Tag: Press This: The WordPress Community Podcast

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

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app, or you can download episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

If you’ve ever contributed to an open-source project, you know that it’s all about collaboration and innovation, but there’s a little-known challenge that many developers might face in ensuring their plugins stay on the right side of the GPL, GNU, General Public License. It’s not just a matter of compliance. It’s about preserving the spirit of open source. 

So today we have a special guest, Jeff Paul, the director of open source at 10up, who will share a game-changing solution he presented at WordCamp US this year. Imagine having a tool that scans your codebase automatically to guarantee your plugin’s GPL compatibility, even as you add new features and dependencies.

That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. But before we dive into it, Jeff, can you tell us your WordPress origin story?

Jeff Paul: Sure. I don’t know that I have the exact year. It was probably early 2000s. I had a personal site that was on a former CMS, I think it was called Geeklog. And between that and my hosting provider at the time, and who knows how many other factors, there was, you know, a collapse of content in CMS. 

And so I was just searching for something to replace that with at the time. I found, WordPress and it worked for what I needed. You know, didn’t go down the path of building a CMS myself, which seems to be a good origin story for a lot of folks. But that was, call it, I don’t know, ‘04 to ‘07, somewhere in that range, but I didn’t, kind of cross the divide to contributing until the WordPress 4.7 release when I joined the release squad there with Helen Hou-Sandí and Aaron Jorbin. So, I spent many years being a consumer of the project, and it wasn’t until quite some time down the road that I became a contributor and have been, you know, continuing on that path since then. Well, you know, dual consumer and contributor at this point.

DP: And you’ve been a very active contributor to WordPress core as well. 10up maintains dozens of plugins in the plugin repository, including ElasticPress, Distributor, ClassifAI. These are all available on the wordpress.org repository, and they’re maintained on GitHub, publicly and using open-source practices. 

You are very familiar with the topic we’re going to dive into. Why don’t we just start off with the WordPress repository, like, the WordPress plugin repository? Tell us quickly, what is the WordPress repository and what are the rules to be able to upload anything to it?

JP: Sure. So the WordPress repository is hosted by WordPress.org, the open source project, separate from WordPress.com, separate from any other host in the ecosystem, separate from, third-party plugin companies or distributors. And it is what is directly linked or tied into every WordPress install out there. When somebody is in the WordPress admin, is searching for a plugin or theme, those searches are through that WordPress.org plugin repository, and theme repository, available in the WordPress admin. And similarly on WordPress.org. Effectively the same search, same content, is available there. 

In terms of getting something listed there, the wordpress.org plugin review team has a set of, detailed guidelines of do’s and don’ts for plugin developers. And then there is an actual submission workflow to go through to do that initial submission to the wordpress.org plugin repository. Once that is approved, there is an SVN repo that is created for your plugin. And, you know, any updates, releases, etc. are pushed there to SVN. And that’s kind of where everything currently lives and breathes for things that are available for search on WordPress.org or within the WordPress admin.

DP: One of the first rules I believe is that whatever you put into the WordPress repository needs to be compliant with the GPL, including fonts and images, not just the code. Is that correct?

JP: Correct. Right. So quite literally, the first rule of the plugin team is that the plugins in their entirety must be GPL-compatible. That is the same license that WordPress follows, and as you mentioned, code, images, and third-party libraries, all have to be GPL-compatible. It doesn’t have to necessarily be the actual, you know, GPLv2 license, there are others that are GPL compatible, but yeah, fonts, images, third-party libraries, dependencies, all that has to be GPL compatible and not just the code that a plugin developer writes, right? All those other things also need to be GPL-compatible.

DP: And just so we don’t keep listeners waiting, like, we could just jump into it. Your talk was about how to be able to check for GPL compatibility using GitHub actions. Can you walk us through that process?

JP: Yeah, so this stems a bit from my role as the director of open source at 10Up. It’s perhaps not something that an everyday plugin author of, you know, a single plugin or even multiple ones might be aware of, or, bother them. But I think at some point I had almost quite literally that wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “I don’t know if I know for certain that you know, all the images, all the third party dependencies, all the fonts, et cetera, are GPL-compatible and trying to figure out a way at scale for us at 10up where we’ve got, like you mentioned, dozens of plugins that are available on the wordpress.org repository or on GitHub as well. The source there. 

I didn’t want to have to go through all of that with a fine-toothed comb and have to check any upstream dependencies that we were using for the plugins and figure out, you know, how are these licensed. That could be a pain in the butt for a single plugin, let alone multiple. And through some, searching online, I identified that there were some tools, some GitHub actions that could be used to help effectively automate that process so that, you know, not just a single one-time scan of a repository to say, yes, you’re compatible or no, you’re not, but continued scans so that any future bug fixes, enhancements, et cetera, that might either add a new dependency or perhaps bump a dependency in your plugin that perhaps happened to change how something was licensed, being able to check that ongoing, and do that kind of first-time pass through was something I was trying to figure out so that it wouldn’t become just a manual, intensive process and kind of like an ongoing nightmare to ensure that, that compatibility. 

So yeah, I mean, I think the initial concern that I had was, I didn’t know that—I had no way to know that some feature we add, if we’re including a new dependency, that that was GPL-compatible, and then realized there could have been an even worse scenario where we had plugins that had been released, iterated upon that already had incompatibilities within their software.

And so that was kind of the first problem I wanted to try and solve. That first initial scan, right? Are our, you know, individual plugins, and are all the ones that 10up supports, truly compatible with the license we declared? And hopefully, cross our fingers they were. And then, you know, from there, that continued check of making sure that future PRs, be they from my team and the open source practice at 10up, broadly with other 10upers contributing to the projects, or just really anybody in the community, ensuring that those maintained the licensing that we stated in the plugins themselves.

DP: And just to clarify here, if you didn’t, if you found through this, that there was, uh, some existing dependency or something in there that, that was not compliant, is the ramification just sort of, shaming from the community or is there possibly punitive damage that you could suffer for not following the rules?

JP: So I’m not a lawyer, right? So, you know, I do not have a lawyer hat on giving this comment, so, you know, not valid legal advice, but the approach that I took as I was running these scans on our plugins, because again, I didn’t know, I was actually quite nervous running all of these, what the results were going to be.

My plan was if I found that there was a plugin that was using something that wasn’t GPL-compatible, that the best approach would be to either remove that dependency, swap it out for something else, effectively clear through that, whatever the issue was and quickly release a new version, right?

There wasn’t much that I felt could be done for what had already been published and released. From my perspective, none of it would have been done in a manner of purposely trying to circumvent licensing. it would have just been, you know, at some point along the line, human error, somewhat akin to a security issue that gets reported to a plugin author. Like, the best approach there is to work on a remediation and quickly get a release out so that folks that are staying current on plugins are in that safer state, be it a security issue or in this case, a licensing concern. Certainly, if there happened to be a plugin that was significantly revenue generating, and if there perhaps could be, reasons to show that it was a known mistake to have something off-licensed, aside, I don’t believe that anybody in the space is doing that on purpose, but I think the only ones that would potentially be at legal risk would be ones that are significantly revenue generating, that would be a target for licensing.

So yeah, I think long story short, if somebody runs a scan and finds an issue in their existing code base, I think the best approach is really that issue a release, an updated version, you know, call out in the change log, call out in the release notes what was changed and why, be transparent about that. But at that point, that’s really, I think the best that a plugin author can do in that case. Fortunately for 10up’s plugins, we didn’t run into that scenario. Everything was, fortunately, compatible, and I would hope that the large majority of folks going down this path, setting up some automation to give them that level of comfort, would have a similar experience. 

It may be a little bit of a nervous, anxious wait for a couple of seconds or a minute for the GitHub actions to run. But, you know, once it shows that everything passes, I think most people would probably end up in that state.

DP: Speaking of getting comfortable, we’re going to take a short break. So sit back and relax, and we’ll be back after the short commercial break with more of our interview with Jeff Paul, the director of open-source initiatives at 10up about keeping your plugins GPL-compliant. Stay tuned for more after this short break.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m Doc. I’m talking to Jeff Paul about, using GitHub actions to make sure that your code, your plugins are GPL-compliant. Before the break, we kind of dived into this a little bit and we talked about the ramifications if you aren’t fully compliant. And I guess I wanted to get back to this specific thing. There are GitHub actions that anyone can create. But Jeff, you mentioned in your WordCamp talk that you use the official GitHub action, I think, with, some small changes. Can you tell us what is the name of the action that people should be looking for to be able to do this?

