into WordPress?

Joe Hoyle: Sure. And, thanks for having me on. How I got into WordPress? Yeah, it was a while ago, certainly, maybe 14 years ago or something like that, maybe a little longer. I think I was just out of college building websites as you do at that kind of early inexperience level and came across WordPress.

I remember actually building a couple of sites in Joomla before that and then finding WordPress and then, thinking, this is a much better system that’s easier and smoother to use than that. And from there, I would say fairly incremental growth up until this point of bringing Human Made into existence, I think 12 or 13 years ago, and then the whole journey that that’s been as well.

Doc Pop: Has Human Made been focused on WordPress most of that time.

Joe Hoyle: Yeah. Exclusively so I suppose when me and Tom Wilmot, my brother founded the company, we were already doing WordPress development individually. You know, that was something like pre-custom post types, WordPress as a CMS was even a novel concept.

And we were doing quite a bit of work around that already with some enterprise size companies. So that’s really where we spun the company out was bringing WordPress to the enterprise, I guess, and, initially obviously creating a very small, niche WordPress agency around that.

And then have grown over time in terms of the amount of people that work with us now and the size of projects we do and all that kind of thing.

Doc Pop: Well, I’m really excited to have you on the show today because you’ve seen things in WordPress and you’ve been around for a while, and I’m really kind of curious to hear your thoughts on this. 

And the impetus for having you join us on this show today is because Human Made is doing a conference coming up. It’s an online conference called AI for WordPress. You have many great speakers lined up and it sounds like it’s gonna be an interesting conversation happening on May 25th online. If people are interested, they can go to humanmade.com to find out more information about that.

But I would like to hear what should agencies know about AI? What is a top level thing that you think just getting started if an agency’s thinking about exploring AI.

Joe Hoyle: Yeah. Well I think for WordPress agencies like Human Made specifically where our majority of our skillset, I suppose, the bread and butter of that industry is in building WordPress solutions. 

We definitely don’t know the final answer to this really yet, in terms of is AI a tool to add to the tool belt of technologies that we might use? Like maybe several years ago learn JavaScript Deeply was kind of the thing then, and the ecosystem generally has adopted the JavaScript language and ecosystem and therefore solutions that you, you build. 

Is AI that kind of thing? Is it something a lot deeper than that, I suppose, in terms of we should see AI as more of an augmenter to everything that we do, and that could be the technology and solutions we build, but also we don’t really know how deep or wide reaching that is yet, I think in terms of just how it changes everybody’s job and all the way through to like a wide, like societal change, for example.

So where exactly AI stops, I don’t really know but I can already see obviously applications for AI, both in terms of how we build solutions with WordPress for customers and also how customers’ expectations of,technology is also shifting quite quickly with seeing what people can now do with computers when they’re assisted by AI.

So I feel like it’s maybe changing from both of those angles, which is fairly certain, which is the work that we do as developers and engineers is undoubtedly gonna change. I mean, one of the first places where these, Large Language Models have gone is actually writing code, which might have actually been quite surprising. It might have been one of those things that you had put quite low down the list of industries to be disrupted by AI initially.

That’s where I guess I can see it playing out in the beginning. Where will we be in one year or longer? It’s difficult to say because the technology itself is evolving fairly rapidly and at the same time, I feel as humans everywhere are also still adjusting to the current point that the technology is at as well. Like we are probably lagging a little bit right in our like adoption or understanding the implications of what just being able to even just generate very natural human language has given us the capabilities to do so. I feel like longer term it’s kind of anybody’s guess in terms of where we end up.

Doc Pop: You mentioned, back in 2015, Matt Mullenweg asked everyone to learn JavaScript deeply and this year he said, “Spend as much time leveraging AI as possible.” I’m curious what sort of technology stack does a WordPress agency or a web developer need to know to use AI?

Are they needing to learn machine learning and Python?

Joe Hoyle: Right. I think that’s a great question, and I will be speaking a little bit about this on Thursday as well. There’s a big spectrum when it comes to AI, and that’s really morphed out of these more recent advances in machine learning and large language models as well.

So, it’s difficult to know how deep you kind of need to go into this, I suppose, and I think Matt’s call to really encourage people to use these tools in what way they can to become familiar with them is certainly a good first step because it just creates familiarity and it’s not that everybody needs to become a kind of like neural network computer scientist overnight or anything like that.

I think initially using them for your own work or even not work activities that you’re doing give you some level of familiarity. So at least you are not completely unaware of what these tools are capable of and what they can help with and that kind of thing. I think beyond that as engineers and I think the definition of who engineers are is probably gonna shift with this as well. Cause there’s so much capability in the AI models that can help you there. 

There’s certainly two sides that I see to that. One is using AI to improve your own. “Okay, I used to write code, now I’m gonna write code with the help of an AI, and Google’s Bard and ChatGPT and ChatGPT plugins on top of that, and Co-pilot from GitHub, and Co-pilot X, which is I think around the corner.”

All of those tools can increase your productivity as a programmer. But that again is, I would say is getting up to speed as much as an accountant might need to get up to speed with how AI can impact their jobs and the work that they’re doing. So I’d say again, that’s kind of table stakes, I think to some degree is to understand how these tools can help us as developers, programmers, in terms of how those tools can be applied there. 

But then there’s kind of the other side of creating solutions using these tools. And that’s where you do have this very big spectrum. Probably something between I’m gonna use an OpenAI API for generating some text, for example, and incorporating that into the software that I’m building.

And then you have a little more in depth around training pre existing models. So you’ve got things like the LAMA model from Facebook that you can train yourself. And a lot of the Google stuff that was recently unveiled is like, use our model, but allow your training on top. 

So you’ve kind of got that, but then you’ve got lower levels of that, which is maybe using a lot of the open source models and running them yourself on hardware that you control. And that is kind of a case of getting Python set up and all of the beefy hardware that needs to go with that. And then you obviously have the much lower level, I would say of you’re really actually understanding the nuts and bolts of how neural nets work and, and all of that.

And I think obviously the deeper you go down this stack, the less you are gonna be relating it to your WordPress solutions and that’s always been the case with, if you just look at like the language technology stack, people use WordPress APIs, which is written in PHP, so they have some good understanding of PHP, but then PHP is written in C and WordPress developers typically don’t really need to know C at all.

And then C itself is compiling to machine code. But again, once you’re a WordPress developer you are a long distance away from needing to know anything about that. And that’s just, I guess, the same spectrum that I’m kind of seeing in merge with AI. 

And it’s been, it’s been a really exciting year because the level of the APIs has got to a very high level where as a web engineer, it’s now at the point I think where they’re speaking your language in terms of like, okay, well it’s a REST API and I pass it some things, I pass it in instruction in the data, and then I get something back. So now I understand how I can work that into the application and I’ve been working with APIs for all these other things.

