Tag: Community

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

On this episode, we are joined by Ryan Singel, a former writer and editor at Wired, and now the founder of Contextly and Outpost. Ryan, I am super excited to have you on here. I’ve always enjoyed our conversations in the past. Let’s start off, why don’t you just tell me your WordPress origin story?

Ryan Singel: Thanks, Doc. So yeah, WordPress origin story when I was at Wired, I played around on my own to sort of set up my own site and that started with movable type, back in the day. And Wired was on some terrible internal CMS, and we lobbied really hard at Wired to move that over to WordPress.

And so I think about halfway through my tenure there we moved over. I spent about five, six years at Wired working with WordPress as our main CMS for publishing the entire site. So got to be very familiar with what needed to be done to make things look good and to push out content at scale.

We were often writing five, six blog posts in my section a day and having to figure out how to make that work with lots of different people touching it and so forth. And then got frustrated. So one of the things we would always do at Wired was link back to our original coverage of a story.

So if we’re writing about WikiLeaks or Chelsea Manning or the NSA, we’d written a bunch before. So we wanted to make sure when somebody read a story, they had an easy way to get back to it. And that was not a part of the WordPress Core. So we had to do a lot of editorial grunt work just searching Google and clicking through to get past the redirect and copying the URLs.

And I got frustrated with that and figured that should be something that was smarter and easier, and that led me to found Contextly and I left Wired to make recommendations for readers on WordPress smarter.

DP: It seems like a lot of influence came out of Wired, I mean, obviously journalistically, but we also have Jake Spurlock, who’s a Core Contributor and very active. And I met him visiting the Wired offices and talking about WordPress with him a long time ago.

So there always has kind of been this relationship with Wired. I don’t think they’re on WordPress anymore, although they might be, but it’s just kind of interesting to see their history and the WordPress timeline like that.

RS: Jake is great, and he came on I think a year or so after we moved over to WordPress. So the Condé Nast Wired story is a very convoluted one, but essentially getting Wired to run on WordPress, it was the first of the Condé Nast sites.

So Wired is owned by the same company that owns, like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, et cetera. And we essentially had an internal writer rebellion because Wired was really, at the time, the only sort of daily production. And so we have this terrible CMS that was built for magazines. There was so much editorial work that had to go into and sort of just grunt work to get something published.

And this was in the early days of the blogging revolution, the TechCrunch’s of the world show up and you know, the need to sort of publish stories quickly and we were just dying. So we essentially had a rebellion that brought WordPress and we got Condé Nast to allow us to bust out of their system and move over to WordPress.

Eventually, it proved to be so useful that WordPress moved to like almost all of the other sites. And then Condé Nast has since done what many large companies do, which is built their own CMS, which is something I never recommend, but I’m not there anymore. I think they are largely off of WordPress now and onto something homegrown.

But it ran on WordPress for, I don’t know, a good 10 plus years and there was that moment when WordPress broke out of just being, the sort of run a small blog or power a small businesses site to being like, sort of a big tech tool and saw the rise of WordPress professional services and the New York Post and so forth were running on it.

It was fun to be there during that time when watching WordPress be pushed into service as a really professional publishing platform.

DP: Absolutely, and it was during your time there that you got the idea for what became Contextly. What does Contextly, which is a WordPress plugin that I use all the time, what does Contextly do for WordPress sites?

RS: Yeah. I would start with what the kind of the architecture is. So what we do is we help readers of your posts find other good things to read on your site. The core example, somebody gets to the bottom of your story. They just read your post and then you want to present them with relevant or interesting options for more things to read from your site.

So everything we do is either from your own site or from sister sites that you tell us to include in the recommendations. So architecturally, what we do differently than most Related Post Plugins is everything we do is computed in the cloud. So instead of using your WordPress database we sort of do all the computations outside of your database.

Have the intelligence live outside of WordPress and compute either related using multiple sets of algorithms, et cetera. Figure out which of your stories are popular and which of your stories are what we call evergreen. So essentially your oldies but goodies and automatically compute those for you and let you show those off.

And then also just cause I come outta the editorial world there are times when an author knows better than an algorithm what’s the best related recommendation for a given post. So we make it easy for you if you want to, to choose what related posts show up at the bottom or in the body of your story.

DP: The way I use it on my site, I spend a lot of time writing these articles and not all of them go viral, most don’t. Right? But you still do a lot of work on ’em and they’re still maybe relevant in the future. And so if a post does happen to get traffic and it’s a first time visitor and they enjoyed that post about weird jazz instruments or something, right?

They can see at the bottom the Contextly suggestions. And there’s different ways that I can show them things. I can either just let Contextly pick or I can kind of like add my YouTube channel, I think was one of the things you could do. You can kind of add things and kind of have it added in there.

I might be wrong on that, but there’s all this customization that I can do and hopefully people, if they like that one article, they’re just gonna continue on over to another article. And then my favorite feature is the Contextly email, it sounds like I’m doing an ad for you, but like the emails that I get every day, that’s like, you had this many visitors and here’s what they visited.

Obviously Google Analytics and things like that have that, but there’s just something really nice about that Contextly email that I get that shows me here’s the article that’s doing really well for some reason today. And I can kind of find out why if I dig down and then here’s how many people clicked from that article to another article.

So here’s another article that might be doing better than usual. That’s a cool feature.

RS: Yeah. When we first started off, we were doing cool stuff, but we needed to sort of prove to people how well it’s working, right? And I think credit for this goes to my co-founder, Ben. We decided to just start with reports rather than building a dashboard.

So almost every other service you sign up for it and they’re like, oh, you can check the dashboard. And it was like just coming from the writing world, there’s like five dashboards I have to check every day and we’re like, no, we’re just gonna send people a report.

Right. That tells ’em up the top, the sort of the basics, and then like, lets ’em dive more in. And just honestly, when we were first doing sales to big companies, the first question, well, not the first question, but we get them past the features and they’d be like, oh, so then you have a dashboard?

And we were like, no, we don’t have a dashboard, but we send you reports and then there’s kind of this “Sigh, oh no.” And then as soon as they start getting reports, nobody ever asked us for a dashboard again. Cause everybody already had enough dashboards and they like the daily reports that give them not just a sense of how Contextly it’s doing, but just a nice general overview of what’s happening on their site.

DP: Absolutely. And you know, I think that’s a great spot for us to take a quick pause and when we come back, we’re gonna talk with Ryan Singel of Contextly and Outpost about Contextly and what it can do for WordPress. So stay tuned. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, joined by Ryan Singel from Contextly, a plugin that helps keep visitors stuck to your site longer. Ryan, we talked about my favorite feature which is the emails that I get. Can you tell us about some of the advanced features that Contextly has?

Because I know that what I mentioned was pretty early on. I feel like y’all have done a lot of work since then that I might not be using as much.

RS: Yeah. So we have a couple other things we kind of built. So one we wanted for sites that have a wider range of content to make it an easy way for readers to just subscribe to a topic, right? So you are interested in Mac Minis and you’re reading Cult of Mac then if you’re reading a Mac Mini story, there’s an ability to follow that topic. And then we automate the emails that go out. And so this essentially works like a notification service. So you know, when there’s a new story about Mac Mini’s we’ll send the reader a nicely formatted email that has the new story.

And then we’ll include down below either related or new or popular stories to sort of do that. And so that creates kind of a distribution channel for your readers who care the most without you having to do any additional work. We think of it as a compliment to most sites that do a newsletter.

But it’s just as kind of an additional way for getting your best readers to know when you’ve got stuff, right. We also built a way you can do that for particular writers. So if you wanted to follow a writer and get notified when they do that. 

And then we’re just about on the algorithm- ish side. So we built some tools where the recommendations work in layers. So we look at different things, right? So we look at the author, we look at the tags, we look at the categories, we look at the body of posts. We look at the age of a post, et cetera.

And we built a nice little graphic equalizer in our backend where you can literally sort of change how the related works. And then over on the side you can start to change what an algorithm would actually do for your site.

So you kind of pick a story, kick up the bass and see what happens, for the recommendations for a given post. And so we’re just about to add a new feature that essentially is a way to tune the related algorithm. So if you’ve just written a new post about Mac Minis there may be a post from five years ago about Mac Minis and that version is maybe not interesting anymore.

So what we’ll be doing is a way to sort of look at the older posts, and even if they are very related, if we think that post is sort of past its deadline and then it’s close to its end of life in terms of reader interest, it gets dropped down in the relevance rankings.

We don’t do that for all stories. We don’t want say anything old no longer is interesting, right? There are definitely posts people have that are evergreen that are still generating interest years after they’ve been published. And so what this does is figure out the difference between those things that are old and still relevant and things that are old and no longer interesting.

We’ll be rolling that out soon, and then we will add in there as another slider that sites can use to tune their own related recommendations.

DP: So if I wrote an article about Twitter launching a brand new API that will help developers everywhere, the algorithm will be like, that’s kind of out of date, that’s maybe not gonna age so well. So that’s cool. 

RS: [laughter] No Twitter API has ever aged well.

DP: You were talking about algorithms here. Are y’all using any of the kind of modern AI to help with these decisions?

RS: So we’ve been doing a bunch of machine learning for a long time. So my co-founder Ben is a long time data scientist. There’s some fun stuff bubbling up that we’re gonna start playing with that I think you can do some cool stuff around AI to increase the quality of just kind of your usual recommendations. That I’m pretty excited about. I think they’ll be really cool. 