JP: Sure. That’s it’s a dependency review action. So GitHub.com, slash actions, slash dependency, hyphen review, hyphen action. Hopefully, the transcript gets that correctly. If there’s any problem finding that I do have notes about this up on my site, on a post that covers the talk. So, there are links available, but if you search for dependency review action in the GitHub action marketplace, you will hopefully find the official one that I used, and it does more than just check plugin dependencies. It will check more than just the licenses. It can also check for vulnerabilities and other things in your plugin dependencies. But the only thing that I use it for, the core thing I use it for, is checking for invalid licenses in the dependencies within our plugins.

DP: And this is an action that you can set up what type of GPL you want to be following. You can include a license and it checks against that. And there’s also the possibility if you maintain, let’s say, dozens of plugins, that you can still source to that same thing. You can have all of those, plugins that you maintain still coming to that one directory, so you don’t have to go and, and update that each time, right?

JP: Correct. Yeah. I see you sat through my talk at WordCamp US, kudos to you for being in the audience and awake and listening, or you caught it on YouTube or WordPress.tv, but yes, there are kind of two standard flows that I would expect folks to follow here.

One, a plugin author that is responsible for one or a very small number of plugins, or somebody who has more on the one-to-n scale, they have that many plugins they are supporting. So for folks that just have a single one, the GitHub action, as you have it defined, can effectively within that workflow file where you effectively are calling that dependency review action, and having it scan through your repository, there are two, environmental variables or parameters that you can provide. That action one is allow licenses and, the corollary to that is deny licenses. You can’t do both at the same time. and the approach that I took was to go with the allow licenses as opposed to the deny licenses. The thinking there was… I would rather have a case where I forgot to include a GPL-compatible license in the allow license list and get effectively a false positive, right? Like get a dependency flagged as not compatible with my licenses because its license was just something I forgot to add in the list, versus if I use the deny licenses list and I forgot to deny a license that I don’t want, then that could have meant a dependency would get through, would not be caught by this check.

So, my extremely strong recommendation is to go with that allow licenses list. And in the case where somebody is maintaining a single plugin, is to just use that parameter and that list of licenses in your workflow files. So, for 10up, for our plugins, that’s the dot GitHub directory, and then the workflows subdirectory there. And then we have the dependency review workflow that calls that dependency review action, has the allow licenses list, you can pull up my presentation either on my site or find the talk online and see the list of licenses that we have. You can also explore any of 10up’s repositories on GitHub and see the licenses we explore. 

Our workflow files are fairly well documented and kind of explain how we got to identifying what we felt were compatible licenses with our plugins. So folks would be welcome to use the list that we have, would be welcome to use a subset of that list, would be welcome to do their own research, perhaps to feel that level of comfort. But we did do fairly lengthy research to make sure that what we were using in our allow licenses list actually is compatible with what we declare. And pretty much by default for 10up, we use, GPLv2 or later, and so all of the licenses that we list are GPLv2-compatible, specifically.

So that’s the case for, again, the plugin author with a single plugin they’re maintaining. As you mentioned, for the case where somebody has more than one, multiple ones, you can have a separate license policy file that effectively has all of those licenses declared in it. And then you reference that config file, that license policy file, in the workflow in your plugins, so that, as you mentioned, you really at that point only have one place you need to maintain the list of compatible licenses. If there happens to be, you know, a new open-source, initiative-approved license that happens to be GPLv2-compatible for us, right? If a new one comes on the scene, then that could be added to the list, or perhaps if one needs to be removed for whatever reasons, you don’t have to do that in dozens of locations. You do it in one location, and then all of your workflow files that are referencing that config are updated immediately, using that new list of licenses.

DP: This is all automated, so if someone does a pull request, it does that just for you. Right?

JP: Correct, correct. So, as we create our workflow files in our repositories, we do have a trigger on a pull request. So, you could also perhaps have it set up to run on a CRON schedule, you could have it run weekly or monthly, but really, once you do that first run, you scan the entire code base of the dependencies, and it’s really going forward, you really only need to check those pull requests that are coming in, You could probably also check individual commits if you’re not using a fairly strict system of requiring PRs on whatever your default or stable branches are for your plugins.

So, there could be additional triggers that people might want to use. For 10up, we tend to fairly strictly require PRs to develop and trunk branches so that we can use this action reliably and know that any changes to dependencies that introduce a new one or bump a version that happens to change the license will get caught by this. So yeah, we use, we pivot or trigger off of pull requests, but depending on how strict folks are, you might, perhaps have that check individual commits to a specific branch, or even run on a schedule daily, weekly, monthly, just to have that comfort knowing that your code is still passing, that there aren’t any licenses that are incompatible with, in this case, GPLv2 for 10up.

DP: We’re going to take another short break here. When we come back, we’ll wrap up our conversation with Jeff Paul about GPL licenses and maybe pick up on anything we didn’t touch upon earlier. So stay tuned for more after this short break.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. We are wrapping up the show and we’re going to switch gears up a little bit. There has been some talk lately about the review process on the plugin repository and, just basically stating this fact that it’s, it’s a little slower than it’s been in the past.

Some people are saying they know that it’s taking, you know, months to get something reviewed where I think I’ve seen it peak at maybe four weeks in most of my years in WordPress. So, Jeff, I know that they’ve talked about maybe some changes they’re going to make to that. Can you tell us what the team is working on now?

JP: Sure. Yeah. And I’ve, you know, I amplify what you said. I think historically, I’ve seen all the things that I’ve submitted have been under two weeks and have been much faster than what is usually reported. And it’s up at around 88 days or something unfortunate for everybody involved. 

I think there’s been some turnover on that team. Some very experienced senior knowledge was lost. And the folks that have graciously stepped in to help fill that void, I think are still getting to the point where they can have that same sort of throughput on processing plugins and reviewing those initial submissions. And there is work they’re doing to try and automate some of that. So some of the things that, you know, computers are better at that humans perhaps aren’t, perhaps like running WordPress coding standards and honing in where there are really critical errors reported, right? Instead of a human having to go through and process those things, having a plugin checker that runs and checks for things that can be automated and helping that plugin review team just get a quick initial pause of like, are things that are automated passing? If so, then, okay, dive into your human review and speed things along. If things have been reported, being automated in nature that are not passing, then it’s, I think, a quicker response to that plugin developer of, hey, we’ve identified these initial things in our scan, you know, please, resolve those and then submit an updated zip file, to get things back on course. 

So I know that they are working to add some automation in, I think the more they can do to help them on that path, the better, just because at this point, well up over a thousand plugins, the backlog is lengthy, and again, not helping anybody there. So yes, they are working on automations. I know they want to do more, and I think if that’s an area where somebody is particularly gifted at automations and wants to contribute, I think the plugin review team would love to have some help on that front. So certainly reach out in Slack if that’s the case.

DP: And speaking of reaching out, if folks have questions, about your talk that you gave at WordCampUS, or just some of the projects that 10uP is working on in the open source space, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you?

JP: Sure. So my website is jeffpaul.com. I’ve got my presentation up there, if you just search for GPL, it’s probably going to be one of the first posts in any case. Otherwise, my email is jeff.paul@10up.com, my work email, um, and then pretty much every social network. WordPress.org, GitHub, Twitter, slash X, and I am @Jeff Paul, and y’all can find me on the social networks that way.

DP: Similarly, if listeners want to find examples of maybe the 10uP work on GitHub, I’m assuming that’s just 10up on GitHub?

JP: Correct, yeah, github.com/10up. All of the repositories for our plugins are up there in public. Our team tracks new issues and PRs closely. Those all get piped into our Slack channel, so anything, any questions folks have, any discussions, they open there. Our team should be fairly responsive to those, but if not, you know, hitting me up on, on WordPress Slack, on Twitter via email, any of those work. I’m always happy to chat open source with folks in the community.

DP: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jeff, it has been really great talking to you and I learned a lot about the actions that GitHub has for pull requests and automating that experience. That’s very helpful. 

If you missed it last week’s episode of Press This, we talked to Carmen Johnson about steps that you can take to prepare your site for the end of life of MySQL 5.7 and how to get ready for MySQL 8. So that’s a really good episode you can check out, and we have plenty more. You can find those on TorqueMag.io if you want to find transcribed versions. Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can follow our adventures on Twitter, at the Torque Mag. 

You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app, or you can download episodes directly from WMR.fm. I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on PressThis.

The post Press This: Are Your WordPress Plugins GPL-compatible? 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 at Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm.  

Now, on October 31st, MySQL will end support for MySQL version 5.7, and although this date happens to fall on Halloween, there’s no reason for WordPress users to be…scared of this upgrade. It is a big upgrade, and as I understand, 75 percent of WordPress sites are still using MySQL version 5.7. 

Today we’re going to be talking to Carmen Johnson, a platform product manager at WP Engine, about everything you need to know to upgrade your MySQL database, Carmen, how are you doing today?

Carmen Johnson: I am doing fantastic, Doc, thanks for asking.