I feel like the last year has actually got it to the point where it’s really fairly applicable and a fairly small adjacent move and learning in technology really to take your, maybe like full WordPress stack understanding and, and expand that to being able to use some of these capabilities in solutions that you make.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s a great spot for us to take a quick break, Joe. We will be right back to talk with you about more things that agencies should keep in mind when working with AI, and so stay tuned for more Press This after the short break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and today we’re talking with Joe Hoyle, the CTO and co-founder of Human Made about what agencies need to know when working with AI and we just ended that first segment talking about the tools that people could use and how deep maybe they need to go or don’t need to go.

In a more practical level, as someone who’s working with an agency, can you tell us, either maybe specific examples that Human Made has done, you could leave out client names if you need to, but I’d like to hear about how AI is being utilized by Human Made when working with a client right now.

Joe Hoyle: Yes, it is a good question. And I’d say for us, it’s definitely early days. I think like it is for many right now. I mean, I guess within AI there’s so much kind of hype cycle around it really. To be honest, a couple of months ago I was a little skeptical of whether this was just gonna be kind of a hype cycle that comes and goes.

And that’s kind of how I would view a lot of the let’s say crypto and Web 3 type stuff, for example. Where I was fairly skeptical there too, but once I actually got stuck into applications in terms of, okay, well what problems can large language models and the image generation models, for example, actually solve, I actually see a lot of practical benefits, let’s say.

But in terms of how that translates to client work for an agency, I mean, I think it comes from two directions as things often do in client work. Either your client is kind of like asking for something, they’ve come up with a great idea around how they’ve pieced together how maybe AI could be applied to a problem.

And they’re looking for their CMS to be able to do that. And that’s really a case of translating product owner requirements ultimately into code. And, I think that side is in some ways easier to deal with cause you understand what you’re trying to build.

 We have a customer, in financial services, for example, and one specific challenge for them is around content production and essentially just like the quality of content that is being produced. And also their editorial team understanding the content that’s already been created. 

And that’s an area where AI can help quite a lot, both in terms of answering questions of your existing content as you’ve probably seen the interfaces with AI around conversations is very good. So you can ask questions of your content. Have we ever written about X, Y, or Z? Or what’s the next thing that we should consider in this series of posts, that kind of thing.

And then also more at the like granular editorial level. AI tools have shown to be really useful around just being able to do editorial either rewriting to be better grammar or changing tone, SEO optimization, that kind of thing. 

So we’ve got a couple of ongoing conversations around those. This is kind of what our work usually is, which is enterprise-y use cases where they’re quite specific in terms of a little bit of productivity win for our editorial team is gonna make a big difference and it’s worth the investment for us to do that.

Those things do seem to largely fall around improving productivity of content production and something to do with understanding semantic meaning and interrogation of existing content. 

But then on the other side in terms of like solutions, this is another tool in your tool belt. Just like a new library that can do X, Y or Z, or understanding JavaScript at a deeper level or something. That’s really where it’s the engineer’s job to appropriately program some outcomes. So you have something,  maybe you have a requirement for your classic related content block or something. 

For those kinds of problems, I would definitely like to see, at Human Made for example, but I think this will apply to all agencies really, of when we are coming up with solutions to customer requirements, then we have AI as a part of that tool belt. So it could be like content classification problems, things like that, right?

Well we want to select the categories for this thing, or we want to do sentiment analysis on user generated content. Or we don’t want people to upload obscene images. All of those kinds of problems, being fairly aware of what you can achieve with the AI tools that are out there from a development point of view, I think is very valuable because ultimately you can really short circuit a lot of long in-depth programming work with these models. 

I’ve implemented a similar algorithm many times around finding common posts by tag or something like that, right? It’s like, so I write code, I loop through the tags, I look at those tags, I look at my listed tags. I try to match them. I order that by the amount of tags that it has in common. And then I strip the ones that have already been shown on the page. 

You kind of build up this whole algorithm, but really what you are actually doing there is probably approximating a requirement from a customer that’s something a little more broad around show similar content or something like that.

You can literally give something like GPT4 via the API. You just give it that human instruction and you give it your list of tags, and then it just somewhat miraculously will come up with the solution to those kinds of problems and generally a lot more accurately as well.

Because not to go too deep on kind of what programming is and all of that, but you’re always trying to kind of, you are feeding in a requirement or an outcome, and you’re ultimately having to break that down into logical rules and very definite steps.

And there’s something that can be lost in that translation. You have to choose the things that you can actually objectively implement or the area where you actually have structured data to deal with, and you don’t really go further than that. So it’s like if the right metadata isn’t there, then you just kind of make do. 

Now with Large Language Models, you can feed them a lot of unstructured data and you can actually give them relatively unstructured outcomes that you’re looking for. And lo and behold, they have a very good success rate of actually interpreting that and giving you back a very good result, which is not only a lot quicker to implement, it’s actually in many cases, a lot more, I would say accurate. 

But accuracy assumes that you have a very specific picture of exactly what you want. And the reality is in many cases, you don’t have that. And that’s where. Using a CMS, in the worst example, is a glorified database of hundreds of fields to fill it in because we program in very strict logical terms where it’s like everything needs to be structured in a separate field, and then really people just feel like they’re doing data entry. I see hese tools, being able to break down that barrier a lot more for us to potentially have a lot more unstructured data to potentially have interfaces that are a lot more human for our clients to use.

Like in the backend when they’re content authoring or whatever else they might be doing. Creating campaigns, events, all of these things where we are very used to having people need to follow a very strict, regimented, like, oh, well you forgot to enter the right time zone in yada yada in that box, you didn’t tick that button.

We are kind of getting to the point where we are gonna be able to provide interfaces to clients that are just a lot more natural, where they can kind of describe what they want and then we can use these Large Language Models to ultimately tie that all together in a much more coherent way.

Doc Pop: What you’re describing in that last segment, it sounds like you’re saying that AI could not just change the way that we generate content or the way that we generate code for sites, but even change the way that viewers come and use the web, is that right?

Joe Hoyle: I think so. I mean, primarily I am thinking of the content editor. How do they describe to the CMS what they want? I’d say that’s kind of a fairly boring process right now in however many fields you’re filling out. I think we are still to see exactly how this transforms like web experiences from end user’s point of view.

And again, the landscape there is gonna change and user expectations are probably gonna change. The general public are using these AI tools a lot as well. I think ChatGPT has like north of 120 million users or something.

So their expectations around whenever I see a search box, why can’t I just ask it a question and have it give me the response? That expectation I think is gonna be changing ‘cause I really do see this major shift that we’ve had in AI is just changing the way that people are interacting with their computers.

And I think we are kind of have been in this transition for a while, right? Of Siri or Alexa. People have been shown this promise of you can naturally talk to a computer. But the reality is it just hasn’t really worked and most people are still stuck in the kind of like sit down with a keyboard and a mouse and do it the traditional way.

That has definitely changed the past year and I think the user expectation is gonna be shifting with that from all of the stuff that Google unveiled a couple of weeks ago at its event in terms of like all of its products are now gonna have these capabilities in. We’re probably gonna have Apple coming next month as well.

WordPress is a CMS and the solutions that are built on it are not isolated from all of that industry change and the expectations are gonna be going up on us as a WordPress project and us as WordPress agencies in terms of what we deliver as well. 