I think there’s gonna be some other fun stuff around AI that will be interesting. One of the things I’ve been watching is using AI as a way to kind of create a sort of question and answer semantic search on your site. So essentially being able to ask on Doc Pop site, “Who’s the coolest glitch artist.” And being able to have that system, that AI, look just at your stuff, right? And create what it thinks is the best answer. The one problem with AI though, is that it often makes stuff up when it doesn’t know the answer. So that’s kind of an unsolved problem, which is AI likes to pretend it’s authoritative.

We all know that person at a party that just spouts off and you know way better than they do. So I’m interested in that, because I think there’s enough places that are smaller on the web that instead of AI trying to answer every question and replace Google, is can it make kind of an interesting search on smaller domains?

DP: Do y’all have a search feature? Like a search widget in WordPress?

RS: We don’t. So the thing is, like with our backend, we know enough about the content, we could deliver a search feature and maybe that’s something we should do. Just adding a smart, full text search. Honestly, no one’s ever asked us for it, so we’ve never done it. But I dunno, maybe we should.

DP: If we’re taking feature requests now, just when you were talking about AI, I think some people would hate this idea. I’m just gonna say it. What if when it’s showing my list of articles after my list of relevant other articles. What if Contextly tried rewriting some of those using AI. Like just like experimented with other titles and let me know like, “Hey, this is performing better if you change the name or anything like that.”

Is there anything possible with that?

RS: Yeah. So I think there’s some fun stuff around that. So there’s an AI writer I’ve been playing with called Lex. It’s built by the folks that made a newsletter subscription site called Every.to. You can sign up and play with it for free. I think there’s a little bit of a waiting list.

But it has some really nice tools around suggesting titles and you know, the sort of usual, write in a paragraph and then ask it to write the next paragraph or two for you. Robin Sloan is a fiction writer, has been playing with AI for a really long time and has used it.

And I think what a lot of writers have found is that it’s useful in order to find some maybe interesting new paths or sometimes it comes up with some clever new language. But really with AI, you’re gonna have to rewrite stuff pretty hardcore?

And I think the problem with AI is it will act authoritative even when it’s not. I dunno if you saw the stories CNET tried writing 60 something articles for kind of the SEO-ish style how-tos or explainers and they got fact checked and they were just wrong in many, many places.

Right. Getting the formula for how compound interest works wrong. But it acts like it knows. So that’s my one concern is I think what will continue to stand out with AI is we’re gonna see a lot of generated AI stuff all over the place, right?

There’s just too much incentive to spam Google. What’s gonna stand out is people who are authoritative. And so I’m interested in the ways that we can help make things authoritative and then having AI help that rather than doing too much with AI sort of helping you write more articles than you probably should.

DP: Yeah. They say AI is a 100 percent confident and 75 percent correct.

RS: [laughter] yeah.

DP: I think that’s a good spot for us to take another quick break, and when we come back, we’re gonna wrap up our conversation with Ryan Singel from Contextly, and I’m a hundred percent confident that you’re gonna enjoy the ending of this episode.

So stay tuned. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, joined by Ryan Singel, the founder of Contextly and Outpost. Ryan, I wanted to ask you, since we’re talking about stickiness on site and keeping folks who landed on your site there. Have you learned anything while you were doing this that kind of like you’ve applied to your writing? Are there any lessons you’ve learned from Contextly that help you keep people on your site longer?

RS: Yeah. We have found that it is not always true that short articles do better than long articles. There used to be a sense that you had to have a ton of volume, so you had a lot of posts but the posts would kind of be short.

And that definitely is a strategy that works if you keep it up. If you publish 10, 15 blog posts a day you’re gonna get some search traffic and people find you. But we find the things that people tend to click related and links on often tend to be longer stories. So even though it takes them longer to get to our recommendation modules they’re more likely to do that on posts that are thorough or interesting or new or a scoop or something like that. So that’s one of the things that we do in the reports is here’s the percentage of people that got so far into your story, and here’s the percentage of people that clicked on related links.

So what I took from that is we all like the sort of cheap content, right? Or the filler things. The 10 most interesting celebrities of 2022. Those stories don’t keep people around. They don’t tend to click to another story. What does keep people around is a deep, interesting story about something. 

And then I guess the other thing we’ve learned and seen a lot about is that I don’t think people think enough about what the end of their story looks like.

And what I mean by that is when somebody reads a post on your site and they get to the bottom, they’ve come to sort of a moment of inattention or indecision. And they have to decide, am I gonna go share this article? Do I email it to somebody? Do I go back and do my actual work? Do I go to Facebook or TikTok? 

And then oftentimes people then show the author’s bio at the end of the post. Which is the least interesting thing. It doesn’t give people a choice. Nobody really wants to read the author bio. When looking at your site and get to the bottom of the article, put yourself in the mindset of somebody who is trying to decide what to do next.

And so the closer you have good related recommendations, they perform better than any other form of recommendation. Get good related recommendations close to the end of the story. Make it clear that they’re related, right? And don’t say, “You Might Like.” That sounds like it’s gonna be some terrible recommendation system.

Just make it clear it’s related. And we think you should do multiple sets of recommendations. Then just move the author bio either to a link from the top or underneath all of that. If people want to comment, they know they just gotta scroll down.

So that would be my one piece of sort of most actionable advice for somebody, even if they’re not using us, which is get your recommendations as close to the end of the article as possible.

DP: I wanna give you one more shout out here for Outpost, which is also doing great stuff. Can you tell us real quickly, how would you describe Outpost?

RS: Yeah, Outpost is sort of power business tools for newsletter and subscription first sites using Ghost. So I can think of Ghost as, and WordPress will be mad about this ‘cause they’re trying to move into the space. But Ghost is sort of WordPress of the newsletter space. They’re open source. 

So what we do is help those sites build their audience. So with tools like an easy to use tip button and a set of like autoresponders that are smart. So somebody signs up for your free site, will set up a drip system that let’s the site tell people what they’re about and sends them links to their previous best stuff and then sends them sets of different offers to sign up for a paid subscription.

So the goal there Outpost is just to help publishers who have moved into that newsletter, subscription sort of space convert more free readers, get more free readers, and sort of build their business without having to do a ton of work.

DP: And on that, Ryan, what is the best way for folks to follow what you’re doing these days?

RS: Yeah. So I used to say Twitter but I’ve largely moved off Twitter for the fediverse. So if they’re interested in me, find me on the fediverse, I’m RyanSingel@writing.exchange or you can check out Contextly. It’s still on Twitter and Outpost is also still on Twitter, or they can check us out at outpost.pub.

DP: Well, thanks for joining me, Ryan, and thanks to the folks who listened to this episode. I hope you had a great time and enjoyed our conversation. This has been Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR.

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: Keeping Users On Your Site Longer appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

If you follow tech, then you know it’s been an exciting time for AI. Last year we saw a boom in text to image synthesis via tools like Dall-e and Midjourney. This year, that excitement seems to have pivoted to tools like ChatGPT. In recent weeks, we’ve seen ChatGPT used for everything from writing high school essays to creating new WordPress plugins with no external coding.

On this episode of Press This, we are joined by Ellis LaMay, a podcaster and WordPress Practice Director at AmericanEagle.com to talk to us about how AI tools like ChatGPT can change the WordPress ecosystem. Ellis, how are you doing today? 

Ellis LaMay: I’m doing great. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

DP: I would love to hear your WordPress origin story before we dive in deep into Large Language Models.

EL: Sure. Yeah. Sounds great. I was thinking about how to tell this story and I think like a lot of people that I’ve met over my years working with WordPress, I kind of fell into it basically by accident. Growing up I was always fascinated with technology and as a kid I would take computers apart and put ’em back together just to try to kind of figure out how they work.

Then eventually that led to trying to figure out how to get them to work in ways they weren’t intended to work in. And you know, I was lucky enough to have a dad who worked for a local college and so he would bring home junk computers from their IT department and that’s how a kind of a never ending source of materials to work with.

As I kind of got a little bit older, I started to get more interested in the software side of things. Started to try to get computers and Windows to do things that it wasn’t meant to do basically. But, uh, eventually I went off to college, believe it or not, and didn’t study computers in college.

The whole time growing up I was also working in bike shops. So at a certain point, the bike shops that I was working for, they needed websites. They needed technological help. And so I was kind of like that internal employee who could always do those things. And one day it sort of just occurred to me that there is a need for a classified bike website that at the time didn’t exist.

And I kind of got this idea from all the customers we’d have that would ask us if we knew of such a thing or if we knew of places that sold used bikes. And so I set about trying to create this on my own, just kind of based on my tech background and my light coding experience. And that was how I basically found WordPress themes.

So you’re talking about probably back in, let’s see, that would’ve been probably 2015ish, 2014 maybe, around there. Once I got my hands on WordPress themes, kind of my childhood passion of like taking things apart and figuring out how they work just came rushing right back in because that’s how I learned theming and plugin building was through basically reverse engineering them.

DP: And as part of your current job, you study technology trends and you’ve always kinda kept your eye on WordPress stuff, but lately you’re also really diving into the potential of AI, including tools like ChatGPT, which I mentioned many times at the beginning of the show.

Can you tell us a little bit about ChatGPT and how it works?

EL: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s kind of the layman’s explanation and then there’s of course deeper explanations about the technology that’s powering it. But on the surface level, it’s really grabbing a lot of people’s attention, including people who are not technologists or maybe don’t consider themselves to be. Because essentially what it is, is a piece of software put out by OpenAI where you can look at a chat-like interface, a box where you type in your input except you’re talking to a computer that has learned off of language models.