DP: Awesome, let’s kick this off. I’d like to hear your WordPress origin story before we get into MySQL.

CJ: Definitely, happy to share it. I have to say it’s not super interesting or fascinating, but, my WordPress origin story actually began at WP Engine. So, I had a background in tech. I worked at several different tech companies in Texas, and WP Engine landed on my radar through just folks in my network who I trusted and I’ve worked with previously who just had nothing but the best things to say about WP Engine and our leadership in the WordPress community. So I just wanted to come on over and taste the Kool-Aid, as you can say. And I’ve been doing that for almost five years now.

DP: Awesome, well, congrats. We’re happy to have you in the space and on the show to tell us about WordPress’s upcoming database switch. Is there like a name for this? Is it, I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but it’s not like MySQL 5.7-ageddon or something, right?

CJ: No, no, no, nothing, nothing that, intense. No, it’s just, you know, part of the standard end-of-life upgrade process that many different WordPress technologies have, and it just so happens to be the time for MySQL version 5.7 to have its own end-of-life process.

DP: I’m not sure if all my stats were correct. So feel free to correct me if I got anything wrong. But as I’m looking around, it looks like about 75 percent of WordPress sites are still running MySQL version 5.7. I guess one of the things I wanted to know was—is a MySQL database sort of like WordPress in that I should just normally be keeping it up to date? Like, I always tell people, be on the current version of WordPress, if you can. Is a database something different where people are less likely to be switching all the time?

CJ: Not at all, and if anything, I’d say it’s probably even more critical that you keep your database versions up to date. You know, you’re hosting all of your critical site, housing, rather, all of your critical site information there. So it’s very important that you keep your database versions up to date, whether it’s through, a managed host or D-I-Y, it doesn’t really matter, you know, the, the method, but definitely ensuring that your database is going to be secure and that your information that you’re storing there is going to be secure is super-critical.

DP: And with that, why is MySQL end of life-ing an older version like 5.7?

CJ: Essentially, as I alluded to earlier, it’s, it’s just a part of the lifecycle of technologies like these. So as new technology enhancements are coming out, as we’re discovering more ways that people can, bad actors, rather, can try and infiltrate systems. You know, security remains top of mind and a top priority with different technologies like MySQL. So, with the end of life of 5.7, the newer version, MySQL 8, which has been out for a few years now, definitely incorporates a lot of those different security and feature enhancements that are just going to ensure that your sites are secure and are functioning as optimally as they can.

DP: You mentioned MySQL 8 has been out for a few years. MySQL 8.1 is even out now, is that still like a bleeding edge release, or is that like a stable release that people should be going to?

CJ: Yeah, great question. MySQL 8.1 was released back in July of this year, and as you called it, a bleeding edge release, it is still very, very early in its life cycle. It has not yet reached long-term support, and what long-term support generally means is that any bugs or fixes that need to be addressed have, for the most part, done that. The version has been out for a while. It’s been fairly widely adopted and is stable. MySQL 8.1, with it having just been released a few months ago, hasn’t quite reached that status. So, for that reason, MySQL 8 is the only version that’s fully supported and is in that long-term support status.

DP: So if a WordPress user is going to be upgrading from 5.7 or whatever version they’re on to 8, what steps should they be taking? Like what can you lay out for them for a path to MySQL 8?

CJ: Yeah, so, first thing, you’re definitely gonna want to spin up some sort of dev environment, to test your sites and your database against that new version of MySQL 8.0. And there are many ways you could do this. With WP Engine specifically, you can leverage our Local dev testing environment, and we have lots of documentation available in our support center that can help walk you through exactly how to test your site, the key things you should be looking out for, specific errors and different things that can trigger, how to debug your different PHP and other file types to find errors or different things that may indicate incompatibility with the new version.

Thank you. so that, you know, you could address those and ensure that your sites are ready to go. But even with that testing, whether you’re with a host or not that is, that is a managed host that is providing those capabilities for you, it’s gonna be really critical that you ensure that your sites are gonna be happy and are gonna perform well on the new version before performing an upgrade, just to prevent breakage or any sort of critical site failures, due to not testing.

DP: You mentioned if you’re a WP Engine customer there’s Local support, but Local is available outside of WP Engine. And as I understand it, it’s still like the go-to for local dev testing, right? Like whether or not you’re a WP Engine customer, you probably are going to spin up a local instance to test out the new database.

CJ: 100%, great call out. Yeah, regardless if you’re with WP Engine or not, Local does remain the standard for dev testing, and you don’t have to be a WP Engine customer to leverage that.

DP: And so does that also kind of imply that—this is a newbie question, as we were saying before the show, I know enough to know not to upgrade my own database on WordPress—but is a local environment the most convenient way to test it? Is it the best way or I guess what I’m getting at is, I would sometimes just spin up a new online staging environment maybe, and try something like that, which I assume is bad practice, but I was hoping you could just kind of tell me why.

CJ: Yeah, that’s a great clarification, and I guess, to be clear here when we say, you know, a local testing environment, you know, for many folks, you know, being able to pull down your site into your machine and, and test it out, um, locally, you know, literally, uh, locally on your machine, is a safer way to test. You’re just ensuring that there’s no impact on your site, to your prod environments, you’re able to test a wide variety of different scenarios without any potential impacts to your live production environments. But that said, if you wanted to really ensure that your sites are going to behave well in those live prod environments, you may have the option to spin up an actual test server, that’s kind of a production environment, but you’ve got your staging and your dev sites there that you could test against. And that just gives you a little bit more, confidence, I guess, that you’re going to have more of that one-to-one experience versus with Local, there is the potential that there may be certain results within a local environment that aren’t replicated in a production environment.

So it really just depends on the user and your site and what you’re needing to accomplish. So whether that be testing on a production server within a staging or dev environment, or testing locally on your machine, the main goal there is just to ensure that you are following some testing steps ahead of making that switch to a newer version.

DP: You know, with that, Carmen, I think we are going to take a short break and when we come back, we’re going to pick up this conversation on what devs need to know after they’ve done their testing to get ready for MySQL 8, as well as maybe some other factors about improvements that they might get from this new version, and some other general questions. So stay tuned. We’re going to take a short break and we’ll be right back.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I’m talking to Carmen Johnson, a platform product manager at WP Engine about MySQL end-of-life-ing, MySQL v5.7, and what developers need to know. I think right before the break, we were saying that if you are getting ready to upgrade, the first thing you should do is spin up another environment and test out the v5.8 or whichever version you’re going to switch to. Test it out. Make sure everything’s working. I guess we didn’t mention it, but a little spoiler, that includes making sure your plugins are working, you know, not just visually, the site’s loading, but sort of testing out everything. Once people have tested out their functionality, Carmen, what should they be doing next?

CJ: Yeah, great question. So once you’ve completed your testing cycles and you’re confident that your sites are ready for the upgrade, then it’s just preparing for the upgrade itself, and that could look very different depending on how you’re hosting your sites. 

So, for instance, if you’re a WP Engine customer, you’re hosting your sites with WP Engine, we’re handling that upgrade process on your behalf. If you are a customer of ours, you’ve probably already received communications from us about this upgrade wave, and, that’s already underway, and we are actually handling getting your sites from MySQL 5.7 on to 8. 0, for you. If you are not hosting with us and you’re leveraging a D-I-Y do-it-yourself solution, you’ll of course need to handle that upgrade yourself to avoid putting yourself at risk of security breaches—and there is public documentation available from MySQL to help you through that process.But in either case, it’s something that you’re going to need to do to avoid being on a version that’s no longer officially supported. 

If you are not doing DIY, but you’re just on a different managed host outside of WP Engine, I’d highly recommend that you check in with your host as soon as possible to learn about their plans for this upgrade, as it is impacting all WordPress users regardless of hosting provider.

DP: I know that downtime, you should be prepared for downtime if you’re doing an upgrade like this. And I guess part of that kind of factors in, even if you did your testing, maybe something still happens. So just be, you know, be ready for downtime. But if I’m a WP Engine customer or another host that will do a similar upgrade for me in the back, kind of like invisibly, right? 

And they’re handling it for me. Is there a chance that I’ll still have the downtime?

CJ: Yeah, that’s a really great question, and it is definitely something to prepare for, as you will certainly have downtime—with the upgrade comes a database restart. So regardless of your host or DIY or what have you, you are going to experience downtime on your sites as your databases are going down on 5.7 and coming back up on the the newer version. 

The good thing for WP Engine customers is that we are timing these upgrade cycles with your standard maintenance window. So, depending on where you’re located, the upgrade itself would be happening during your already communicated maintenance window. So, it wouldn’t be any, unexpected downtime outside of those maintenance windows. But if you’re not with a host and you don’t have that set up, you could expect to need to put up some sort of maintenance paid or something for your customers to ensure that they’re not having a bad experience as those databases are restarting.