Doc Pop: And that’s a great spot for us to take one more break, and when we come back, we’ll wrap up our conversation with Joe Hoyle about AI and agencies. So stay tuned for more. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and I am chatting today with Joe Hoyle, the CTO and co-founder of Human Made about AI and its place in WordPress agencies. How can agencies think about using AI? That last segment we really got in deep. I really appreciated your thoughts there, Joe.

I’m having a hard time as a reporter being more rigorous with my definitions. I tend to say AI when I should probably be specifically saying “text-to-image generators”, or I should be saying “large language models”. Or I should be saying whatever powers the self-driving cars we see in San Francisco, we lump them together.

And I think the last thing I want to talk to you about, there’s a lot of folks who are concerned about how AI could affect them. There’s these different types of, AI, right?

The large language models and all these different things, and then these different types of concerns. So it’s hard to address them all, right? Because there’s so many different little things that people have. How are you trying to help work with people who might be hesitant about using AI in any form for their work.

Joe Hoyle: Yeah, I think it’s a really good question. Because this has, for better or worse, all been labeled AI, whereas maybe a few years ago, AI more a conscious thing that we are talking to and it’s like all seeing or knowing or whatever.

This recent advent of human language has looked so convincing in many cases though, it’s like now we call this whole thing AI. But really I think this is one part of the puzzle to this much larger journey that we are on, right? In terms of developing actual, let’s say artificial intelligence. 

But nonetheless, there are still considerable safety issues I think that we need to watch out for. And I’ve definitely been a proponent of having a surface level understanding of how an LLM works, for example, because it’s really important to know that the things that a LLM will tell you isn’t necessarily factual, for example. So you definitely shouldn’t use ChatGPT just to give you a yes/no answer on a question or something like that.

They’re also trained on like half of the Internet’s worth of data, so that not only includes a huge amount of inaccurate information, let alone the fact that these models don’t actually truthfully represent the data that you feed into them. So even in an ideal world, if you had fed them, let’s say something like Wikipedia, they’re still gonna be able to hallucinate a lot of facts because they just don’t have a semantic understanding really of cohesion and contradiction and things. But they’re also trained on a lot of data that’s written by people that is very biased.

So there’s a huge amount of bias in these models. Obviously in terms of gender bias and racial bias and things like that. So I think, once you kind of understand that, of okay what is ChatGPT doing? It’s ingesting a lot of content from the internet with varying degrees and it’s jumbling all of that out, creating associations.

And ultimately there’s an algorithm that is able to print out streams of text that at a squint looks like text. Right? But it doesn’t necessarily represent a cohesive worldview. It can say things that contradict itself and all of that. 

Therefore something like ChatGPT is a long way away from some kind of oracle artificial intelligence that really does know everything and can give you the right answer to anything. 

Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that they’re not useful. They can be used for a lot of useful things, but the area that I think that they’re most useful is really in cases where you have a human, which is in the loop, so to speak.

So like you are asking it to help you with writing something or make suggestions or explain a concept or something like that. And you are kind of using that as a jumping off point for further research and all of that. And really you are using it as part of your creative process in idea generation for the most part.

And that’s no different to how we might have used word clouds for brainstorming sessions and things like that. You’re really just trying to overcome some kind of writer’s block that you might have on some challenge or something like that, but you’re still keeping yourself very central. 

I think there are major issues when you actually start to offload the cognitive burden of understanding, so you have it generate a thousand posts for you and you just publish them. Or you plug it into your HR pipeline to make decisions based off of how quality people might seem based off of their resumes.

In those kind of situations, you really are exposing yourself to a lot of inaccuracies and bias and misinformation and that kind of thing, where you’re gonna have it run wild. 

And that is something that I do worry about a bit is how much of a race to the bottom in content creation are we gonna have?

And I think we’re still on the side of that hasn’t quite happened yet. But really quite feasibly, we could be creating double the amount of content on the internet every six months or something with just the sheer amount of content farming that you can now do. And, and that’s one specific thing that obviously I wouldn’t really like to see for the kind of signal to noise ratio to really vastly change.

I mean, it’s maybe not perfect as it is on the internet, right? But that’s just one of many challenges I think.

Doc Pop: Well, Joe, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. I really appreciate it. If people wanna learn more about what you’re working on, I’d recommend going to twitter.com and finding Human Made, @humanmadeLTD, all one word, or just go to humanmade.com to be able to find more about your agency and, and about the upcoming AI for WordPress conference that’s happening. 

Again, that’s happening on May 25th, so if you’re hearing this, there’s possibly time that you can still sign up and enjoy that.

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

The post Press This: AI’s Place in a WordPress Agency 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.

Changing your company’s name after many years of building up trust and recognition can always be tricky. If your company’s growing successfully, though, sometimes you might have outgrown what the original mission was, and it might be time to reconsider a rebrand.

And that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. Our guest is Devin Walker, a general manager at StellarWP, and the co-creator of GiveWP.

Devin, welcome to the show. We are gonna talk to you about iThemes rebranding as SolidWP, but before we do, I think this is your first time on Press This, at least the first time since I’ve been hosting. Can you just remind our listeners, how did you get started with WordPress?

Devin Walker: Sure. Yeah. Hey everyone. So yeah, my name’s Devin Walker. I’ve been in the WordPress world for about 14 years now. Started in 2009 after finding my way through different Microsoft technologies like SharePoint, and then getting over to Drupal and then Joomla for a little bit, and then finally WordPress and then found my home there.

Started out building sites with an agency, pre-custom post types, which was interesting. And then I remember life got easier after custom post types and I moved on from the agency and started building some individual plugins, doing some white label works, still working with clients. 

And from there I realized, hey, I really enjoy building plugins and I did a couple pro ones back in 2012, 2013. That did okay. And from there we were building a lot of nonprofit sites and there wasn’t really a tool that fit their need exactly. They were all asking for a fundraising platform that’s native WordPress. So eventually partnered with Matt Cromwell, my longtime business partner, still to this day.

And in 2013, 2014 we built GiveWP and launched it at WordCamp San Diego in April, 2015. Since then, it’s been a great ride and been our main focus. In recent years, we’ve expanded our focus a bit, which we’ll get into. But yeah, that’s a bit about how I got into WordPress.

Doc Pop: Yeah. Well, let’s start with that big bullet point. iThemes is now called SolidWP. What prompted that change?

Devin Walker: Yeah, so not officially yet. We’re actually doing a rebranding in public series right now where we’re bringing folks along the journey of that. 

But to answer your question, what actually prompted that change? We recently took over the iThemes brand in August of 2022 last year. And when we took it over, we weren’t specifically given the instructions, Hey, go rebrand this.

No, we were given the instructions, do your thing guys. But we want to make this brand set up for success for the next 10 years, right? And, iThemes as a brand that’s been around for longer than I’ve been in WordPress for about 15, 16 years now. And throughout that entire time, it’s changed identities quite a bit.

I mean, the name implies it started with themes which it did and has had a great catalog of over 200, almost 300 themes. But since then, it changed focus quite a bit. And now, fast forward to this year or last year when we decided to rebrand it. The main flagship product is a security offering, right?