It can then interact with you as if it’s a person. So it can do interesting things like understand context that other search interfaces and things like that that most people are used to can’t do. So, that’s essentially it kind of on the surface level. I think beneath that there’s probably some really intense algorithms that work through combing through data and large language models and huge data structures for it to soak up that knowledge.

DP: Before the show you and I were kind of mentioning how one of the things unique to ChatGPT is the chat-like interface where you can kind of have a discussion with the computer and it’ll spit out something very confidently. It may or may not be correct. But that’s kind of the interface that’s happening, and that’s a pretty revolutionary thing. Can you tell us how a tool like ChatGPT, or something else out there like it, how can those improve experiences for WordPress visitors? Visitors to my WordPress site?

EL: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think that some of the potential that tools like this, and ChatGPT in particular, may have one day for improving user experiences, maybe from the implementer side. And perhaps I’m biased cause I’m a guy who builds websites all day every day. But something I kind of pictured that I thought would be really fascinating is, I get involved in all kinds of UX studies where essentially what we’re doing is taking the feedback from dozens and dozens of users of a website or an application and getting their qualitative feedback on what their user experience was like.

I imagined a situation where you scaled that out to potentially hundreds or thousands of people and then used a tool like ChatGPT to do the analysis on those large volumes of qualitative feedback. Just to distill it down into some takeaways, some literal actionable, tasks or steps you could take with your interface based off of analyzing thousands of user feedback sessions. And that’s something that people could do, but it would just take a long, long time.

DP: I think that sounds pretty cool if I understand that correctly. It sort of sounds like you are describing running a test or just kind of looking at the way users visit your site and then you have this big data and having something like ChatGPT to help kind of break that data down so that you don’t have to know how to look through all that data. You can have something kind of talk to you and give you suggestions. Is that what you’re saying?

EL: Yeah, pretty much. Imagine you give a survey to say a thousand people, where you ask them to describe their experience using a piece of software. And you just leave it open-ended like that because you’re looking for their qualitative feedback. At the end of that survey, someone’s gotta go through all that feedback and distill it down into some kind of takeaway.

What does it mean? What does it tell us? What can we learn? That’s a very large task for a human being to go through, right? Reading thousands of feedback surveys and kind of tracking the input and sort of pulling it together in a cohesive message. But if you’ve got something like ChatGPT that can understand context, but because it’s ultimately a computer power through those tasks much faster. You can get much larger takeaways from big data. Like really fast.

DP: We’re already kind of talking about how web developers can use this for improving sites. We’ve got things like Copilot from GitHub, which allows developers to kind of have things auto completed, I guess. Kind of like having a computer help you write code and not write the code for you.

Is this something that you think WordPressers are gonna see or are already using, maybe Copilot to code WordPress?

EL: I think that’d be really cool. I have seen, I don’t know if they’re ChatGPT affiliated per se, but I have seen the emergence of a couple AI tools out there that report to write WordPress code. Right? So this could be something like building out the structure for a Custom Post Type with some custom meta fields where what you’re putting into this software is just the layman’s description of what you want.

And then the AI will actually translate that into code and structure your content types and Custom Fields. So I’ve seen stuff like that out there in the wild. I think the real thing I’m curious about is how reliable these technologies are, especially at this stage of the game. Mostly because my experience with developing websites, particularly WordPress, is that the context of other plugins and other site functionalities matters heavily.

So I don’t know if AI can account for that just yet, but I’d imagine that’s coming soon in the near future.

DP: I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break, and when we come back, we are gonna continue our conversation with Ellis LaMay about the potential of using AI tools with WordPress. Stay tuned.

DP: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Popular, and joined this week by Ellis LaMay, a podcaster and WordPress Practice Director at AmericanEagle.com. And Ellis has been studying the potential of AI tools like ChatGPT and kind of thinking about how they could be used by WordPress developers and just website developers, not just WordPress.

And we’ve talked so far about Copilot and how ChatGPT could potentially help people create sites. I’m kind of curious, have you seen any of your research, have you seen any cool examples of ChatGPT being used on a website in a way that you just weren’t expecting?

EL: I’m trying to think of unique examples. I’m a little hard pressed to come up with some unique ones, but I have definitely seen it being used in ways that you would kind of guess. Right. And I think one of the topics that a lot of folks are aware of by now is how a lot of these technologies are being used to generate content really quickly.

A big part of getting your name out there, promoting a brand and climbing up Search Engine results is a matter of putting out good content regularly. And so I think that’s where the most immediate fit is gonna be for things like this. And I’ve seen even as of this week, there’s two plugins out there that allow you to install a plugin into WordPress, connect an API key to get ChatGPT working within that plugin, and then start generating blog content based off of some keywords or topics you give it. And the one I was playing with earlier today, actually, even writes that content with structured headings and the right semantic markups.

So, I think for marketers right now, it’s kind of the Wild West because they can use tools like that to quickly, sort of prototype and ideate blog content and then perhaps tweak it from there.

DP: Talking about Gutenberg blocks and their potential for something like this. I wanna mention that we have talked to the creators of Imajinn, which is an AI art generator. And it takes place as a WordPress block. So you install the plugin and then you just add a block in the middle of your post and you can type in your prompt.

And I’ve been using it sometimes to create featured images for posts, right? Like that’s always a hard thing when you’ve got everything kind of ready and you know you need to have a featured image, you just don’t wanna grab a stock photo, and you don’t really have time to create a photo of your own.

So there’s ways that I’ve already been kind of integrating AI into my workflow for generating content. And then what you’re talking about, it sounds sort of like a plugin installed and then a block and you can kind of, within your dashboard, create content around probably a prompt.

That sounds pretty cool. There’s this talk that the generated content might start overwhelming Google search and kind of overwhelming the web, right?

It’s very easy and there’s a lot of potential, a lot of incentive for people to create content and if they can do it without hiring someone, if they can just kind of generate it through a ChatGPT, there’s gonna be a lot more of it. And so there’s been this idea that maybe Google might have a way of detecting AI text and maybe try to punish it or anything.

Have you heard anything about Google cracking down on AI generated content?

EL: I haven’t heard any specific news about Google doing this, but it’s really easy to imagine that they would want to, right? Because a few weeks ago, when I first started to hear about ChatGPT and explore it, all you had to do was get on YouTube and within a matter of, like half a minute, you’d start seeing headlines for videos about how ChatGPT is gonna end Google as we know it.

I gotta imagine Google’s not a fan of hearing messaging like that. So from that standpoint, of course they’d probably wanna kind of control this a little bit. But you know, the other thing too is, as a developer, I’ve always been tracking Google pretty much since day one because everything you build has to play well with it from a structure standpoint. But also for digital marketing purposes, ranking and promotion.

You know,what I’m curious to see is, as I’ve understood it, one of Google’s core missions is to kind of democratize the web. Their goal is to basically get the best content, the most relevant content into the hands of people who are looking for it. And so you kind of have to ask the question of, if everyone is using AI to generate content, is content sort of across the board going down in quality? Because you no longer have the critical thinking and thought leadership of people behind it, but some of it’s being generated by a computer, you know?

And if you think about all of the changes to the Google algorithm over the years and how they’ve basically made big strides to weed out things like keyword stuffing, and things like that, you gotta think that they’re gonna start to put an emphasis on staying away from computer generated content because it just won’t be viewed as authentic as human generated content.

DP: Yeah, I mentioned earlier, the answers ChatGPT gives are very confident, whether it’s writing code or whether it’s giving you a book report. And it is definitely a better writer than I think I am. I have to admit, that’s not my strong point. But just because it’s a better writer, I am personally a little worried that it might start to trend higher on Google with not necessarily the correct answers. 

And I don’t know if Google has a fix for detecting AI, but also for detecting accuracy. But then I guess that’s a whole other thing that currently we haven’t worried about. Google detecting how accurate is a thing? We just look at how long visitors stay in the site, how does the site perform? And other parts of their algorithm. There’s gonna have to be some tweaking for Google to still be relevant in a post-ChatGPT world, it seems.

EL: Yeah, it really will. And I almost wonder too, where that sort of thing kind of collides then with the world of academia. Some of the people that I’ve talked to about this over the last few weeks are people who are teachers at all levels, and one of the first questions they have is almost this look of astonishment, where they look at me and go, “Oh my gosh, are my students already using this to like cheat on papers and things?”

And my genuine answer is, I don’t know, but maybe. And so you gotta wonder too, you already have Google and search engines that really changed the landscape of how students did their work. But that was 20 years ago, you know? And so kind of what new sort of risks is ChatGPT gonna invite into that scenario?

I think it’ll be really interesting to see how that plays out.

DP: There is a lot of conversation too about how calculators were going to break students. Like students need to know how to do all this very advanced math, not everyday math, but some of the more advanced stuff. They need to know how to do that, even though is it something they’re actually gonna have to apply.

I think there’s probably 20 years from now, there’s a chance that we might be looking back at these conversations in the same way that we are looking back at “How calculators ruined high school for students.”

EL: Yeah, absolutely. It could be, and I think with every technical advancement, there’s the potential that it’s used for good and then the potential that it’s used for not good. I’m kind of a self-taught person. A lot of the things that I know about development and that have been pivotal for me in my career development have been things I’ve self-taught myself.

It’s interesting developing your career that way because for me it’s essentially a matter of piecing together a bunch of great resources and learning how to learn along the way. But I have had occasions sometimes of learning certain languages where you kind of get stuck and you need someone to sort of fill in a knowledge gap for you.