DP: So let’s talk about the good news here. Assuming this gets a whole bunch of people, 75 percent of WordPressers, hopefully, will move over to version 8.0 or higher. What benefits can they get out of a database upgrade like this?

CJ: Yeah, there’s definitely some good news there, as there are some noted advantages with MySQL 8 specifically—specifically some performance and functionality enhancements like enhanced security with OpenSSL improvements, a new default authentication method, the introduction of SQL roles, breaking up the super privileged password strength enhancements, a lot of technical jargon that basically just equates to really enhanced security, with MySQL 8.0, as well as improved performance. There are enhancements to NODB, which deliver better read, write, workload performance, IO bound workloads, basically ensuring that the NODB buffer is performing well. And including things that devs love, like improved SQL code organization and readability, with the introduction of some new features, like SQL window functions and common table expressions. There’s also some enhanced JSON capability in there, and just overall reliability, that comes with MySQL 8 specifically.

So definitely some good things to come along with just knowing that you’re going to be on the most secure version of MySQL.

DP: Yeah, I feel like largely what I’m hearing here is security. You did briefly mention that there’s gonna be a couple new ways that coders are working. And so this kind of standardizes towards those new ways so that, developers will have an easier time using MySQL, but largely what I’m hearing is SSL upgrades and changing how permissions are broken up for users.

I didn’t know about the super-user thing. That sounds a little sketch. Like, if that gets hacked, that sounds scary. But, anyway, it sounds largely like what we’re talking about, aren’t your typical speed improvements, although there might be some, it sounds largely like this is a big security upgrade for MySQL.

CJ: Definitely, definitely. All signs are pointing to that. This is mainly a lot of security enhancements that are coming with this new version.

DP: I was kind of wondering, I don’t know if you’ll be able to tell me this, but as I’m kind of learning about this, cause this is not, I don’t talk about MySQL databases often. I just keep staring at this number that makes no sense to me. And Carmen, I hope you can explain it to me. We’re, we’re just seeing like all these releases, 5.1, 5.2, 5.7, and then just this gap to 8.0, and then 8.1, and it’s all so different than how WordPress works. The releases seem like years apart. And I don’t know, do you understand the naming convention and the numbering convention and why we went from 5.7 to 8?

CJ: Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s actually a common one that we at WP Engine do get a lot. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to disappoint you and tell you that I don’t have a good answer for it, other than MySQL just didn’t release any new versions between 5.7 and 8.0. Obviously there are sub-versions, so 5.7.x, but there were no other major versions of releases between 5.7 and 8.0. If anyone does know the answer to that question of why they skipped so many levels before eight, I’d love to hear it.

DP: We’d have to look into the Oracle. But if it was, that was a pun by the way. 

CJ: Yeah

DP: At least they’re not doing like what Apple’s doing where it’s like, iPhone nine, iPhone X, iPhone XR, right?

CJ: Yeah. There’s at least some rhyme and reason.

DP: Yeah. Okay, so we are going to take one more short break and when we come back, we’re going to pick up our conversation with Carmen about MySQL 8 and the end of life of 5.7, so stay tuned for more after this short break.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, talking today to Carmen Johnson, a platform product manager at WP Engine, about MySQL end of life for 5.7 and the advantages of moving to MySQL 8. And also, if you happen to be, because I’m sure there’s someone out there that’s just, every time we say MySQL, it could be also “M Y S Q L” right? Or My-S-Q-L. Apparently, that’s what Oracle says on their site is the standardized pronunciation, but after saying my-sequel for so long, it’s hard for me to get used to any other way to say it.

CJ: I have the same problem.

DP: Kind of along those lines, I was actually wondering Carmen, we’ve talked about your advice for people who are going to be upgrading and about the benefits of the new version. And I mentioned earlier in the show that I’m kind of used to the way WordPress does things, and I forgot to look it up before the show, but I know that WordPress supports practically all versions of WordPress, like there’s a big brouhaha when they’re talking about stopping support for WordPress 3 or something for like really old versions. And MySQL does it totally the opposite way. We’re talking about, the last major version before 8.0 was 5. 7, and they’re getting ready to end-of-life that last version. So they’re not supporting multiple major versions, like WordPress is.

And I guess, to get to my question, Carmen, I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on how you thought they handled this, you know, did they communicate it to the users well? And what you think about their decision to end of life the previous version, which was admittedly seven years old?

CJ: So, you know, in my personal opinion, I don’t feel that they were as vocal, to be frank, about the upcoming end of life as they could have been. But to be fair, there are many implementations of MySQL outside of Oracle’s officially supported version. So, you know, to be able to capture that broad of a swath and run that program essentially, efficiently. It may have just been something that they weren’t able to do. But speaking specifically of Oracle, I do think they could have been a bit more vocal. Granted, you did mention that this version, 8.0, has been out for quite some time now, but with an end-of-life, especially one that comes with potential security risk, significant security risk, for people remaining on this older version, I do think that there, there was an opportunity for them to be a bit more vocal in encouraging users to adopt MySQL 8, earlier.

DP: And this would go towards, I guess, people who are hosting kind of on like not managed hosts and they just maybe have this kind of long-running site that maybe they’re keeping their WordPress version up to date all the time, but they haven’t updated, you know, anything else. anything external, like their database, they haven’t updated it, let’s say in, you know, six or seven years.

So these would be the sort of people that, if they didn’t hear about it, and their host isn’t upgrading them as a kind of a privilege of being on that hosted, managed server, then they might run into security issues. Maybe not right away, not like November 1st, but you know, next year, they still probably don’t know that there’s a new version and that MySQL 5.7 is no longer supported. So these are the users that you’re saying maybe would be at risk because they didn’t hear about it.

CJ: Yeah, absolutely. and I’m actually gonna let you in on a little secret here since you did mention it. you know, There may be people that are using versions of MySQL even older than 5.7. Versions that have already been end of life, and they just don’t realize it because they’re not working with the host or some provider that’s able to help them keep those versions up to date.

So yeah, this is definitely a risk that is present if you’re hosting on your own or D-I-Y and, you know, just aren’t tied into the MySQL community in that way.

DP: Well, I think on that note, Carmen, that’s all the questions I had. If someone listening to this has another question about the upgrade or just how WP Engine is handling it, is there a place that you recommend that they reach out or look for more thoughts?

CJ: Absolutely. So we’ve definitely curated a lot of content in our support center in helping prepare people for this switch to MySQL 8. So you could go to wpengine.com backslash support backslash prepare for MySQL 8. And we have a plethora of information there around what exactly this end of life is, what it means for you, how to test your site, and as always, as a customer, you can definitely reach out to our support team if you have any specific questions about your site or need assistance with testing, or just want to know about the upgrade itself.

DP: Well, I really appreciate you joining us today, Carmen. if you enjoyed this episode, I wanted to recommend that you check out more episodes on torquemag.io. We do our best to put up transcribed versions of each episode, so you can dive in there.

You can also subscribe to Press This on your favorite podcasting app. Mine is Overcast. Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can follow our adventures on Twitter at the Torque mag, or you can go to torquemag.io, as I mentioned earlier, to find previous episodes.

You can subscribe on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download directly from WMR.fm. I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Is Your Site Ready For MySQL 5.7’s EoL? appeared first on Torque.

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

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

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

Now each month on Press This, we do this thing called Word Around the Campfire where we grab some marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, light a campfire, and we get around and we talk about this month’s news. And there’s a lot of news to talk about this month.

I’ll just go on and let you know we’re going to start talking about events, and WordCamp US, we’re also going to cover MySQL. We’re going to talk about what’s coming in WordPress 6.4. We’ve got a lot of other stuff to cover in here, so stay tuned. But to help me out with this episode, I’ve got two special guests joining us.

I’ve got Mike Davey, a Senior Editor from Delicious Brains. Howdy, Mike.

Mike: Hi, Doc.

Doc: And Damon Cook, a Developer Advocate at WP Engine. Damon, thanks for joining us.

Damon: Hi Doc, glad to be here.

Doc: All right. And let’s kick this off with talking about WordCamp US, which, gosh, I think just wrapped up two weeks ago as we’re recording and, there were 2000 attendees gathered at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just outside of DC.

This was the largest WordCamp US ever. Damon, did you have any highlights from this year’s WordCamp that you wanted to bring up?

Damon: I think the common takeaway for me was the hallway track of just interacting with folks, getting to meet face to face. It had been a long time for myself and that was actually the first flagship WordCamp US event I’d been to, besides small local ones and it was a great experience.

It was really great to meet a lot of the community and get some face time.