So iThemes security, it’s got a million active installs. And then our next most popular plugin is a backup solution, Backup Buddy, which has been around for 10 plus years. And then finally on top of that our SaaS platform, which does website, uh, maintenance and management, which is called iThemes Sync. Really great and powerful platform that has 60,000 active installs on the satellite plugin. 

Those are the three core offerings and we didn’t really even sell themes anymore. So really it became evident. We have to find a new identity for this brand. We need to set it up for success in the future, and we need to find a common foundation that all these brands can live under.

We tossed a lot of names around, but finally came around SolidWP in November last year. So we’re pretty happy with the name and we’re taking a lot of steps now in that rebranding effort. 

Doc Pop: You know, that’s true. When I think of iThemes, I think of site design and site toolkits. But when I think of iThemes the company, it’s the security and the backup, right? Like these things that don’t have anything really to do with themes anymore.

They were just kind of like, “Hey, we’ve got this one trusted product and, if you liked this product from us, you might also trust these other products as well.” 

But they don’t necessarily fit under the themes name for sure. If you could just tell me quickly, how did you land on SolidWP?

Devin Walker: So we took a look at what we do offer and really security, backups, maintenance, updates, and these types of offerings that we’re looking to expand also in the near future, are very core to what every website needs. And I keep using the word foundational, right? Performance, security, maintenance, backups.

These are things that every website needs as part of their foundation, and what does every foundation need to be, right? It needs to be pretty solid. And so I thought it was a really cool word too. I mean, I’m guilty of using it quite a bit and might be, uh, part of my SoCal slang. But I’ve always said that’s really solid or something like that.

So when figuring out names, we wanted a domain that was available, a domain that made a lot of sense, was catchy, still had a WP in it, and this just fit all those bills. That’s really what it came down to.

Doc Pop: Kind of thinking of that SoCal linguistic nature, I think solid definitely sounds better than like BasteWP or something like that. 

Devin Walker: Stoked WP [laughs]. We could have gone with that.

Doc Pop: S you mentioned that you’re rebranding in public, and I want to hear more about that. Can I make a pull request to SolidWPPs rebrand file? Is it like a GitHub repo kind of thing that you’re doing?

Devin Walker: Well we should consider that, we’d love outside contributions from the development perspective. We could always use more development, but it’s really about bringing our customers and users along the journey with us and making sure nobody’s left behind and their voice is heard.

And being very open and democratic about the whole thing. So showing previews of what the UIs are gonna look like, bringing people in on decisions that we’re making about the website and the nature of where we’re gonna take our training offering, and really including and listening to our customers because, 0ver 15 years, we’ve accumulated quite a bit of them.

And so we wanted to make sure that we’re not gonna be making choices that the majority of folks don’t agree with. And so it’s really about being open and transparent with it while also admitting to some of the hurdles we’re tackling and if our timeline slips or things like that, we’re just gonna be very open with it. And I think everybody will appreciate that and see it. 

And it’s kind of a trend now to build in public. We wanted to do our own twist on that and rebrand in public.

Doc Pop: It certainly gives the vibes of early access games on Steam where they are really transparently showing works in progress, first level. There’s a lot of work that they have to do to even get that far. They have to have the game and have kind of a foundation built.

But then they’re definitely trying to listen to feedback, what do people like, what do people want more of? So I’m kind of getting that vibe here.

Devin Walker: Absolutely. I mean, I’m glad you brought up Steam because I’m on steam a lot too, and some of those games never see the light of day. I can guarantee this will see the light of day. 

It’s really about bringing that journey along and showing off what we have. So we just recorded our third video this morning with me and Matt, but we’re bringing in other team members and, just find us on YouTube on SolidWP. We have a playlist going. You can leave comments on there. We’re paying attention to comments and it’s pretty fun.

Doc Pop: We are gonna take a quick break and when we come back we’re gonna keep talking to Devin Walker, general manager at StellarWP about the recent rebrand that SolidWP is doing, and we’re also gonna talk about how to know when it’s time for your company to consider doing a rebrand, and if you’re already thinking about that, some tips that Devin can share along the way.

So keep listening. We’ll be right back.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I’m talking to Devin Walker, General Manager at Stellar WP and a co-creator of GiveWP and several other products you’ve probably heard of. We are talking about the recent rebranding of Stellar WP from iThemes and Devin, we talked about how y’all are doing it, you’re testing or well testing, I dunno if that’s the right word, but you’re doing this in public.

You haven’t actually, as of recording, officially switched over yet. It sounds like you’re still iThemes in the process of rebranding over to SolidWP, which is a really interesting way to do that. 

The thing I was teasing before the break was that some people listening might be in a similar situation where their company has done well enough that they are no longer specifically a security company or an SEO company or something like that. But it’s tied to their name. 

And I’m just kind of curious about advice you might have. Let’s start with this, what have you learned so far with the rebranding public that you think might be helpful to other users who are thinking about rebranding?

Devin Walker: Well, there’s a lot of different things that come to mind when you bring that question to me. I think the first thing I would say is determining whether you should rebrand or not shouldn’t so much be about how your revenue and how that’s been working. More so how your mission has changed and your products fit your brand and your identity.

Does what you sell still reflect your original mission statement and what the brand identity you formed originally? I’m sure it’s a balance. It’s always a balance between that and revenue and where you want to go with the product. So it’s not like a cookie cutter approach, whether you should or you should not.Same with updating logos and so on and so forth. 

For Give WP for instance, we most likely won’t ever update the name for that or the logo. It just fits. It’s been our mission. It’s always gonna be our mission. Unless there’s something that happens in the future that I can’t foretell right now, but for iThemes, it was a lot more evident that this needed to happen.

Security sales have been great, backups have been great, but there’s a whole bunch of legacy products out there still hanging around. That just needed to go. We sold a product called BoomBar. You could still buy it on iThemes.com hasn’t been updated in a long time.

Very legacy product that just needed to go. There’s a couple more like that. So that was causing some of the identity crisis, I like to say. And then some of the naming too, back in 2007, 2008, it was really cool to put a I before a word. It was a cool Apple thing to do. So iThemes was a really cool domain name, still is a cool domain name, but it does show its age now and it’s evident.

So that was another telling factor there. So I’d say, you have to sit down with your leaders, your stakeholders, your team. And really determine if it’s the pathway you want to go and do an analysis on it. Pick your favorite analysis and see how it comes out at the end.

But that’s kind of the process we went through there. 

We’re learning a lot of lessons along the way. That’s why we’re doing the rebranding in public and mentioning some of that during our shows, but some of the original first lessons I’ve learned is that the approach should be in a phased approach. 

For such a massive project like this, we were really counting on a lifting of the curtains once all the work was done, and it became more apparent as time went on that we really couldn’t just do a grand reveal like that. We had to take a stepped approach from everything from the website migration, the licensing, the commerce platform to the products themselves, how they’re deployed. The WordPress.org, content updates, banner updates, everything. There’s so many parts to it. 