And when you’re a self-learner, you’re kind of at the whim of what you can find going through Google. I think that ChatGPT could actually be something that helps facilitate people who are self-learners because it could help show them resources that they might not know exist or just fill in knowledge gaps because it’s got that context from those language learning models.

DP: On that point, there are tools, I think we mentioned, or alluded to them earlier, tools like CodeWP, which is a website where you can go and explain what you want out of a plugin and AI will create it. I think they’re using ChatGPT, to create a plugin that may or may not work, but supposedly it’s trained on WordPress plugins as its knowledge base. So it should be very specialized for that. Do you think at the moment this is a good tool for people to use if they wanna avoid coding? Should they be using tools like that?

EL: I think right now I’d have to go with kind of a solid No. The reason being is because again, the context of the rest of your application matters. If you kind of push all that context to the side, and you write a plugin to do some specific functions or something specific, I think there’s a high likelihood that you would install that plugin and then have conflicts with the rest of your ecosystem, or maybe encounter conflicts later on.

Right? As you introduce new variables and factors into your site architecture, you’re writing more functions, you’re building more functionality. I just think that it’s not like a slam dunk one and done. I kind of look at ChatGPT and other tools like it, sort of like any other tool. 

The hammer doesn’t build the house. The person holding the hammer builds the house and that person needs to take into context a lot of other factors along the way during that journey. And I just see ChatGPT as really no different, at least for now.

DP: That’s another great spot for us to take a quick break and when we come back, we will talk to Ellis LaMay about potential uses for ChatGPT that he sees for WordPress developers. So stay tuned for more. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and this week we are talking about ChatGPT with Ellis LaMay, the WordPress Practice Director at AmericanEagle.com. 

Ellis, at the beginning of the show, you were saying you’re keeping your eye towards this technology, and you also were saying you’re building websites on a daily basis.

I’m kind of wondering, have y’all had the conversation yet about using ChatGPT for some web design for some project at AmericanEagle.com?

EL: Very, very lightly. And I think one of the practical uses that we see for it during development is filling in placeholder content. I think everyone who’s worked on a website at some point has gone to a Lorem Ipsum website to basically copy and paste tons of placeholder content so that they could just simply build out their layouts.

And when you’re presenting prototypes and concepts to clientele, It really does go a long way to have some relevant content in your designs that at least it isn’t Lorem Ipsum. And so for now, we’re just kind of dipping our toe and starting to use it for creating blog titles and things like that.

Really just for the purpose of demoing sites, we’re not really promoting it as a tool to replace thoughtful content writing, but that’s one way we’re using it. But we also have a great program at American Eagle called The Hatchery, where its sole purpose is to build upon emerging technologies and try to come up with innovative ideas to carry ’em forward.

And so, I can’t share any details yet, but there have been some ideas recommended to The Hatchery for developing it further.

DP: The example you were just mentioning about using it to create dummy content, I hadn’t even thought of that. That’s such an obvious one, but that’s such a game changer if you are building sites and you wanna be able to show here’s how it would look to a restaurant, or here’s how this site would look for something else.

And maybe even have some localized text in there or whatever. All with prompts. Man, that would be so much better than Lorem Ipsum. That’d be like Lorem AI-ipsum it reads in my head, but it doesn’t sound good. But that’s a really cool usage. That’d be cool if we saw something like that out there.

EL: All right. Well, maybe a listener will take that idea and push it forward.

DP: It might be early days and I know that a lot of bugs are still getting worked out and we said, we probably wouldn’t be using this to code a website yet. But I think early days, one of the things I’m kind of most excited about is definitely using it as part of my workflow.

If I make a video and I’m kind of struggling to come up, Description of it that needs to go in the body of the text. I might go to ChatGPT and kind of tell it kind of what I’m looking for and it gives me something. And I don’t think I’ve used that exactly yet, but it’s helped me out a lot.

And I have, even for art, I’ve used Midjourney kind of help get started with an art idea and then I end up redrawing it from scratch. So just integrating it into my workflow, not necessarily replacing my workflow with it has been really nice for me. And it kind of sounds like y’all are thinking in the same way.

EL: Yeah, I agree. You know, one simple way that I’ve used it over the last couple weeks is to get quick references to the meaning of things while I’m on calls with clients and partners. It’s almost kind of embarrassing to admit, but an example would be the other day I was on the phone with some leadership from an insurance company.

We were talking about the 2.0 version of their website and there’s a lot of acronyms in the insurance world, and it was really helpful to have ChatGPT up because I could just type into it, “What does blah, blah, blah mean relative to car insurance?” 

And even though I could do the same thing through Google, you still have that sort of manual aspect to Google where you have to make sure that you know what you are looking at is the right result.

And you might have to kind of peruse through some of Google’s interface to find your literal answer. But with ChatGPT I just get the answer. So that’s been pretty useful. And the people that I’m talking to on the phone really have no idea that I’ve got that in my back pocket. So I think a lot of little uses like that will continue to embolden the business world.

DP: Well, that’s really interesting. I really appreciate your time today talking to me about ChatGPT. I think I’m thinking about it in much different ways than I was before. Ellis, if people want to follow you online, what’s a good way to kind of keep up with the work you’re doing?

EL: You can follow me on AmericanEagle.com’s blog. As well as on LinkedIn.

DP: Well, I really appreciate you joining me for this episode of Press This. Press This is a weekly podcast. Next week we’re gonna be talking to Ryan Singel from Contextly about how to make your website stickier using tools like Contextly. Thanks for listening to Press This. I’m your host, Doc Pop.

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-to-Code, Building WordPress Plugins with ChatGPT appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

On this episode of Press This, we’re talking about Headless WordPress, GraphQL, and Faust.js. How these tools can be used together and what sort of cost could be associated with Headless WordPress. We’re gonna kind of try to dive in deep with this, and I’ve got two great guests joining me today, I’ve got Jason Bahl, a principal software engineer at WP Engine based in Denver, Colorado, where he maintains WPGraphQL. And we’ve got Chris Weigman, an engineering manager working on Faust.js. I usually like to start these shows off asking guests about their WordPress origin stories, but I thought I’d switch things up a little bit here.

Jason, can you tell us what WPgraphQL is and what its wordPress Origin story. 

Jason Bahl: Oh yeah, WPGraphQL is a free open source WordPress plugin that brings a GraphQL API to your WordPress site and GraphQL is graph query language. So it allows developers to get content in and out of WordPress using the graph query language.  

And the plugin originated, I was working at a newspaper a few years ago and we were doing a lot of content syndication. We had a network of something like 54 sites and all across the US and we needed to move content from one side to another. You know, when a news story was published, different newspapers could subscribe to content from other newspapers.

And so when various events occurred, we needed to move data around this network and we were using the WordPress REST API to do a lot of that data movement. And were having some issues with that technically and like the actual performance technically, but also the developer experience. I found out about GraphQL, the actual graph query language, which was open sourced by Facebook in 2015.

So I found this technology, did some prototyping, pitched it to my colleagues and then we migrated our contact syndication from REST to GraphQL. And then I continued working on the project as a community project knowing that JavaScript frameworks were becoming the hot thing and that would probably be the primary use case of using GraphQL, like server to server communication isn’t the primary use case. It solved our needs, but I saw a bigger vision for it, so I kept working on it as an open source project for the community. 

DP: Well, cool. Chris, can you tell us a similar story about what is Faust and how did it come about?

Chris Weigman: Sure Faust is, recently as of really this week, officially released to the public, re-released to the public framework for building Headless WordPress sites using GraphQL. Well development started on it in 2020, and it was kind of an unofficial project of WP Engine, and this is the third major pivot.

They had started it as an extension of DevRel, kind of started making it a little more official with and pivoted into something called GQty and a very JavaScript, developer first mentality. And then when I took over the team in December 1st of last year, we realized that that wasn’t our target market.

We should have been developing for WordPress devs. So we started rebuilding it again, and that’s just finally been able to be re-released recently. 

DP: Jason you’d recently tweeted that you had launched the new wpgraphql.com on Faust.js. The previous site, I believe was headless WordPress. Can you just tell us about this change that you did and you know, what improvements you’re saying? 

JB: Yeah. So wpgraphql.com, it’s been a headless site for many years. So I’m using multiple data sources. So I have a lot of content in WordPress, like the blog posts are all in WordPress. 

Some of the documentation exists in WordPress as well. And then some documentation exists in markdown files in the GitHub repo. For the longest time I was using Gatsby, maybe for like three years, I was using Gatsby, which is a JavaScript framework that at its core has its data layer where you can pull in data from multiple sources.

So I was using that, it would pull data from GitHub, pull data from WordPress using WPGraphQL as well and allow me to use that data to build my templates. So I was using that for a few years. There’s a lot of pain points with the data layer that I wanted to kind of get out of.

So I wanted to use Next which is what Faust is built on. It’s another JavaScript framework, but there was a lot of missing pieces, I guess. Next, and a lot of these JavaScript frameworks have the idea that your front end frameworks should define all routing, right? But if you’re using a CMS, your CMS defines routing.

And so there’s a lot of technical issues of getting those things to play nice, where like your front end has an opinion on something and your back end has a different opinion. So like one of the problems I was trying to solve is getting my front end to recognize that a specific URL was a specific type of thing, and then render a template that represented that thing.

Like a blog post has a different template than a doc or a user archive or whatever. So I wanted my front end to have the ability to send a URL to the CMS, get data back, but understand what template to return. In WordPress its called template hierarchy. And so when the Faust team was able to get that problem solved, I was like, heck yeah, I’m moving over to Faust.