Doc: You know, what you’re bringing up, I think, was kind of what made this unique. Last year, WordCamp US was capped at 650 attendees, and this year they didn’t have a cap. We had around 2,000 attendees. So it was kind of back to pre-pandemic levels. And I actually appreciated last year as kind of a way to ramp back up to being social and doing these things again.

One of the things that I noticed that had changed just even between this year and last year was social media, like where people were communicating and how they were organizing. And I did a series of interviews with people at WordCamp US. I asked them all sorts of questions, but the one question I asked everybody was about are you still using Twitter or have you found something else?

And there’s a lot of strong opinions about it and there is no consensus on what’s happening. But I think the one thing that I heard from a lot of people was that this event felt large and kind of back to normal. But one thing that they felt was they were like on Mastodon or they were looking on Instagram. They were kind of all other places. 

Damon, you’re using Twitter. Did you notice any sort of difference between this year’s event and any others you’ve been to?

Damon: Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. I think there’s still a bit of community on Twitter X. I have not tried Mastodon myself, so, I’m missing out on probably a large part of the community in that aspect. So I can’t really speak to that, but yeah, I can see how there is definitely a complexity and diversity in the social media realms these days.

Doc: One of the other things that I was kind of looking for themes this year, and if we were talking about our predictions for WordCamp US in January, I think we would all be talking about AI. Is AI going to have fizzled out or is it going to be all everyone can talk about? And when I went to WordCamp US, what I noticed was it was neither of the two. AI is so common that it’s mundane. 

Everybody had a new AI product, but I don’t think anybody was trying to make it their differentiator because everybody else also had some sort of AI onboarding or AI to help you write emails or to write your metadata. They all kind of had it in just a very mundane way.

Not like it’s changing everything, although I guess it has changed everything, but in a way that’s just like, okay, yeah, we’re all using this feature a little bit, and we’re not figuring out how to do this yet. Did you, did you notice anything kind of along that lines about like AI and WordPress?

Damon: At WordCamp US? No, I think just in general though, it’s pretty early certainly there’s some products out there in the WordPress Ecosystem. And I think it’s the early days. I mean, yeah, it’s easy to say, right? I think that the first round, first batch and first inflection point for AI and WordPress is quieting down and still taking shape, I guess in a way, but I didn’t notice any highlights of AI permeating in WordCamp US.

Doc: What I was kind of thinking was just like every company of a certain size has to have an SEO person. I feel like there’s going to be something like that. Every company is just going to have to have that AI person and it’s going to be just sort of there. And we’re still maybe figuring out how it’s going to revolutionize everything and SEO is very important, but like in the same way, I think we haven’t quite upended an industry yet, but it’s getting integrated and almost, kind of, I’m not saying SEO is mundane, but I think y’all know what I’m saying. Where it’s just like, yeah, we have an AI guy and they’re doing this thing and we’re on top of it.

That’s sort of what I got this year.

Damon: Yeah. The use cases though should be interesting. 

Doc: And next year, we should see a much different iteration at WordCamp US. Let’s talk about some of the other upcoming WordPress events. WordPress Accessibility Day is coming up. 

This is gonna be a free virtual 24 hour conference on WordPress accessibility. And Mike, you were just saying before the show that you signed up for this event, right?

Mike: Yeah, I did. It’s actually something I’m personally fairly interested in, but I’ve only become interested in it, to my shame, in the last couple of years. But one of the presentations I’m really looking forward to is Allie Nimmons is giving a presentation on Accessibility Beyond Blindness. And just the abstract notes that when we speak of web accessibility, our minds can immediately go to optimizing for the visually impaired. 

And that’s actually just something that I’ve been thinking over for the last couple of weeks, that that’s how I usually think of accessibility as well, and I think that’s probably a trap, and I need to get beyond that. So I’m really looking forward to that. 

And I mean, there’s probably a lot of practical value in it. Seminars like, Is My WordPress Site Accessible? How to Perform Accessibility and Usability Tests. Because a lot of us just don’t know how to test for it. So, I’m looking forward to that one as well. And the nice thing about this conference is, of course, that it is both free and online.

Doc: When I was first hearing about WordPress Accessibility Day, I thought this was a contributor day type event.

But as far as I see, it’s actually more of like a kind of a WordCamp, an online WordCamp about accessibility. Right?

Mike: Exactly.

Doc: Well, cool. I’m excited about that. And the next event that was going to be coming up was WordCamp Rochester, which Mike, you were saying that you had hoped to go to before, right?

Mike: No, I was hoping to go to WordCamp Niagara Falls.

Doc: Niagara. Yes. And okay. And I think this kind of brings us to, oh right, Damon’s going to be going to, but WordCamp Niagara Falls in Canada was one of the events that recently announced or quietly announced that it got canceled along with WordCamp Omaha. So these are two events that are coming up soon or were coming up soon.

And I think this is just kind of an interesting thing. I don’t know if I have any theories as to what’s happening, but it does seem like some of the smaller events are having a hard time getting going this year. Damon you were planning on going, you were going to speak at WordCamp Omaha.

Can you tell us about what you know about what happened to that event?

Damon: Yeah, I think some of the local WordCamps are having a hard time starting back up post COVID. Having organized WordCamp pre-covid back in the day, it is a large effort and takes a team to organize and a lot of moving pieces sponsors, attendees, speakers, filling all those populations is pretty hard to do.

And so I think that’s kind of what has been the case for Omaha. I know that there are several speakers already on the bill and I’m not sure if the organizers had a difficulty getting enough attendees or a full roster of speakers, but it’s unfortunate that they had to cancel. But I think WordCamp Atlanta is happening that same weekend so, that should be another one to keep eyes on.

Doc: Since you were planning on going to Omaha, are you going to pivot and go to Atlanta instead?

Damon: I did submit a speaker application for Atlanta, but I think I had missed the deadline, so I would not be surprised if I don’t even hear back. But another one that’s coming up that I had reach out to me was WordCamp Montreal. And I don’t know that it’s on WordCamp Central yet as an announcement, but they were looking for some preliminary reach out for speakers.

Ao I did submit a talk for them. WordCamps are slowly popping up.But again, I think it’s hard to get all the ducks in a row and get all the interest in everything going again, so we’ll see what happens.

Doc: WordCamp Montreal is going to be online November 8th.

Damon: Okay it is, great.

Doc: At least according to this current update, and that could change. And just as a reminder to anyone listening, you can find these events on central.wordcamp.org. If it’s something kind of unique, like WordPress Accessibility Day, you’re probably just going to want to use Google for that. 

And so there are lots of events happening. We’re not trying to say they’re all getting canceled, but it does seem like organizers are having a hard time figuring out, between the large events, like the continental events, like WordCamp Asia and Europe and, uh, and US and some of the others, t seems like we’re having a hard time getting back just to our roots of like small meetups, even in San Francisco, we haven’t had, or in the Bay area, like Oakland used to have WordPress meetups once a month and those haven’t happened.

It’s kind of tough for everybody. I don’t know if it’s lack of marketing or money that helped keep these events going. Or it’s lack of volunteers to help run them. I’m not going to try to make any guesses. It’s just interesting seeing what the space is like right now. 

Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to pick up our word around the campfire with Damon and Mike. We’re going to talk about MySQL. We’re going to talk about what’s coming in WordPress 6.4 and a new Advanced Custom Fields survey that just got finished. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc: Welcome back to Press This, our Word Around the Campfire edition, where we catch up with our friends, Damon Cook and Mike Davey. And we are talking about what’s happening in WordPress. We spent the beginning of the show talking about meetups. We just got done with WordCamp US and there’s a lot of other meetups happening and some that aren’t.

Now we’re going to move a little bit to the meat and potatoes of WordPress. Let’s get started with just kind of talking about WordPress 6. 4 updates. Damon, why don’t you tell us about what we can expect from the next version of WordPress as far as what we know so far?

Damon: Yeah, it’s pretty early on, the first beta isn’t even out yet, but there are certainly some features that look like they’ll land for 6.4. 

One of the things is the Twenty Twenty-Four theme, which is getting lots of activity. I think it has about 40 plus contributors at this point, and that’s pretty amazing for one of the default themes, and I think it might even be a new record to just see that many contributors on a default theme this early on.

That theme should be neat. It’s got a few different verticals that it’s kind of focused on like a portfolio, a blog, and a photographer, well, I guess that’s the portfolio. But that theme should be a neat result in 6.4. 

Another one is the font library, which is still in the early stages, but you can test it out if you get the Nightly of Gutenberg and download that.

But right now they’re focusing on just a small feature set for the font library, so basically, it’s just kind of like a media library, but you’re uploading fonts. And they’re all stored in a fonts directory. So it’s very parallel to the media library. You just drag and drop some fonts into a modal, they’re uploaded and then you can find them in the fonts directory and access them there.

Doc: So if I have an unusual font that I want to use on my site, I can very easily just go in and add it myself to my site. Is that kind of how that works?