And unless you have a massive team or employ a third party consultant, like an agency or an SEO specialist that can help you get to that finish line, and you can be a hundred percent sure you can push that red button and everything’s gonna switch over, I think a phased approach is much more realistic to having success with it. 

So that’s what we’re gonna do for all aspects of this rollout. We’re gonna do it in phased approaches. So right now we have just a single page up on SolidWP.com with a blog that’s all about the rebranding effort. iThemes is still up, still the original content.

We’re still posting on ithemes.com. And then eventually we’re building out SolidWP.com’s website and we’ll start to roll that out eventually, and do a phase rollout of the SEO. There’s over 1100 posts on the iThemes blog, some of which rank very highly in the search engine. So we wanna make sure we don’t rock that boat. 

And then also with the products and the rollout there, being very careful about that. There’s lots of things with the licensing that can go wrong that we don’t want to as well.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I was just checking out your plugin repository listing for iThemes Security on WordPress.org. And I believe WordPress.org plugins kind of have this thing where it’s really hard to change the URL once it’s kind of landed. And luckily, I don’t know if this was planning from the start or a sign from another rebrand, but luckily y’all’s URL is Better-WP-Security on there, so no iThemes to scrub from the URL at least.

Devin Walker: No iThemes. Yeah, so it’s funny, iTheme Security was acquired from actually Chris Wegman, who you mentioned pre-show, way back in the day. Prior to me being involved with any of these brands. They rebranded it iThemes Security and now we’re gonna rebrand it again. So you’re right, that WordPress.org url, that never changes no matter what.

Doc Pop: That’s fun. So kinda speaking of these acquisitions that have happened, you were co-founder and co-creator of GiveWP, which was later acquired by Liquid Web. I’m wondering what that experience of having your brand join another kind of large legacy brand, what that taught you and kind of the goods and the bads you kind of learned from that experience.

Devin Walker: Yeah, so, oh man, I really like talking about this. It was quite the experience. About two years ago now, we joined Liquid Web, but the entire process started around two and a half to two years and eight months ago. From initial conversations that we started having with Liquid Web to getting into the LOI phase, letter of intent, to getting through to due diligence, to actually completing due diligence to final signing, that process took around seven, eight months and.

There’s a lot of back and forth in there. I would say take that process as slow and as carefully as you can and involve as many smart people like lawyers who have done this before, through that process to make sure you’re crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s. but prior to even having that conversation, you should build a business that’s ready to be acquired.

So, post selling or being acquired by Liquid Web, I’ve had the opportunity to sit on the other side of the table now and evaluate quite a few businesses and see under the hood, if you will, of what’s going on there. And there’s a lot of things you see that are eye-opening that you don’t like to see in the WordPress world.

A couple examples would be massive lifetime license sales. My boss likes to call a lifetime licensed drug because we seem to really love it in WordPress. I hear the explanation, well why would I get a one-time subscription payment now when I could get three years upfront, four years upfront? Well, when you go to sell the business, there’s no more recurring revenue once you collect that initial revenue. So it means nothing to that business that you already collected that money and it’s now sitting in some bank account that they won’t ever have access to. 

The second is no customer data or marketing list whatsoever. Privacy advocacy is a really good thing, and I think it has its place like in WordPress.org on the free plugins. Like we gotta abide by the rules, but once they start becoming a paying customer of yours, I think it’s worthwhile to collect as much user data and customer data as you can and market towards them.

Of course, don’t do anything shady, but that’s worth something to a potential acquirer. How much data do you have? What are your marketing lists like? What’s the community around your product like? Are they engaged? Are they not engaged? In evaluating certain businesses in the past, I’ve seen many that take a high stance on not collecting any of that data at all, not knowing anything about their customers, not even having any renewals or subscriptions or anything like that, and it makes it really less appealing for certain buyers when that’s the situation. 

Finally, SaaS components are always really nice. More proprietary code bases are really nice. And then revenue share deals with different payment gateways. So if you have some sort of commerce aspect to your plugin, are you collecting revenue share from your gateways on the back end of that and essentially making money when you sleep.

So, with Give WP, we did almost $350 million in total processing volume through multiple gateways last year alone. We got a pretty good cut out of that, and we didn’t have to do anything to get that cut. Besides make sure our plugins are up to date, make sure we’re working with our customers really well and maintaining the software and doing all the stuff we normally do.

But if we’d never had that deal with Stripe or PayPal, or name the gateway, that revenue would never have been there. So where’s revenue at that you might not be seeing it. I could go on and on here. Doc, you know, I’ll let you chime in.

Doc Pop: Well, yeah, we’re coming up at our next break. We’re gonna come back and wrap up our conversation with Devin Walker, general Manager at SolidWP. We’re going to keep talking about rebranding your agency or company, so stay tuned. We will be right back.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. We are talking with Devin Walker. We’re wrapping up our show, talking about rebranding in public. Devin, right before the break, I asked you a question you got really excited about. Give WP, which is a product that you co-created, was acquired by Liquid Web, and you kind of talked to us about the experience of being acquired. I am just kind of curious though. Can you tell us, was there a conversation at that time that now it should be Give Liquid Web or Liquid Web’s GiveWP? Was there some sort of conversation about rebranding the product to fit with Liquid Web, which has a lot of products under its sleeve?

Devin Walker: Well, that wasone of the things we evaluated when first looking at this deal because we didn’t wanna mess with our brand. And one of our criteria for looking at offers or deals or potential acquisitions was don’t mess with our brand. That wasn’t the first priority, but it was pretty darn high up there.

The first priority, of course, was making sure our team was taken care of and they weren’t just gonna come in and gut the place. And then also a track record of showing proof. The proof’s in the pudding. Right. So iThemes was the first acquisition by Liquid Web in 2018, I believe. And when they came to us, we saw most of the team already in place.

I think Corey, the founder, had left, but the rest of the team was largely still in place. And they made some other previous acquisitions that the entire team came in place. And we spoke with those leaders and it was all very transparent and made us feel very comfortable. 

So they didn’t mess with the brand. That was very important with us. It’s not gonna be called, Liquid Give, or who knows what the heck it would be called. And so that made us very happy.

Doc Pop: And you know, we’ve talked about this iThemes rebrand to SolidWP, and you mentioned that it’s not happened yet, so it sounds like technically, iThemes is still the name we should be working on. I’m just kinda curious about this transition you’re talking about. How long do you think it will be before you can solidly say SolidWP.

Devin Walker: Don’t worry. We’ve been using that pun so much lately. It’s never gonna get old. Well, I would say we have a very tight timeline. I hate giving specifics out, but I’d say mid to late summer is our target. Mid being the earliest I believe, which would probably the end of this quarter.

Looking at the timeline now, I’m saying we’ll probably go later somewhere. Early Fall is now what I’m looking at. There’s just a lot of moving parts here and you know how things go with development and design.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. Well, Devin, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for joining us on Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. If people want to follow up with the change that’s happening in public. Where should they go to kind of see this change happening?