So, yeah, I’m able to take some of the concepts that exist in core WordPress, like PHP theming and use them in headless so I can use the benefits of React and whatever JavaScript I want to use on the front end to template my site, but still familiar concepts from the WordPress world. 

DP: Chris, you were mentioning that Faust kind of underwent some changes. What were those changes? You know, Jason was mentioning them. What were some of those changes that have made this improvement possible?

CW: It’s always focused on WPGraphQL. It was everything else that was really the issue. For instance, the last major version of Faust used a library underneath to interact with GraphQL called GQty, which on paper sounded really cool. The idea being from the Faust team at the time that, let’s just abstract, people shouldn’t need to know how to build these complex queries.

This framework should abstract that for you. On paper that looked really good, in practice because of all the complexities of WordPress data. Even a single post type can have so many variations. Maybe you’re mixing that with category, maybe all the different things. GQty just couldn’t power it through.

On top of that, when it was built with the GQty version, there was really no attention given to the routing problem that Jason spoke of. Who handles the routing? WordPress wants to handle its routing by what the content is, it’s a content management system, so all routing and WordPress is largely content based.

Next.js is a frontend framework, so all routing is based on, it’s a completely different paradigm for how the routing’s based. What could be /Blog on Next may have nothing to do with content for a blog. It’s going to a set of templates. It’s going to part of the application that can build a blog.

Whereas /Blog on WordPress could very well mean, these are all the blog posts. And that paradigm when building, if you wanna make WordPress a very solid frontend or headless capable CMS, we had to deal with that routing. Another shift when we made this, like I said with the GQty version, our goal was JavaScript developers who had to use WordPress, which seems noble until you realize this is WP Engine. 

We’re dealing with agencies who have built on WordPress for years, who now for various reasons that we can get into later, are moving into a headless thing. They know how to do WordPress development. They understand how WordPress template routings work and templates work, things like that.

We need to bring those features forward, so GraphQL can be more easily used by WordPress devs. And that’s what the goal of Faust here has been. The template hierarchy, just simply rebuilds what WordPress did. Now if you wanna use Next’s routing, there are ways to override it in the app so you’re not losing anything.

But for people who are using WordPresses as a true content management system, capable of routing content by content management, then Faust is gonna handle that much better for you? Does that make sense? 

DP: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I think that’s a good spot to take a quick break here. You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast with Chris Weigman and Jason Bahl. We’ll be back to talk about WordPress and headless. Stay tuned.

DP: We’re back with Press This. And you know, Chris, right before that break you mentioned something, you mentioned kind of more and more companies getting into headless, and I know that WP Engine has done a lot of research kind of showing that is the case. I am kind of wondering, headless definitely has a reputation as something, I think enterprise, when I think headless am I thinking correctly. Is that what headless is? Is it just a tool for enterprise or is this a tool that more sites are gonna be using? 

CW: Yes and no. Largely headless, especially with WordPress right now, the complexity involved in it means that you probably have a full team building out what you need.

This isn’t somebody just using WordPress out of the box, that you just want your personal blog. It can do that, but it’s a much heavier lift so far in order to be able to do that. Same with Contentful, same with all these other CMSs. If you just wanted something simple, something that, you know, the type of content that’s been on the web for years, headless is probably more work than you wanna deal with so far.

Is it strictly enterprise? Look, no. Gatsby’s been working on this problem for years. You’ve got another podcast later, Doc with Mastodon. It’s a community I’ve been involved with for a number of years. Most folks on that are using variations of headless CMSs, especially Gatsby, but there’s Hugo. There’s all kinds of different, that type of technology on a very grassroots level. 

So you wind up with the grassroots users and you wind up with enterprise users for heavy sites, whereas WordPress traditionally seems to fall with everybody else in between. It’s the person who doesn’t wanna deal with markdown files and code like a Gatsby user might, or you know, just Gatsby out of the box anyway.

But it’s also not somebody who has a whole team of 10 building their personal branding or personal blog. This takes WordPress out of that middle and expands it to both ends very easily. Now you can easily build between GraphQL, you have all the data and you have an ever-growing set of ways to handle that data.

And Faust makes it much easier to utilize that and something that you can build in a day instead of a month. 

DP: Jason, Chris mentioned something I’d like to hear your thoughts on, I hear that this is not maybe great for small teams, small bloggers like myself, which obviously makes sense, I don’t need a headless WordPress, but like, I guess what I’m wondering is, is headless WordPress going to cost me more because I’m gonna have to have an iOS dev and a WordPress dev? Is it more expensive or is it somehow more cost efficient? 

JB: Probably depends on what you’re producing, I guess. If you are doing, like you mentioned iOS, if you are doing a native mobile app, I mean there’s obviously be costs associated with that regardless, and there’s not really a good way to do it if you’re using data from WordPress, other than doing it headless, cause you know, a native app doesn’t render php, so you would have to do that headlessly.

But as far as like if you’re building for the web right now in traditional WordPress, you can go find a theme, you know either a free theme or find a theme on a marketplace, download it, install it, and you’re off to the races. Most people are going to customize it in some way or another.

So you’re gonna have developer cost usually, whether it’s yourself doing it or someone else. One of the things with headless WordPress that differs from traditional PHP theming, Is that for example when I launched the new wpgraphql.com, I was able to use the same instance of WordPress that was powering my Gatsby site.

I’m getting the data, the data was coming out and going into the Gatsby site, I was able to continue publishing content in the CMS while developing my next frontend for it at the same time. In traditional WordPress development, you have to usually migrate your site into like a staging environment.

Activate a new theme on that environment, build your theme over there, deal with some sort of like content freeze period where you tell your content creators, “Hey, today you can’t publish content cause we’re gonna migrate and then we’re gonna set the new WordPress instance, the live instance.” And then you have to log in over there and start doing your content right.

Headless WordPress, I was able to rebuild my site on a completely different frontend stack without disrupting anything in my actual WordPress instance, it’s a separation of data and presentation, right? So I could go, if I wanted to explore the next hot technology tomorrow, like I could put my sight on Svelte instead of Next, and I wouldn’t have to change a thing in WordPress.

So in some cases it can actually be cheaper because that whole process of spinning up another server, getting your team to stop writing content and then move into a different instance of WordPress, and then start publishing there, doing Delta migrations, things like that, that has a cost too.

Another thing that’s interesting too is the JavaScript ecosystem is really shipping. The common drive, in my opinion, one of the common motivators for moving headless is component based architectures. And there’s, all sorts of component libraries in the React and VUE ecosystem, which allow you to reuse components across projects.

And so agencies can build common components that they use in projects and they can update those in a central place, but then install them in multiple projects. With WordPress, that’s not quite as easy cause your PHP template parts and WordPress are usually very tightly coupled with the project they belong to.

Where with headless you can have an MPM package that has those components and multiple projects can update that package and benefit all at the same time with less effort. So I think at the moment, I would say probably is more costly and more work, but I think tools like Faust, that didn’t exist until recently are, are lowering the overall effort required to build headless.

And I think in the not too distant future, it might be cheaper to build headless than not headless. 

DP: Chris, did you have anything you wanted to add to what agencies might need to think about in terms of costs of headless WordPress? 

CW: I think Jason really hit the nail in the head.

And that’s one thing I like about WPGraphQL is my team’s working next on extending WordPress that direction with what we call, our working title is the React Gutenberg Bridge, but it’s a problem in WordPress too. How do you reuse these components? I don’t wanna use the word just component, because it doesn’t apply on the WordPress side in the same way that it applies on the JavaScript side, right?

But how do we reuse code across projects, headless or otherwise with WordPress and headless does enable that. But I think it’s safe to say that the average blogger just trying to get out their foodie blogs, probably not dealing with that themselves. That’s very much an agency problem. Is that more cost?

Maybe, maybe not, but that’s where it gets complicated when we talk about where’s the cost in this? Because it’s different types of how you want to use data. 

DP: Yeah, absolutely. You know, coming from a newspaper background, working on Weeklys in the Twin Cities and in Nashville, Jason, I can imagine what it would would’ve been like to tell your 56 newspapers not to publish for a day.

No news today, because we’re updating the site. 

JB: Yeah. And I mean, we did go through those periods, right? Like when I was hired there, they weren’t on WordPress and so part of my job was getting them from another system to WordPress. So there definitely were days when it was like, all right, it’s go live on WordPress day. Stop what you’re doing. Right. 

So there definitely were periods like that or we also had to deal with that issue of like, okay, they were publishing on the old system until midnight last night, but we had the WordPress ready to go two days before that. So now we gotta do like a Delta migration and make sure all the data’s still synced so that, you know, there’s definitely technical and human cost to those processes for sure. 

DP: Yeah. And I’m thinking there’s also a lot, when you’re still using WordPress, you still get that ecosystem that you can get this cost saving. You don’t have to build the SEO tools.

You can use Yoast SEO plugin or whatever. Even though you’re a Headless site, I’m assuming, most plugins will still work as long as they’re not front facing. 

JB: Yeah. That’s actually an interesting thing. So the new Faust is built with a plugin architecture itself. So like out of the box, it’s going to come with a client, it’s using Apollo client so that you can fetch data from WPGraphQL, you can get your WordPress data, but you can create plugins so that, let’s say you did, like you mentioned, install Yoast SEO on your WordPress site.