Damon: Yes, that’s the idea.

Doc: Neat. That’s cool. Because that’s something I’ve been wanting to do and it’s not hard to do currently, but it’s just one step more difficult than I’ve been able to do. So if it was just like a font library that I could go to, that’s pretty interesting. 

And you mentioned the Twenty Twenty-Four Theme, one of the things I was hearing there. Usually they kind of have a target, Twenty Twenty-Three could be just focusing on blocks and how you can kind of like make themes with these sub themes to them. But this one, instead of having something very specific, it sounds like they’re going for everything.

This is going to be a theme that could be used for enterprise or for small businesses. It could be used for writers or artists. There’s a lot going on and it is interesting that they have a lot of people contributing to it. I’m actually on Twenty Twenty-Three for my personal blog and maybe I’ll switch over to Twenty Twenty-Four because it sounds like it would be a fun one to play with too.

Damon: Yeah, test it out early. It’s on GitHub right now. It’s not available yet in the theme directory, but you can certainly test it out, install it, and there’s lots of activity and contribution back to it, so.

Doc: So 6.4 is scheduled for November 7th, and it’s going to be led by an underrepresented, gender release squad. It’s got a lot of exciting stuff going on with it. We will keep you updated as we know more about that, but let’s switch over a little bit to MySQL or MySQL’s End of Life for 5.7. Mike, why don’t you tell us about that?

You had a great write up on it on Delicious Brains. I’d love you to recap here.

Mike: Thanks, Doc. I won’t be able to solve if it’s MySQL or MySQL, I mean, just as an example, I walked around, uh, calling URLs, URLs for years and not one person corrected me, so I’m not a good guide to how things are pronounced. 

But I do know there are some changes you need to watch out for if you’re updating a WordPress site, from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0. And part of the reason for that is because 5.7 is reaching its end of life in October 2023 so it won’t be supported anymore. So a lot of people are going to be having to upgrade their sites. Just a few things to watch out for, like 5.7 supports some data types that became obsolete actually in previous versions, but they are simply no longer supported in 8.0.

In a similar vein, support for partition tables using a storage engine without native partitioning support was deprecated in 5.7, but it’s completely removed in 8.0. The only supported storage engines in 8.0 are, that have native partitioning handlers are NODB and NDB, and partition tables using other storage engines won’t be available after you update.

You need to either convert the table or remove the partitioning before you make the update, or you won’t be able to use the table for anything. Like, I won’t be able to access it. 

There’s a few other things you need to watch out for. There’s some new reserved keywords. They weren’t previously reserved but they are now, which could cause keywords that you’d previously used as identifiers to become illegal. There is a list of reserved keywords that they’ve got. But on the other hand, you also get improved security, like the Default Authentication plugin provides more secure password hashing than the previous one.

According to the test results I’ve seen, there is actually quite a bit of enhanced performance and it’s more scalable. Like test results were showing fairly significant speed increases. The example query was to retrieve column names for all NODB tables. The tests ended up executing hundreds of times faster on 8.0 compared to 5.7, um, and I’ll pop in a link at some point to see if I can find those test results. 

Doc: I have a dumb question here. So we don’t know how it’s pronounced, but I’m going to keep saying MySQL, is an open source,database management system. When I go to their site, when I go to mysql.com, it feels kind of like corporate, like there’s buy it here and stuff like that.

I just kind of don’t quite understand this organization. And I guess the thing that’s sticking out to me is they are really good about saying, Hey, we’re going to stop supporting this or whatever, where WordPress has kind of infinite back support, maybe not infinite. I’m sure Damon knows how far we go back, but it is kind of interesting kind of comparing this other open source projects and just kind of seeing how different it feels and how transparent they are for better or worse with like, Hey, we’re going to stop supporting this. So you need to, you need to move and they give you six months notice, or I’m not sure how far, maybe even a year notice.

That’s just kind of interesting to compare WordPress to MySQL, which are two different things, but they’re both open source projects and seeing how they manage themselves is interesting.

Mike: Yeah. Well, I mean MySQL became a part of Oracle in 2010, I believe. So I think Oracle probably has had a fair amount of influence on how it presents itself to the world and just how they conduct everything.

Doc: That does explain a lot. That explains that it’s still open source, but it’s part of Oracle and I can get that Oracle vibe on here. So, we are going to wrap up this segment and we’re going to take a short break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up the show with a bit of a survey that ACF took.

So stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc: Welcome back to the Word Around the Campfire edition of Press This. As you can see, the campfire is slowly starting to fizzle. It means it’s time for us to pack up, but before we do, Mike, why don’t you tell us about the recent ACF survey that happened?

Mike: Sure thing, Doc. We started this fairly early in 2023, but we’ve only recently published the results now. It surveyed about a little over 2,000 ACF users, and just from the results of the survey, we know over 80 percent of those folks were developers far outweighing any other category.

The next highest was designer at a little under 8 percent, so almost 10 times as many developers as any other category. And it’s actually probably a bit higher than the figure we give on the website of 81 percent because we had a little under 3 percent answer Other, and when we unpacked those answers, we found a lot of them were combinations of the other categories, very often with developer in there, such as developer/business owner or designer/developer.

That really does show that most of the people, not only is ACF a developer’s tool, which we all knew, but most of the people taking this survey are, in fact, working developers. Some of the more interesting things, you can hit up all the results on the ACF website.

There’s a lovely infographic that sort of lays out a lot of the top line stuff, and then we get into a bit of the analysis down below. But there’s some things that aren’t there, necessarily. For example we had a question about how often to use the following ACF fields.

And I’m really sure this was a bit of a slog for all the folks who completed it in the survey, because we asked them to rank how often they used each and every single field. Never, sometimes, frequently, or always. And the results on the ACF site, only show the rankings of the always column.

And it’s pretty much what you’d expect. The top three are text, text area, and image. But when we unpack some of those results, though, it really highlights just how tremendously flexible ACF is, and how people are using it in a lot of diverse ways. We have fields like password. That a little over 56 percent of respondents say they never use it. And about five and a half percent who use it on every build. OEmbed is another one. Like, I think 36 percent or so people never use it. And yet 8.9 percent of people always use it. Those percentages are pretty far apart. But there’s a lot of other fields with closer spreads.

We’ve got the gallery field. 22 and a half people never use it. 15 percent always use it. Tab fields. 16.9 percent, never. 25.16, always. When we look at that sometimes column, remember it’s Never, Sometimes, Frequently, and Always. So Sometimes is only the second one. You sometimes use it.

The only fields that scored less than 10 percent of the respondents saying they sometimes use it are ones with absolutely enormous numbers in the Always column. There were just three that actually had less than 10 percent text, text area, and image. And the repeater field, which by the way is an ACF Pro field. The repeater field only got 10.53 percent of Sometimes use it. But on the other hand, it’s Always ranking is 52.98 percent. And there’s a cluster of a few fields that got 15 to 19 percent in the Sometimes, and all of those have always rankings between 35 and 50. It’s really interesting just because it shows that all of those fields are being used.

There is no field in ACF’s over 30 fields that someone, like a fairly significant portion of developers, don’t consider essential. 

Doc: Well, I think that’s a good spot for us to stop there, but it sounds like there’s a lot more to cover on that. If people want to learn more about the ACF survey or Mike, what you’re writing about in general, where would you send them?

Mike: Well, for the ACF survey, I would hit up WP_ACF on Twitter, and follow there. I you want you can follow me on Twitter. And of course, you can always go to advancedcustomfields.com and the survey results should be fairly easy to locate.

Doc: Well thanks for joining us and Damon, I know that we still didn’t get around to talking about 6.4’s block hooks. And I know you have a lot to say about that, but luckily people can catch you at WordCamp Rochester, right? To hear more about that.

Damon: Yeah, that’s September 30th. I’ll be presenting on the 6.4 features. So yeah, I’ll be talking about Blockhooks

Doc: where else can people find you online?

Damon: Follow me on Twitter. That’s the best place to keep track.

Doc: Well, that’s it for this week’s episode of Press This, our Word Around the Campfire edition. I want to say thanks again to Damon Cook and Mike Davey for joining me today. Next week we’ll be talking to Carmen Johnson about what developers need to know about MySQL’s end of life. And how they need to be prepared for it. And maybe the benefits even of upgrading as well. So stay tuned for that episode coming next week.

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

The post Press This: Word Around the Campfire September 2023 appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

I often tend to think of the web and WordPress in a US-centric way because that’s where I live. Luckily, through many of my interviews, though, here on Press This, I’m reminded that the world is much bigger than what I tend to think of. As a matter of fact, I’d say at least half of our guests are not in the US, and that’s just a good reminder sometimes that when I’m building a website in English that I might not be involving all the possible people who I want to see it. 