Devin Walker: Sure the easiest place, just go to SolidWP.Com. There you’ll see all the latest videos you’ll read about our message to the iThemes customers, and then you can also sign up for our rebranding in public series newsletter.

Doc Pop: That’s cool. Devin, thanks again for joining us today and thanks to everyone who’s listened and enjoyed this episode.

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: Rebranding in Public 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.

Each week of Press This, we usually focus on one conversation with an individual on a specific topic. But there’s too much WordPress news to do that, and I’m really excited about today’s segment. This is our Word Around the Campfire segment where we have a couple guests come on.

And we just talk about different things that are happening in the WordPress community because there’s so many things to catch up on. Today we have Sam Brockway, a Community Manager for Developer Relations at WP Engine. Howdy Sam.

Sam Brockway: Hello. So happy to be here and for anyone listening and if you know me as Sam Munos, yes, that’s my new name, Sam Brockway. So thanks for the intro.

Doc Pop: Breaking news here. Yes. Our first bit of news. 

And we also have Mike Davey, the Senior Editor of Delicious Brains. Howdy, Mike, how are you?

Mike Davey: Hi, Doc. I’m not too bad. And how are you doing?

Doc Pop: You know, I went to the climbing gym on Sunday, and this isn’t just me trying to sneak in a gym reference. But I went to the climbing gym and was about to rope into my first climb for the day.

I just finished warming up and a new climber who was 30 feet above me took a, a little tiny swing and I didn’t see it, but a cellphone fell out of his pocket and just clocked me in the forehead. So if y’all saw me with an ice pack at the beginning of this show, that’s me still trying to get the swelling down.

I guess the good news is that I did get swole at the gym and having a climbing injury kind of sounds cool as long as you don’t mention the cell phone. But yeah, I’m good other than that.

So we have a bunch of things that have happened in WordPress lately. I think the biggest new thing is the release of WordPress 6.2, which is named nicknamed Dolphy. Named after a woodwind jazz player Eric Allen Dolphy Jr. 

Sam, there’s a lot of really cool stuff in WordPress 6.2. What is your favorite new feature in this release?

Sam Brockway: Oh, I didn’t know you were gonna ask me for just one. It’s crazy. I actually it’s always hard. So if anybody ever plays with like the Gutenberg Plugin and has like the bleeding edge on and is playing with all the features, it’s really hard to distinguish what’s in Gutenberg and what is like not a part of a release yet and what’s a part of the release.

So I had to go and look at the release notes about 6.2 to remind myself of what was in here. And I wrote down like five of my favorite things, but I’ll just choose one. This new insert media drag and drop sidebar thing that’s going on in this new release is amazing. So basically, if you go to add a block and you click browse all, you can either choose a block or a pattern, or you can select this new tab, which is media.

And from there you get access to your whole media library and you can see your photos, your videos, audio. And I think that there is going to be like a file explorer in there as well for PDFs and things like that soon. But you can drag and drop it right from this sidebar into the Block Editor, which seems like such a small interface update, but is so smooth and it feels very Squarespace and other page builder-like features. Which is really cool because I think that this really takes WordPress up a notch because normally you have to open up the media library, it pops up in another window, you’re looking for your thing, and you put it on the page, very much, multiple clicks, multiple buttons.

And so this new feature, I think is really awesome and just very seamless with an editing experience.

Doc Pop: I think seamless is a good way to describe the improvements in 6.2. It’s not a version that people seem to talk about that much but it’s really got a lot of polish, especially like on that site editing page. What we previously would’ve called like the customizer. There’s a lot of polishing. 

My favorite new feature, Sam I don’t know if you had a chance to play with it yet, but it’s called the Style Book and it is a way to be able to preview all of your blocks in one spot. So if you are kind of laying out your page, you’re kind of used to dragging a block and something into the header, bringing a logo into the header, something like that. And that’s kind of how you think about that specific site editing feature, just kind of like looking at one page at the time.

But with this style book, you can just click on that and you’ll see how all of your paragraphs look and all of your paragraph blocks with different types of indentations or how the quote block lists. You see all of this stuff and it even implies to third party blocks as well.

So I have a cooking block, like a recipe block. I can see side by side with everything else, how that recipe block looks and make changes to it. It’s not just a way to kind of view things. It’s a way to kind of go through and if you are having trouble, for some reason, one of your blocks just has weird spacing and you can’t figure out why.

The style book is the quickest way to kind of go in and be like, okay, well here’s my paragraph spacing on every other block. And for some reason my paragraph spacing is different here, so I’ll just make a quick change and you’re done. 

It is a super cool feature that I think is really hidden in the Site Editor, but man that’s such a powerful new tool.

Sam Brockway: That sounds amazing, especially for, I’m just thinking for an agency owner. Anyone working with clients, previously you might have made something like a style tile or a brand style guide, but in an outside tool. But now instead you can have it all within WordPress and like make changes live while you’re on the call with them.

How do all these things fit together before you go off and make changes to the rest of the website? I’m really excited about that one. I have not played with it, but now you’ve got me itching to go mess around with it.

Doc Pop: One note, the style book. For some reason, the icon is like an eyeball. I’m really petitioning them to make it an open book or something, but it’s not super intuitive to find. But now that you know, to look for the style book, if you’re listening to this, look for this feature so you can try it out.

And also, Sam was saying the OpenVerse integration and the way media kind of works. Sam, do you wanna give us your other four things you’re excited about?

Sam Brockway: Yeah, so one of ’em is the fact that the Site Editor is out of beta, so it no longer has that little label, which I just think is good for adopting the Site Editor, Full, Site Editing, et cetera. 

So I’m excited to see that happening. The navigation block got a big update. I haven’t played with it yet, but previously building menus with the new modern WordPress features has been kind of a pain.

So I know that that has been well received by the community. Distraction free mode is out. And I really love that. I’m a big distraction free person in general. I think Google Docs just came out with something like that too, and it does wonders for the concentration. 

And then the last one is copy and pasting styles. So I know that in other page builders, for example, like Divvy, you can copy styles from one module into another. So it’ll change like the padding and the formatting and the text and all of those things. And I believe that is what this feature does with blocks. So I can see these things working in conjunction together, like what you said with the style book and all of that too, the copy and pasting styles. 

So those are all really, really fun ones to explore. And again, like you said, maybe this release hasn’t been as hyped as some of the other ones, but it’s more about depth and bringing, um, a better experience to the features that already exist.

So I think that this is a great release to go play with.

Doc Pop: I had Justin Tadlock, who is a Core Contributor. He was on last week’s episode of Press This, and I asked him his favorite new feature of 6.2, and his answer surprised me. It was, this is the version that agencies can tell their clients about. That was his take. This is the polished version.

We are not officially at the end of Gutenberg phase two, which is Full, Site Editing with a Block Editor, is kind of what phase two is all about, but this is the pen ultimate release before we move on to Gutenberg phase three, which is gonna be collaborative editing. 

And Collaborative Editing, the easiest way to describe it, it’s just like when you’re in Google Docs, you can have two people kind of editing a post. And that’s great for news publishers who always wanna have their editor kind of come and check stuff. And it’s very cumbersome to actually write in Google Docs and then kind of copy paste it into WordPress.