You can add a Yoast Plugin. It doesn’t exist yet, but it can soon. You could add a Yoast plugin for Faust on the frontend that knows what to do with that data, right? So there’ll be the ability for folks, some we might produce and support, but some, the community can produce and support plugins for the Faust side of things as well, so that you with just one line of code, add this plugin can get functionality such as Yoast for your headless front end. 

It’s something that I don’t think any other headless frontend really has the concept of in the same way that Faust is approaching it. So I think the plugin, I think it’s another thing that’s familiar for WordPress developers. It’s bringing familiar concepts from WordPress, but bridging it with the modern JavaScript frontend stack.

DP: that’s a, that’s a good spot for one final break here on Press This, and when we come back, we’ll wrap up our conversation with Chris Weigman and Jason Bahl. Stay tuned.

DP: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today we’re talking about WPGraphQL, Faust, and how you can power your headless WordPress site. Right before the break, we were talking about Faust and plugins and I’m just gonna throw some random questions at y’all and just kind of see if there’s any good answers here that come up. 

But Chris, I’m kind of wondering with, with Faust, is there any potential, I know it’s a headless platform, but is there any potential for like a WordPress Faust theme that just kind of at least gets you set up with like, here’s the plugins you need and here’s just kind of everything out the box.

CW: Absolutely. In fact, we already have it. We’re referring to it as Blueprints because it works so heavily with Local. Most people are gonna do some sort of tweaking on this stuff before launching it on a platform like WP Engine. So we borrowed Local’s name of Blueprints. 

For the new Faust we have one called Portfolio, which is basically a full portfolio theme and we’re working on just a very blank scaffold that agencies can use. Once you get the hang of things, you’re probably gonna wanna customize everything yourself. So a scaffold would be project best practices, spin that up, and then you can do all your own stuff with it. 

Long term we’ve talked very heavily about a headless theme store, ala Blueprints. We don’t have the manpower so that’s a little ways away, but it’s absolutely something we’re, we’re considering and we’d like to see happen. 

DP: Yeah that’s cool to think about. That’s a whole different kind of ecosystem to get into.

And you know, Jason, I’ve interviewed you before, and I’m sure this question comes up all the time, but every time I’m hearing about WPGraphQL, I’m thinking that sounds a lot like what REST API does. Actually, that sounds like a lot more powerful than what REST API does and REST API is part of core and I’m just kind of wondering, do you feel that WPGraphQL should be part of WordPress Core? 

JB: Maybe someday. I don’t think we’re there yet. When things get merged in WordPress Core, probably with the exception of Gutenberg, innovation halts. The REST API, for example, there’s still a bug that I point out to people that still exists from I think 2016. So I mean, when stuff goes into core, you’re adding a feature set to 40 ish percent of the web and so making changes has to be done at a much slower pace, where if it’s a plugin you can let folks opt into the version that they want to opt into and you can iterate much faster because they can choose what version works best for their project.

Where in core, if you update core and it includes breaking change, you might have just broke 40 percent of the web. So GraphQL is a specification, it has nothing to do with WordPress as well.

Right. And so the GraphQL specification is still evolving. And as that continues to evolve, we want to keep up with the latest and greatest of the GraphQL spec. If we were to merge, let’s say, WPGraphQL into Core today, and GraphQL keeps evolving, WordPress would be stuck at the 2022 edition of GraphQL where the rest of the world is on the 2030 version or whatever. To me, I think it might make sense at some point to have it recognized like WPCLI is as like the official way to do X thing.

Like you can go build your own CLI client for WordPress, but it’s kind of recognized by the community that WPCLI is the official thing. It’s not part of WordPress Core but it’s recognized by the WordPress Foundation and most of the WordPress community as the official thing. So it might be nice at some point for a WPGraphQL to be recognized like that is, like if you’re going to do headless WordPress, do it this way.

It’s still gonna remain a plugin. That’s my thought. There might be a time where the GraphQL feels perfect and it’s not really being iterated and maybe at that time we consider it. But at this time there’s things coming to the GraphQL spec that will cause the API to have breaking changes.

So doing it as a plugin to me makes sense still. 

DP: Right on. And yeah, you’ve mentioned WPCLI and I keep forgetting, like they just, they just feel like it’s part of core. Whatever it feels, it’s like official. So yeah, it’s like, oh yeah, that is like this independent thing, just like WPGraphQL is at the moment.

That’s a good analogy. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna wrap up here. It’s been really great chatting with both of y’all. If the listeners are interested in following either of you, you can follow @JasonBahl and @ChrisWeigman. We’ll put the Twitter handles in the show description if we can. You’ve been listening to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. 

On next week’s episode, we’re gonna have Anne McCarthy, a product liaison at Automatic, talking about changes to site Editing and 6.1 and what’s coming up with 6.2. Thanks again for listening to Press This.

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: WPGraphQL and Faust.js appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

Each month we like to do a community focused episode. We like to call them Word Around the Campfire, where we talk with WordPress friends about events and news within the community. Joining us this week is Mike Davey, a Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. Mike, how are you doing today?

Mike Davey: Oh, not too bad. Doc and yourself.

DP: I’m doing really well. And we also have Nick Diego, a Developer Advocate at WP Engine and a WordPress Core Contributor. Nick, how are you?

Nick Diego: Doing great! Thanks for having me.

DP: Let’s start off with the biggest news in the community this week. Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word address. Matt gave this presentation just yesterday. Nick, can you kind of tell us a little bit about the State of the Word and kind of where it happened, set the scene for us?

ND: Yeah, absolutely. So the State of the Word is something that’s done each year and it’s delivered by the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. And the goal of the event is to kind of share reflections on the progress of the project during the current year or the past year, and also kind of set the scene for what’s gonna be coming in the future of WordPress.

This year it took place in New York City, and it was actually live again this year to a handful of folks. And we learned a lot of great things about what happened in 2022 and also some things that we can expect this coming year.

DP: WordPress is turning 20. That was kind of a big eye-opener for me. The other thing to expect is the end of Gutenberg Phase Two. Nick, can you tell us about that?

ND: This whole block project started, Gutenberg project started, it’s broken into kind of four parts. We’ve been in stage two for quite a long time now. And that’s kind of everything focused around being able to build with blocks. The different supports and controls and functionality, Full Site Editing, all that kind of stuff.

And we’ve seen huge advancements in 2022 towards that stage two goal. There’s still a little bit of work left to do and that will be completed as we move into 2023, but the goal is that once we get to the end of the year, we will be completely done with the bulk of everything that’s needed for that stage two goal.

And then we can look forward to stage three.

DP: So, end of this year or end of next year, we should be done with Phase Two?

ND: Oh, my apologies for that. End of 2023.

DP: Okay. So 6.1 was sort of the biggest version of Site Editing so far. Of course, that’s how WordPress releases work. Each version’s gonna be the biggest one or the newest one. But 6.2 I was thinking, was going to kind of book end that at least as best as possible, try to wrap up any of the major issues or bugs?

Is that still correct or am I just misunderstanding what 6.2 is gonna be doing there?

ND: No. You’re a hundred percent correct there. I think that there’s a few outstanding items regarding Full Site Editing, and the Site Editor. A lot of work’s being done there. Kind of polishing off some remaining functionality that folks have been looking for. That’s all aiming at 6.2.

DP: And they talked a little bit about new plugin taxonomies being introduced. And I’m gonna say I didn’t fully understand that part of the talk. Mike, can you help explain to me what Matt was talking about there?

MD: Sure. Essentially, the idea is that plugin and theme developers sort of self-identify what their project goals are through that new taxonomy. Just looking at plugins though, there’s a few different categories they can put it in. One of them being commercial and I’m in favor of greater transparency.

My main concern with that is that a lot of users, especially a lot of new users, may skip right over anything that says commercial. And it seems to me like that might be a barrier for the freemium plugins, especially the new ones that don’t have an audience yet. And I mean, just from my personal perspective, the Delicious Brains plugins all have free versions, and those free versions do significantly enhance your capabilities. And so I worry that new users might miss that if the plugins are just tagged as commercial. Right. 

And speaking of looking just still at new users, I don’t think the current taxonomy scheme that we’ve seen is going to be of much help for them when they need to figure out which plugins to use. Solo? Community? What does that even mean? And don’t get me started on canonical, I seem to recall there was some confusion about that term just a few months ago, even among the WordPress cognoscente. Right? Like it’s not an obvious term to use. 

And if I were just going in blind, I would see the words canonical plugin assume that that means it’s something you have to have. And then I would question why it wasn’t just included in Core. Right? So I think maybe the way we’re terming them is confusing.

DP: Yeah, there seems to be a lot of kind of confusion about this. Maybe it wasn’t rolled out great. It sounds like the goal is to help identify a user on the plugin repository of what type of plugin they’re getting. It sounds like that’s the noble goal. And these are supposed to be self applied or self-identified.

I know that currently there’s some folks who are looking at the way that these have been tagged and not fully understanding ’em, but yeah, you’re bringing up some other points too, just like canonical. I mean, the terminology of that seems pretty off for sure.

MD: Yeah, I mean, I seem to recall the first time I’d ever seen the term. There was a big discussion a few months back about the plugin download stats being removed. And Matt Mullenweg said that I believe at the time in a comment on WordPress.org that the best way to do this would probably be via a canonical plugin.

And there were plenty of questions generated from that, like plenty of questions coming from very knowledgeable people saying, what is a canonical plugin? 