I read this morning that six out of 10 people over the age of five speak English, so that’s a pretty good reach. But there’s still lots of people that I might not be reaching or that might not really feel that comfortable reading English on my site. 

So today I’m talking to Thomas Fanchon, the partnership manager at Weglot, a translation service that is compatible with all major CMSs.

We’ll be talking about the advantages of translation from an accessibility perspective, as well as SEO and other benefits. Plus we’ll be going through the step by step process of how to set up your own multilingual site using Weglot. But let’s kick this off, Thomas. Why don’t you just tell us how you got into WordPress?

Thomas: It’s a funny story because back in the day, I was trying to launch my business and that’s how I discovered WordPress because I wanted to build a website. It was a pet sitting business, so I created my website using WordPress. That’s how I actually discovered WordPress, which is basically how it went.

Afterwards, I started to dig a little bit more around plugins, themes, to understand how the ecosystem works. And more about the community itself. 

It’s something that came to me afterwards because at first I didn’t know that there was a WordPress community. I was just a lonely business owner who was trying to launch a business and make it grow. Then I discovered Weglot, and I started to work there. And that’s when our CEO told me about the community, about meetups, WordCamps, and all the amazing things that the community is doing. And that’s when I dug a little bit more in WordPress and in the ecosystem.

Doc: And I mentioned at the top of the show that most of my guests recently have been overseas, a lot of Europe. You’re out of Paris right now in the Weglot office. 

Thomas: We are in the HQ today, and we are in Paris, France. Most of the Weglot team is based around Paris.

Doc: So why don’t you tell us what is Weglot and how does it work?

Thomas: Weglot simply a translation plugin that will allow you to translate your website in multiple languages. 

How does it work? When you first install it on WordPress, like all of the plugins that are available there. So you add it from the directory. And then you are asked to add the API key that you have when you create a Weglot account, you add it on WordPress. Your original language is already selected, and then you have to choose your destination language. After that, you are redirected to your website and you have a language feature and then you can switch between English and whatever language that you actually pick.

All of your translations are stored outside of your WordPress dashboard. They are stored outside on the Weglot dashboard and you can have access to them. Then you can edit it and use all the tools that we have to fine tune your translation.

Doc: Is it creating a multi-site? Is it like english.torquemag.io or is it just like a little switch that changes?

Thomas: So basically we use sub directories on WordPress. So it will be yourwebsite/FR, for example, for the French version of your website.

Doc: Okay. And are you using large language models to do that transcription?

Thomas: So we have different translation solutions that we use for the translation. We use the best available on the market currently, which is DeepL. Google also, and Microsoft Bing, I think. And depending on your language pair, we will select one of them. And you can even ask our support team if you, for example, prefer DeepL or Google and to have this translation solution for your website.

Doc: If I have a site that has maybe my product name looks like a regular word, but it’s slightly like intentionally misspelled or something, and I need that to stay the same, but I need everything else around it translated. Is there a way to be able to train Weglot to recognize when I want a word in English?

Thomas: Yep, it’s part of our editing option that you can have access to. So you can actually add the translation rules. Which would say never translate my business name and we will never detect it and translate it.

Doc: And so what are some of the advantages of having a multilingual site? Like what would you list as some of the big reasons for why someone would wanna do that?

Thomas: The first thing that I have in mind is increasing your traffic because by adding more languages, you are allowing more people to have access to your pages. 

If you’re doing it correctly, which means that SEO wise, you’re respecting all of Google Multilingual SEO best practices and your pages are properly indexed, then you should acquire more people coming from different languages.

And if you adapt your marketing likewise, you should also be able to increase your conversion rate on the website and drive more sales, which is always nice when you have a business and you want to generate more revenue. 

And of course, also, it’s all about website customization. Everyone wants to have this perfect custom website, so we go and we pay a lot of money to have this crazy design and all of these cool effects on the website. And we often forget about the languages because a lot of people are actually interested in your topic, but they just don’t understand it. You can have like a really, really fancy website, but if let’s say I only speak French, I come to your website and I don’t understand anything, then it’s going to be difficult for me to purchase your services or your product.

So, translation can also be a major key in the customization world.

Doc: As a user I might be a little nervous about translating. Are there any disadvantages like just a couple of them that I have fears of? Maybe that I’ll be maintaining multiple sites instead of just maintaining one or maybe that it will affect my you know PageSpeed, or just in general, like that it’ll be more work.

Can you, can you talk about like, are there any downsides like that for translating your site?

Thomas: There’s one thing that you mentioned that is quite interesting.. You can have one site and subdirectories. For example, it’s what we do at Weglot. And you can also have a multi-site, which means that you’ll have one website for, let’s say, each of your regions or the countries that you’re targeting. So you have one website for French, one website for English, Spanish, and so on. 

So even with these two approaches, there are pros and cons. For example, if you take one site, it’s easier to maintain, it’s also faster for you. So, I think that’s quicker. When it comes to having one site, it takes you more time, and you’re going to have a lot of manual process involved, if you do everything manually, for example. 

Sometimes when you’re thinking about translation software, you’re thinking about speed. Does it impact your page speed? That will depend on the translation software itself and are the developers aware of that? Are they making sure that it has a low minimal impact on your page? And one other thing is people tend to think about the quality of the translation. And is the software going to be fully compliant to their workflow.

Doc: Hmm.

Thomas: I would say these aren’t disadvantages but it’s just like things that people think about when it comes to translation software.

Doc: I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break, Thomas. I appreciate you answering those questions. And when we come back, we are gonna get back into it talking about how to build a multilingual website. I think we’ll be kind of assuming we’re talking about a multilingual WordPress website using Weglot.

So stay tuned after this short break, and we’ll be right back to talk more with Fanchon about Weglot and multilingual websites. 

Doc: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc. Today, I’m talking to Thomas Fanchan, the partnership manager at Weglot. We are talking about Weglot translation software. The first half of the show, you probably heard, we talked about the advantages and disadvantages of having multiple languages supported on your website? I think at this point, let’s just get into, assuming I have a website, a WordPress website, whatever the modern version is. I’m running blocks and have full site editing and stuff like that.

I’m on a modern WordPress website. I’m ready to translate it. I’ve got it all set up and I really like the way it is in English. What’s the next thing that I would need to do using Weglot?

Thomas: Okay. So I think the first thing that you are going to have in mind is what are the languages that you’re going to select? So in order for you to do that, there is a really simple way you can simply go at your Google Analytics and double check in which languages your users use.

Once you have that information, you can select the top two languages and start to translate it and see if it has an impact or not. After that, you want to think about, are you going to use machine translation, human translation or a mix of both? Which is something we provide at Weglot. You have a first layer of automatic translation and then you can edit everything. 

Another point would be to always have in mind what are the cultural differences of the countries or the regions that you are targeting because words don’t have the same meaning depending on which country you are targeting. And once you have those three in mind, then you can move to selecting your language.

You can start with machine translation, which is super fast and cheaper than human translation. But with human translation, you have a higher quality translation. And once you define this, you can move to the more technical stuff, which is your SEO settings. Oh, and one more thing thatI always forget is the images. Because you’re also going to want to adapt your images depending on which regions are you targeting. So make sure to translate your images.

Doc: When you say translate your image, are you talking about translating like the alt description? Orimage title?

Thomas: I’m talking about the alt images. Also if you have words on the image. Let’s say you’re based in Europe and you’re also targeting the US. Maybe you’re running some sales. You don’t want to have the same image in both of the languages. So then maybe you’re going to want to change those images and adapt them to your marketing. 

Once you select your language, you choose a software that is going to be able to manage machine or human translation. Then you’re going to do your SEO settings. Next you want to have unique and dedicated URLs. So you can have sub domains, sub directories, or country specific domains. At Weglot, we do sub directories with WordPress. Then you’re going to want to add SharePoint tags to the website to make sure that Google is aware your website is being translated in the specific languages that you selected.

If you’re doing it by yourself, you’re going to have to add it manually, which can be a pain. If you have translation software, that will get added automatically. It’s done by default. 

And once you have the SharePoint tags on your website, you’re going to think about your metadata. Make sure that your content is properly indexed and people can understand what they are about to click on.

And another tip we had from an agency who is working with us is about the language switcher visibility. So we found out that the more that the language feature is visible, the better it is to rank on a search engine. 

Doc: I feel like I’ve been talking this whole show as if like, you know, just support all the languages, but you’re talking about maybe supporting some, and I guess that probably does make more sense, like if I have a site that’s, maybe there’s a lot of people in India that visit our site, and so I want to kind of translate towards languages there, rather than just like selecting all. I would probably be a little bit more intentional when I’m translating a site, right?