So that’s the kind of big thing we’re thinking about. But when you think deeper, collaborative editing is also gonna mean that we will have two people editing a front page of a website at the same time. Something totally unheard of in WordPress. So that’s gonna be coming out in 6.4, the beginning of Gutenberg phase three, and that’s just the beginning.

And Gutenberg phase two took many years to kind of get to where it is now. So who knows when we’ll actually see these collaborative editing tools. But something else that’s happening in 6.4 is that there’s going be the second time that WordPress has done a woman and non-binary led release of WordPress.

This is going to be another project that Josepha Haden Chomphosy is working on, and I don’t know if they’ve announced any of the details yet. 

This whole project is to encourage people who don’t normally contribute to WordPress. This is a way to kind of get them involved and to reach out to people rather than just kind of waiting for people to get engaged, to kind of try to reach out to new leaders in the space and get them involved with a release.

And then hopefully after 6.4 comes out, many of them will stick around and be more active contributors. So that is gonna also be happening in 6.4. Lot of cool stuff happening in the WordPress space, and we are gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we’re gonna talk with Mike Davey about AI and WordPress and some of the interesting things that are happening there.

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 this is our Word Around the Campfire edition of Press This. We are joined by Sam Brockway and Mike Davey, the Senior Editor of Delicious brands. 

We teased right before the break about WordPress and AI and I think it’s kind of interesting: Matt Mullenweg in 2015, his advice for word pressers was to learn JavaScript deeply. And a few weeks ago, Matt kind of updated his advice and he said quote, “My message for 2023 will be to spend as much time leveraging AI as possible.” Mike, did you hear anything about that quote?

Mike Davey: I did actually, and I’ve got to say that in this particular case, Matt’s thoughts line up pretty much with mine. 

Like any tool, it’s hard to figure out at first what it might be good for. With simple tools, it’s always very obvious. With a more complicated tool like AI, it’s going to be a little more difficult.

But the thing is, there’s so many tasks that we have to do in a day that don’t require originality, don’t require creativity, and could easily be outsourced. I’ve used or experimented with a lot of the AI features that have come out. I’ve tried Jetpack’s AI and wasn’t terribly impressed with the quality of its writing or its accuracy.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Mike Davey: Because in part, the one problem with an AI writer in my opinion, is that it doesn’t have any guts. Like literally and figuratively. It doesn’t have any guts. It can’t really connect with the audience. It can’t take chances. It can’t tell personal stories, because it doesn’t have any. 

And assuming that like a large language model had any real understanding of anything, which they don’t, they still wouldn’t really understand how to connect with an audience. Lately I’ve been running an experiment, a content experiment using AutoGPT’s god mode. I’ve been running it pretty much continuously on one of my computers and I’ve learned a few things. One of the things I’ve learned is that I need to learn how to issue better prompts to AutoGPT. Let me start at the beginning, a few ACF users have requested a sort of master list of functions and the parameters that they can be used with. Like a chart, sort of a quick reference so they don’t have to dive into the individual docs for those functions. They can just look at the chart and go, “Oh, yep, those are the parameters I can use. Thanks for the reminder.” 

Now, the start for something like that is to just get a list by copying and pasting the names of the functions, duck into the docs for that function, copy and paste the parameters and move on to the next. That’s not hard to do, but I can definitely think of more productive uses of my time. Like practically anything. 

It’s one of the most dull and tedious jobs you can imagine. So it sounded like a project that would be absolutely perfect for an AI agent. Basically the way that, like AutoGPT’s god mode works is you set up a task or multiple tasks, and the agent tries to complete them.

While it’s doing that, it comes up with plans for you to approve. Like it comes up with plans for how am I gonna get to achieve this task? Like, what do I need? Do you approve, disapprove? Do you wanna make modifications? 

So long story short, not only was I not precise enough with my prompts when I started this project, I really didn’t pay enough attention when I was approving its plans. And before I get into exactly what happened and what it did, I should note that the only access AutoGPT had to ACF was at the public level. Like it was just information it could find on the public web. I didn’t provide it with any passwords or keys or backdoor access. 

One of the things I asked it to do, in addition to listing the functions and parameters, was to give some examples of how those parameters would be used. And I rather naively assumed it was just going to comb through the ACF docs, maybe look around on Google for a few more examples, check the support forums, and just copy and paste whatever it could find. That’s not at all what happened. 

Instead, it spent a couple of days basically teaching itself how to actually use ACF. Not only did it comb through all the docs, it looked through what I’m pretty sure is a big chunk of the WordPress codex and it Googled and Googled and Googled until it found what it was looking for. It included going through the publicly available repo for ACF on GitHub. 

Now it’s still going on that machine and I’m getting results I absolutely didn’t expect and not sure I want. You can forget the simple copy and paste job based on what we have on the ACF site. For one thing, it’s unpacked as much of the ACF code as it could, and it found functions that aren’t documented. I wondered at that point if it was hallucinating, but I checked our help forum for a few of them and they’re definitely real.

There’s a few that people have discovered by accident over the years, and it’s also gone on to explain how to use these functions complete with code snippets and it even tested the code snippets to make sure they worked. Now, I still wouldn’t be confident publishing any of that without a human testing it out, but they do appear to work. 

The thing is, and I’m going to have to reach out to the Dev team on a lot of this, but some of those functions may be undocumented because they’re either a very limited usefulness or because using them may have unforeseen consequences. Like there may be something you do with one of those functions that you don’t really want to do, if you see what I mean.

Now I’ve let it continue to run through this just because I’m fascinated, and I’m going to have to spend a lot of time coming through the output and figuring out if any of what it’s turning out is actually useful. The thing is it’s been going for a few days and I still don’t have the list, the original list of parameter functions and their parameters that I was looking for. But I do think I’ve learned enough that I can get it to spit out that list pretty quickly.

Doc Pop: Hmm.

Mike Davey: The biggest mistake I made was asking it to explain how the functions and parameters were used, because what it assumed it had to do. Because what it really does have to do to actually figure that out and thoroughly explain it, is it’s really gotta understand exactly how ACF works. It has to understand a lot of how WordPress works. It needs to get into how templates work. Long story short, there was a lot more information it thought it needed because I wasn’t clear enough with my prompt.

Doc Pop: When you’re running this, are you actually trying to have it spit out a new plugin, or are you looking for a code snippet, or are you looking for it to give you documentation and then you’ll write the code?

Mike Davey: In this case I was looking for both, documentation, right? Essentially I wanted to scrape the existing ACF docs for functions, like the documented functions and then just copy and paste the list of parameters you can use from those docs under each function, right? Like that’s basically all I was asking for.

What it produced was a lot of, as I said, like at least a few undocumented functions. And it did in fact create the code snippets, including a lot of stuff where it goes far beyond what the ACF docs currently list under functions. Like, like it gets more into how you use them in templates and things like that.