ND: So I think the spirit of the initiative is a good one. I think there are a lot of plugins in the repository. I’ll leave it at that. There’s a lot of plugins in the repository and the more that we can do to categorize them, I think is helpful. How that’s done. You know, there’s always gonna be concerns and questions around that.

I think that the commercial thing might actually be beneficial personally. I think that there’s a lot of plugins out there that are, it’s hard to tell if they’re being actively supported. Is it just somebody who built it and put it out there and just left it? Who’s actually behind these plugins?

It can kind of cut both ways. I know, but I think it could also be beneficial to showcase, “Hey, this plugin is free. Use it however you want, but it’s backed up by a company, and they are actively supporting this and they’re putting dev time towards it.” 

Again, I’m not sure how it’s all gonna play out in the end, but I do think that the plugin repository is a bit of a wild west and what can be done to kind of tame that, I think is in concept helpful.

DP: Each year we do the Plugin Madness competition over on Torque Magazine. It’s coming up in a few weeks or a few months. When I first heard about the taxonomies, I was like, oh, that sounds a little bit like, we’ve got kind of an enterprise and a maintenance and optimization.

We’ve brought basically plugins into four kind of pillars, which is not easy to do. And every year we get a lot of complaints about how we do it. It’s not an easy task. So I can kind of see that. And this is obviously something different. It’s not breaking it up into its functionality quite like that. 

But it is kind of fun seeing other people have to deal with the criticism that we get when we try adding any sort of taxonomy or grouping to things. And Mike actually mentions the developer download issue that came up where stats on downloads were removed.

I think probably for privacy concerns for users. Both of these things do kind of have that similar vibe where I think plugin developers, I feel like plugin developers are feeling like this kind of came out of nowhere, or maybe they weren’t consulted or they sort of feel like out of the loop on both of these. At least with this one, if I understand correctly they should be able to fix that. Like there’s no fixing the download stats. 

MD: I’m actually not sure to be honest, like I don’t know that you can, once it’s set, there’s probably some way to change it. Like, for example, because somebody made a side, “This was a commercial Plugin when I developed it five years on, I’m just making it totally free.” So there must be a way to, to change that setting, but I don’t know for sure.

ND: Yeah, I don’t either. 

DP: We’re gonna take a quick break and when we come back we’re gonna talk a little bit more about the community as seen through Matt Mullenweg and the State of the Word and what we’ve kind of learned about 2022 and 2023. Stay tuned for more. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and we are doing our Word Around the Campfire segment where we talk about the WordPress community. Today we’re really talking about the State of the Word that happened just yesterday, as we’re recording. I’m joined by Mike Davey from Delicious Brains and Nick Diego from WP Engine. Mike, I’m curious, what was one of your favorite questions during Matt’s famous Q and A segment after State of the word?

MD: I’d have to say that my favorite question was, “Are we going to get to one universal theme?” Because it mirrors something I was thinking when Matt was showing off some of the new stuff about Gutenberg and he was showing the new Twenty Twenty-Three Theme with I think 10 style variations. Because it really does seem to me that that seems to be the sort of way that it’s driving. Right.

Is that we may eventually get to the point where we have just sort of one universal theme and you can change so many things about it, right? Fairly easily that it’s the only theme you really need. Now as Matt did say during State of the Word, we’re probably going to see some really weird themes still, no matter how advanced we get with these new themes, right? We’re probably gonna see some niche themes, I think he mentioned one that looks like a terminal, that sort of thing. But I suspect we’re going to see eventually it driving towards one universal theme.

One of the other things he mentioned, you can create themes just using blocks and style variations, and I really think that that is in line with WordPress’s initial and continual mission of democratizing publishing.

It seems to me that you can now be a low code or no code person and actually build a custom theme. It’s probably gonna take you a while. There may be some stuff you’ve gotta learn, but you can get in there and start doing it. And I think the more open we make this and the easier we make it to do, the more we fulfill that mission of democratizing publishing.

ND: Yeah, I agree. And I think that one of the things that we’re looking at as well as maybe there’s a kind of a default base theme for WordPress that people can build on. But I also think that when it comes to businesses, it’s going to be what a lot of people do. They have their own base theme. Then every single client site or every single site that they build is from that base.

Maybe they have some custom functionality that’s specific to their business. Maybe they specialize in eCommerce or whatever. That may require a bit of a different base. But having a solid base, whatever that might be, whether it’s the WordPress base or their own custom base, you can build so much on top of that, like never before.

I think we’re gonna see a lot of that especially in the agency framework.

DP: That makes a lot of sense that if you’re an agency, that you might have a theme that you just kind of like cookie cutter, just to start off everything with and then build around that. I could definitely see that. When I’m looking for themes, I keep finding more and more that themes are actually getting in my way.

Even with the Twenty Twenty-Three Theme that I got, I still ended up like trying to strip it down to the point where some of the things, I can’t find them. I think like the border around the edges or whatever. I’m kind of looking for just a theme that’s just a blank sheet to start with and I kind of wonder if that’s maybe gonna be what themes start becoming, and then they just have these like patterns and things kind of tucked in on the side.

If you want that border, it’s gonna be tucked in on the side maybe rather than kind of baked in. I think the more we bake into themes, the more difficult it actually becomes for some users.

ND: Once you have those controls and you want to be able to to change things, the theme can definitely get in the way of doing them.

DP: So my favorite question was, I think it was Courtney Robertson asked about certification in the WordPress space. And this has been a highly contentious issue, I think in the 10 years I’ve been covering it with Torque, and I was really surprised when she asked Matt about it, that he said that he’s kind of come around on it.

Matt was one of the people who felt that the idea of certification, the idea that there’s a global body saying here’s a test to see if you’re qualified, and kind of organizing that, it just didn’t feel very WordPressy. It felt like WordPressy should be a little more self-organized. And even in general, maybe the idea of certification wasn’t really a good idea.

I got the impression during Courtney’s talk very quickly that Matt was like, I’ve come around on this and I think it’s not a terrible idea and he didn’t say that things are in the works for that, but just the idea that he’s kind of come around on it makes me wonder if there’s possibly some sort of certification process talk happening behind the scenes.

I know that recently CertifyWP.Com has popped up as one of the newest groups trying to kind of create a certification process. The whole conundrum that they’re trying to solve is these people also hire WordPressers and sometimes they just don’t know what they’re getting when they’re hiring someone.

They don’t know if they really know what they’re talking about or not and the hope is that if someone has certification in WordPress, whatever that means, that you can hire them knowing that they’ll be able to do what they say they can do. Sort of like a little blue verification badge. Mike, did you have any thoughts on that particular segment?

MD: Overall, I think certifications are actually a sign of a maturity, which is not necessarily that WordPress needs to have them, but I mean, WordPress is turning 20 next year and certifications do provide some assurance to people outside of WordPress that this person knows what they’re talking about.

For example, you mentioned that somebody may hire a WordPress developer but they don’t necessarily know if that person’s competent. And I know enough about WordPress that I’m positive I could convince a small business owner that I know it all. But the fact of the matter is I don’t, and I’m not a developer.

Right? So a certification would help to, I think, alleviate some of those concerns for people outside of WordPress.

DP: Nick, do you have any thoughts on the WordPress certification as a program that should be adopted or not?

ND: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting one. I think that you know it. One, it gives something for people to strive towards. It kind of creates this collective idea of what, it’s hard because you gotta say, what is included in that certification? What are the things that you need to know? I think in concept, I like the idea. It’s a little bit gatekeepy, but I do like the idea. 

The problem I have with it is how fast WordPress is evolving.

MD: Hmm.

ND: You know? I couldn’t do what I did last year, what I do now, even though I would be considered a “WordPress expert” last year. So I think that this is something that you kind of gotta work into that process, whether it’s a recertification or hard questions to answer. But in concept, I like the idea, but the how it would work is a bit of a challenging one.

DP: It seems in general like, a lot of things are changing really quickly with Site Editor and I wonder if two years from now it’ll feel quite as radical or if something else will come around. You know, cause you’re right, like certification a year ago versus now, it seems like totally, it doesn’t mean you know what’s happening in WordPress necessarily cause things have changed so much.

I’m hoping things settle down because it’s actually getting a little hard to write tutorials on things right now with everything changing so quickly.

ND: Yeah, and maybe this is a perfect time to revisit certifications cause you’re a hundred percent right. Once we get to the end of Phase Two, things will settle down a little bit more and it might make more sense cause we’ll have a bit more of a solid understanding of what it means to be a certified WordPress professional.

DP: There we have it, Gutenberg Phase Five, certifications. You heard it here, first. Mike and I were talking a little bit before the show about Matt’s new love of AI. Mike, you want to tell us a little bit about that?

MD: I mean, I’m also very excited about AI and Matt did seem to be pretty excited about, in particular, OpenAI. He mentioned ChatGPT, which I’m sure by now just about everybody’s heard about it. The current level of technology we have in AI takes me back to nearly a decade ago when an editorial colleague asked me if he thought we would be replaced by AI.

My answer then is the same as it is now, not completely. There’s too many judgment calls to make, and more fundamentally, you need to really understand your audience on a gut level. And I don’t think that applies to just editorial and content either. I think that applies to just about everything.

AI is an excellent tool and a lot of work can be automated and we’re rapidly gaining access to the tools we need to do it. And from my perspective, that would free me up to do what really does need human intervention, planning, strategy, and ensuring that what we’re producing is the very best it can be and really meets the reader’s needs.

However excited as I am about the potential of AI, there are a lot of social implications here that I don’t necessarily think that people that really need to be thinking about it have been. And that would be its societal implications. I’m with Bill Gates on this one. At some point I think we’re going to have to start taxing robot labor. That is a policy intervention that goes far beyond anything Matt was talking about, but eventually I think we will need to do that because we’re going to need fewer people doing fewer things. 

With that said, I mean, if you’ve looked at what I’ve heard about Open AI’s like ChatGPT can in fact generate code and sometimes the code works like somebody built a working WordPress plugin using ChatGPT. But what I’ve also heard is that the code it produces, while it may work, is not good code. Right. It does need a lot of human editing. Again, it’s not best practice. It’s not necessarily secure. It does things in ways that a human developer probably wouldn’t. 

So we definitely still need human intervention there and human oversight and to make those judgment calls. But it is a very exciting era. And I think we’re just starting to see the potential.

DP: Matt certainly seemed excited about it as I think almost every CEO is, they’re at least open to the possibilities. The same thing happened a year ago. Everybody was excited about NFTs. I think AI has a longer lasting potential. During his talk, Matt, used a line that was written in ChatGPT, kind of as a throwaway gag.

Everyone seems to be throwing that into their speeches now. But at the end, Michelle Frechette asked him about OpenVerse, which is a CreativeCommons project where you can upload images or media, music, video. And these are open for anyone to use, and WordPress has adopted OpenVerse. It’s now something that they’re trying to get people to use and people are contributing.

But the question from Michelle Frechette was saying that usage isn’t that high. People aren’t using it that much. And during his answer, Matt said some of the rules that they use for OpenVerse include things like no faces can be shown because they don’t wanna get into legal troubles and worry about releases and stuff like that.

They’re trying to keep it simple and some users do need a face or want an image of someone who has a face. So, Matt’s suggestion, coming back to AI, was talking about using AI to generate images, sort of like ThisPersonDoesNotExist.Com images to help add faces to that category.

And I know that, Mike, to what you’re saying, this is kind of a contentious thing for some people in terms of ethics, in terms of where are these images being generated from, or, you know, the source material. It’s pretty interesting and it kind of caught me off guard to see Matt really excited about it.

But I do think there are parts with ChatGPT in particular to help build maybe an article and you can go through and flesh it out more. I think there’s a lot of exciting stuff there. So I get it. We’re gonna take a final break here on Press This, and when we come back, we’re gonna wrap up our Word Around The Campfire segment and talk about Playground. So stay tuned. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. We are doing our Word Around The Campfire segment with Mike Davey from Delicious Brains and Nick Diego from WP Engine. We are mostly talking about the State of the Word address that Matt Mullenweg gave yesterday in New York. And the final thing I think I wanted to talk about was Playground.

I know both of y’all have interesting things to say with it. Nick, why don’t you just kick us off? What is Playground?

ND: Oh, that’s such a hard question. So WordPress Playground is a tool where you can spin up WordPress, right in your web browser. How it’s done is a bit beyond me technically, but I understand that it uses web assembly to create PHP and the server. Everything behind the scenes in WordPress, all within your browser.

So, it’s a pretty fascinating piece of technology. Even Matt said in the presentation, when he first saw it, he didn’t think it was possible. But it’s a really interesting way for you to spin up WordPress sites right in the browser and it really opens the doors for all sorts of interesting things.

DP: I was understanding that it even allowed you to kind of play with other people’s sites. Mike, do you know if I’m wrong on that?

MD: I’m actually not sure. I’ve only used it myself a bit in the last couple of days, but I did report on it back in the Delicious Brain Bites newsletter in early October, and I was impressed by it then and I’m even more impressed that it’s already ready for primetime.

My thought when I first heard about it was, that’s really neat. I can’t wait to see where it is next year. I never expected it to be ready this early. Now it is still experimental and in development, but there’s a lot you can do with it. This is another area that’s gonna be really helpful for people who are just getting started on their WordPress journey.

You can play and experiment as much as you like, and the only investment is time. You don’t even need to log in, like you do not need to be logged into WordPress org tag. That’s the playground. If you just type in WordPress playground into your search engine, go to that link. You can start right away. You can get right into the backend of the site and see what does what. 

ND: Well, one of the things I think is also really cool is that if you want to demo something in WordPress, instead of having to have a user, install a local version of WordPress and download the various plugins they need to demo. You can set up an entire WordPress site, all preconfigured what you want to have in it, and then that user can just hop in and start experiencing WordPress with your predefined configuration.

So, new users, great. Showcasing products and features, great. All sorts of cool things that you could do. So you could take something like ACF, Advanced Custom Fields, and have a Playground instance with it. You go in there, you could play around with ACF, learn how to use it, all that sort of thing, all within the browser.

So there’s a lot of really interesting implications for this technology.

DP: Playground is being marketed as a WordPress experience that runs totally in your browser. And as Nick is saying, you can use it to embed a real WordPress site in like a tutorial or a course, or you can use it as part of your pitch when you’re sending something to your client you can kind of put it in there. And then also in the description it says, experiment with an anonymous WordPress website, which is where I was kind of getting the vibe that maybe you could kind of plug in someone’s URL and just kind of play around with it and see if you can modify it and learn how it was made.

I was suggested to try using Playground specifically, cause I have a weird bug that I can’t tell if it’s in the theme or if it’s something I did and someone was like, “Oh, well, very easily you could just put your site into playground and try switching the theme up a little bit.” It’s sort of like a Local install, but maybe even easier.

Is it sort of like Local in a way? Is it possible you’re gonna be fitting that need?

ND: There are echoes of Local in Playground. However, I mean, Local’s obviously a much more advanced tool. All the integrations with Flywheel and WP Engine and all that kind of stuff. But there’s definitely some echoes between the two.

DP: That’s all we have time for on this episode of Press This. I want to say thank you so much to Nick and Mike, we will drop links to your projects in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode of Press This, I’d recommend checking out our recent interview with Brian Gardner. He did a predictions about themes and trends for 2023, talking about what we think are gonna happen both with like, themes in general, like how websites look, but also themes like how themes are being used.

So if you’re interested in that, check out that episode. I also recently talked with Sé Reed and Courtney Robertson on the WP Community Collective, a group that is seeking to fund WordPress contributions and initiatives. You can hear that on the Torque Social Hour Livestream. You can find that on YouTube or on TorqueMag.io

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

The post Press This: Word Around the Campfire December 2022 appeared first on Torque.

The days are getting shorter, the cold is setting in, and family is coming into town. It is the perfect time to settle in beside the fire with a nice cup of hot chocolate and catch up on podcasts. 

This year, Torque’s own Doc Pop took over the WordPress community podcast, Press This. Doc talked to experts from all the community about everything from WordCamps to Gutenberg and beyond.

We’ve compiled a few excellent episodes to get you started, but if you’re interested in the entire catalog, you can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Happy listening! 

WordPress Halloween Horror Stories

Powered by RedCircle

Turn on all the lights and grab a friend, because we are starting off with a spine-chilling episode. Settle in for three horrifying stories of sites gone wrong!

We begin with Chris Weigman, an Engineering Manager at WP Engine. Chris tells a tale of not one but two features breaking on a plugin update release day. This is something that keeps developers up at night, so listen with caution! 

Next, Derek Ashauer talks about a time a site he created for a client completely crashed on a big sale day. This one is particularly interesting for fans of early 2000s pop/punk. 

Lastly, host Doc Pop discusses the horrors of broken images in a blog post. This episode definitely isn’t for the faint of heart! Don’t say we didn’t warn you. 

Don’t Be Scared It’s Just Headless WordPress

Powered by RedCircle

Now that your heart is racing from the last episode, let’s go to something more calming. Our guest, Fran Agulto, Developer Advocate at WP Engine, is here to assuage any fears you may have about Headless WordPress. 

Though the concept can seem daunting, Fran walks through who it works for and who should maybe stay away. This is a great listen if you have clients who are uncertain about making the switch, or if you yourself have some doubts. 

WordPress Nonprofits and Giving Tuesday

Powered by RedCircle

The end of the year is a great time to think about giving back. On this episode, GiveWP co-founder, Matt Cromwell, looks at what it takes to run a successful nonprofit site on WordPress and ways we can all give back. 

Matt has been in the WordPress nonprofit space for a long time and has great advice on how to support your nonprofit clients so they can continue to help the causes they support. 

Beyond Site Editing: What’s Next for 6.2?

Powered by RedCircle

Though WordPress 6.1 just came out, it is never too late to start looking toward the future of WordPress. In this episode, Doc is joined by Product Liaison at Automattic, Anne McCarthy. Anne takes a look at some of the coolest features that shipped with 6.1 as well as what might be coming in next year in 6.2. 

She discusses style variations, block themes, and the Full Site Editing Outreach program. If you’ve been confused about the change in vernacular from Full Site Editing to Site Editing, this is the show for you. 

WordPress Themes for 2023

Powered by RedCircle

For the final episode, Doc and guest Brian Gardner, a Developer Advocate, Principal at WP Engine look at WordPress theme design trends for 2023, including candy pastels, creative typography, and radiant gradients.

Brian has been a long-time theme author and really has his pulse on what people want to see in web design and what we might be moving away from. This is a great episode if you’re looking to up your design game, or if you just want to know how the web might look in 2023. 

Happy Listening!

No matter your focus in WordPress, there is a Press This episode for you. We guarantee with each episode you will laugh a little, learn a lot, and feel inspired to keep making beautiful WordPress sites. 

There is a new episode every week so make sure you subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

The post 5 Press This Episodes to Listen to Over Break appeared first on Torque.