The problem is, I’m not sure if it’s how much of it’s accurate or how much of it’s useful. It thinks it’s accurate and it’s tested it, but I’d have to test it before we actually put it out anywhere.

Doc Pop: It’s quite confident. I’m sure that everything it’s saying is accurate. But this is one of the things that comes up a lot is that the AI could be really useful for helping answering questions or providing documentation, and that kind of makes sense he level of how many times have we looked up something to find reference of a button that’s not even there anymore or some sort of missing piece that seems to be, you know, crucial to the documentation but hasn’t been updated. So we’re just kind of left hanging and we think that AI is gonna be a really good way to provide up to the date documentation.

But what you’re kind of saying kind of feeds into some hunches that I’ve had that AI’s gonna have a really hard time unlearning old stuff as well. Like it might occasionally give you advice from an old version. That it just kind of thought was still relevant. 

And then on top of that, the hallucination thing, which is a humanistic characteristic that we’re putting into AI but it fits so well.

The idea that like, sometimes the answers are coming to you and they’re really legit and they’re kind of well referenced. They almost feel like they’re cut and paste from somewhere, but they’re actually kind of reinterpreted. It’s still correct. And then every now and then it’s just gonna give you something that sounds really confident and makes sense.

But it just made up like it didn’t pull from anywhere. I’ve actually even had it when I’m asking, “Hey, ChatGPT, give me a recipe for making bread or something.” And every now and then, most of the time it’s like, pretty accurate.

It might be a little different than maybe my preferences, but every now and then it’ll just add in, like some crazy thing, like raisins. I’m not putting raisins in bread, Mike, you can’t make me, the robots are not gonna make me put raisins into bread. 

Anyway, I went on a tangent, but I’m just saying that it’s interesting to think that there’s all sorts of that ChatGPT could solve and then also I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to keep it from every now and then just kind of making up something that sounds good or showing this outdated information, but presenting it as if it’s still current.

Mike Davey: One thing I did notice when it was preparing the basic list of the functions available, I did ask it to sort it into categories, right? And I gave it the categories. Now those functions are already listed in categories in the ACF documentation. Right. The thing is, that’s human readable text.

Like if you were looking at that webpage, there’s no way on earth you would ever think like a function was deprecated that wasn’t. The deprecated functions are all down at the bottom. There’s only five or six of them. Right? But AutoGPT managed to get very confused about what went into which section because that text, I don’t think is designed to be machine readable. 

Like it’s easy to read for humans, but it doesn’t necessarily distinguish it as a separate section. It’s not picking up where it says loop or deprecate it. So it’s gotta try to figure that out for itself and it got it wrong.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. I think that’s a really interesting experiment you’ve been doing. Thanks for sharing that with us, Mikey. That’s really cool. We are gonna take one final break here on Press This, and when we come back, we’re just gonna talk about some of the events happening in the WordPress space.

There’s a lot of WordCamps happening and things like that, so stay tuned for more Press This. We’ll be right back.

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a weekly WordPress roundup where we talk about WordPress news and events. This particular week, we are doing our Word Around the Campfire edition, where around this wonderful campfire we have Sam Brockway, a Community Manager for Developer relations at WP Engine, and Mike Davy, the Senior Editor of Delicious Brains. 

So far, we have talked about WordPress 6.2 and what’s coming in Gutenberg phase three. We’ve also talked about AI and WordPress and there’s always so much that we can talk about there. I think the final thing I’d like to talk about is just some of the events happening in the space and maybe tie up any loose ends.

There’s a lot of upcoming WordCamps, WordCamp, Buffalo is May 6. That sounds like that’s gonna be an amazing event. WordCamp Europe in Athens June 8th through 10th. The Torque publication that I work with will be a media partner for WordCamp Europe this year. WordCamp Montclair, June 24th in Montclair, New Jersey.

And as well, there’s a lot of other events happening, such as the weekly Build Mode. Sam, can you, can you tell us about that.

Sam Brockway: Absolutely. Brian Gardner and I host a weekly chat about modern WordPress called Build Mode. It’s very informal, very much conversational, but the goal and focus is to, originally it was to help anyone who was interested in dabbling in blocks just have the motivation essentially to say, okay, this is worth investing my time into and now we’ve really shifted the conversation more so to how the Block Editor and all of the features coming to modern WordPress and coming to 6.2 and just every new iteration of WordPress is going to make things better and easier for running your wordPress based business.

So it is one of my favorite times of the week every single Friday we meet, which is awesome too because we just have consistency to our conversations and anyone is welcome to join in at any time to those conversations. We keep it like a small, intimate group so everyone has a chance to speak, but it is a great opportunity to collaborate and connect with other WordPress lovers.

And I will just say something about the WordCamp Buffalo. Someone from my team, Damon Cook, will be speaking at that talking again about blocks and WordPress, so that’ll be great.

Doc Pop: Awesome. Yeah. WordCamp Buffalo sounds awesome. Mike, you and I had talked in the past about you attending your first WordCamp. I think where you lived here aren’t any, but you were saying maybe you might try to travel to some this year. Have you thought more about that?

Mike Davey: I have actually, WordCamp Buffalo is not too far away from my house. I live in Hamilton, Ontario.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Mike Davey: So Buffalo is about, once you take a border crossing into account a little over an hour from here. So I might actually manage to make it to WordCamp Buffalo this year, and that would be my very first WordCamp.

Doc Pop: That’s awesome. And I wanna suggest if you have a good time, I think that there’s maybe some bones there with your experiments that you’re doing with AutoGPT and ChatGPT for maybe a WordPress talk. Maybe if you have a good time at WordCamp Buffalo, sometime later this year you’ll put in a talk and we can learn more about your experiments there.

Mike Davey: I’ll certainly think about it.

Doc Pop: One other event that just came to a close was Plugin Madness, our annual bracket style competition where we put 64 of the best WordPress plugins, head to head against each other to see who comes out on top. It was another close contest this year.

And our final winner was Advanced Custom Fields. I’m hoping that we can get someone from Advanced Custom Fields onto this podcast sometime soon, to just kind of talk about  their victory lap. And also just to find out what’s happening with Advanced Custom Fields this year and kind of see what’s on the horizon for them.

So stay tuned for more Press This episodes where hopefully we’ll get ACF coming in and maybe we’ll hand them their Plugin Madness trophy virtually. I think that’s it for this episode of Press This, a WordPress committee podcast on WMR. Sam, I wanna give you a quick chance to be able to lead people where can people find you online? What’s a good place to follow what you’re working on?

Sam Brockway: Yep. The best place is on Twitter. I’m at HelloSamMunos. So that’s a good place to find and connect with me. But I will also say that @WPEBuilders is a great place to see all of the developer and builder related content that the Developer Relations Team shares at WP Engine.

Doc Pop: Awesome. And Mike, if folks want to find out more about what you’re working on, what’s a good way to follow you online?

Mike Davey: I would also suggest Twitter at MediumMikeDavey. I would actually also keep a very close eye on the documentation section for Advanced Custom Fields, because we are really working very hard right now and improving our documentation and extending our documentation and making sure everything’s up to date and much easier to follow than previous.

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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