Thomas: And I think it’s just also thinking about the cost, because obviously, even if you’re doing it by yourself, you don’t use a translation software or a translation plugin like Welgot and you’re doing it by yourself, it’s going to cost you some money. You already have a market, and then you just double check if you have a return on investment or not.

If you don’t have it, then maybe you need to improve your translation, make some changes to the page to make it convert better. But if it’s working, then you can also invest more in the translation. 

You could also just select a couple of pages. Let’s say you have a product website. You have like three or four products that are working quite well. So you choose to translate these pages. And you see there is some attraction there, and if there is, then you can invest more and have your entire website translated. So it depends on your approach, but yeah, it’s just making sure that all your marketing efforts should be perfectly matched with what you’re doing when you’re approaching translation.

Doc: Well, I think that’s a good spot for us, Thomas, to take our final break, and when we come back, I think we’re just going to talk about the advantages that WordPress offers for this type of thing. So stay tuned, and when we come back, we’re going to continue our conversation with Thomas Franchon, the Partnership Manager at Weglot.

Stay tuned for more.

Doc: Welcome back to this episode of Press This. I’m your host, Doc Pop, talking to Thomas about translation software. We are specifically talking about Weglot, and we just went into a deep dive. Thank you, Thomas, for that, of how to set up your SEO and translating images and things like that. And all this got me thinking. At the top of the show, we said that Weglot supports all major CMSs, which is a claim made on the site, but it seems to check out. 

I’m looking here, I see WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Ghost, everything. I even asked, I didn’t see Joomla on here, but you were saying there’s a PHP snippet that people can add to enable this on Joomla. 

Thomas, the question I wanna know is just an expert on all CMSs, which you are now officially dubbed an expert on all CMSs. What is the advantage maybe of just working with WordPress in this ecosystem? When you have a plugin that works with so many other different things?

Thomas: Yeah, so, originally, we launched Weglot on WordPress, and we always had a special bond with the ecosystem. What I really like is that there are multiple options on WordPress and it’s a fast growing technology. Obviously there are a lot and a lot of users on WordPress. There are a huge amount of potential customers, which is interesting. 

There are a lot of plugins available on the market. A lot of cool things that we can do regarding partnerships. There are tons of themes, plugins, and cool things that we can do with people from the ecosystem.

It’s fast growing, the technology is always moving, there are a lot of contributors, a lot of people, and a huge community too. Like for WorldCamp US, I’m sure maybe you attended, and I wasn’t there this time, but I’m sure it was amazing, but I’ve attended a couple of WorldCamp Europe and meetups, and it’s just a super nice ecosystem to make your product grow. And I find that WordPress users in general are really easy to give you feedback about your product. And at Weglot that’s something that we value a lot. We are able to improve the product and make sure that it fits the needs of our customers.

Doc: Well, I really appreciate your time here today, Thomas. If people wanna follow you or learn more about Weglot, what’s a good way to do that online?

Thomas: You can go on our website, where you’ll be able to find all of the information about Weglot and if you want to reach out to me, like you can do it on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Doc: Right on. And I really appreciate you joining us today. And you mentioned WordCamp US, and I’ll just go on and say, I just got back from WordCamp US 2023 in Washington, DC. If you’re looking for more great content about WordPress, I shot 12 interviews with WordPressers on location there. So you can check those out on Torque’s YouTube channel or go to TorqueMag.

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

The post Press This: How to Translate Your Website with Weglot appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

Today, we’re going to dive headfirst into the world of affiliate marketing, where clicks can turn into cash and partnerships can pave the way for growing your brand, business, and website. Our guest today is Dustin Howes, the chief coach at performancemarketingmanager.com, and he’s going to tell us how bloggers, influencers, and savvy entrepreneurs can turn their passion into profit by promoting products they love. Boy that’s a good alliteration there.

Dustin, how are you doing today?

Dustin: Great. Doctor Popular, so good to be hanging out with you again. I miss our days at WP Engine, man.

Doc: Right on, let’s kick this off. Why don’t you tell us how you got into WordPress?

Dustin: Oh, absolutely. It’s been a good, I don’t know, 12 years since I started my own site, like I went to a meetup in Austin and they were talking about starting your own blog and people were teaching you how to do it and I remember it being pretty difficult to create and spin up your own WordPress site. And since then, I feel like WordPress has just gotten so much easier through the years.

But that was my first foray in digital marketing world. And eventually, I became an affiliate manager over at WP Engine, and really engulfed myself into the WordPress community, going to the WordCamps and hanging out with that kind of folk, and really enjoyed the camaraderie of the WordPress community itself. 

Doc: When you got into WordPress, you were saying you went to a meetup in Austin about building a website. Was that to get into marketing, or is that just you were kind of doing it for just your own personal blog, and then marketing kind of came out of that?

Dustin: Well, I’d already got my start in affiliate marketing and I’d watched all these folks making millions of dollars on their blogs and absolutely killing it, just making a living starting it. And I said, well, I mean, why can’t I just go and do that? So that’s what I started to go and do. And what it turned out to be is getting the groundwork to understand what affiliates actually go through and how hard it is to create an affiliate website and be an entrepreneur in that space. 

So I grew a lot of empathy for the affiliate partners that I work with today by learning what they have to go through in building a site. And so that first framework of creating my first blog turned into me creating five other sites at this point and getting better and better at WordPress and being the entrepreneur that I am today.

Doc: For our listeners, let’s go ahead and describe what affiliate marketing is, and what are some of the basic models of affiliate marketing?

Dustin: So in its essence, affiliate marketing is click and sales based traffic. Going from one website to another and then crediting the affiliate partner with a commission for that end sale. 

So let’s take, for example, you have a website that has traffic and that subject is electronics, right? You say this is the best computer, and why, and here’s where you can go and buy it. And that link goes to Amazon or a Best Buy or something of that nature, a place that actually has these things for sale. And that end user that read your blog and clicked through your link goes to that website, makes a purchase, and then that website kicks you back a commission of the sale.

So you might earn 5 to 20 percent of whatever the sale actually brought that company.

Doc: And that could be pay per sale, or you might get paid per click, or you might get paid per lead that you generate.

Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. All of the above are possibilities in affiliate programs. I highly suggest you pay per acquisition, a CPA, for the sale. Leads and clicks can get a little hairy if you’re creating affiliate programs that pay out on leads and clicks. It could get a little bit sketch in terms of fraud because there can be a lot of sites that join your affiliate program, bring you a whole bunch of clicks and leads that are fake and get paid and then leave you high and dry.

So when sales actually happen, that’s a much more dependable route for you as a company to be paying out just when you actually make money.

Doc: And I think for the point of today’s conversation, we’re going to focus on the affiliate side, the blog that’s sending the traffic to the larger companies. Is there a type of size that affiliates usually need to be? Is there such a thing as oh, you’re too big to be in affiliate marketing, or you’re too small to be in affiliate marketing?

Dustin: I don’t think there’s ever a too small, the too big is debatable. So let’s start on the small side. When you’re just starting as an entrepreneur in affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing might be your key to getting your first earnings on your website. Your website might have low traffic and you’re trying to rank for certain keywords that you’re writing about. And so when you do that, affiliate marketing can be a great revenue source while you continue to build content. And eventually you get to a point where your traffic is in the hundreds of thousands of visits per year or even per month. And then you can start considering other avenues of traffic or ways to utilize the traffic that is coming in.

And that’s where things like AdSense come in, where you can earn just on images being up on your site and impressions, and you get paid on that. It’s much more minimal than affiliate marketing. And if you’re good at affiliate marketing on your website, then you really never go back to anything else. 

But then at the super level, when you’re getting hundreds of thousands of visitors per month and maybe even to the millions, now you have the availability to name your own prices for the pages that you’re promoting companies, and you can take on sponsorships for being on your website for extended periods of times, thousands of dollars to be sponsors on this page that is getting all this kind of traffic.

It’s really an evolution. But affiliate marketing is a great starting point and there are many companies out there, huge publications like CNET that are still using affiliate marketing today as their main source of revenue.

Doc: And I do want to let people know, we are going to dive into the WordPress side of things. After this break, we’re going to talk about plugins and benefits of WordPress. But before we do, just one more question, just kind of on broad affiliate marketing definitions and things like that. If someone listening were to get into affiliate marketing, if they’re interested in that, what sort of objectives or goals should they try starting off with or setting for themselves?

Dustin: I think the best advice I could give anybody that’s getting into creating content and developing their website is try to rank on Google first before becoming an affiliate. So, Adam Enfroy has an incredible journey around this where he would build a piece of content, let it rank for three months with organic links, and then go back and optimize it with affiliate links.

And that way, you give Google a chance to index your site and recognize you as an authoritative figure before you go and try to make money off of that site. And this is a really good strategy for those starting out. You don’t need to go and try to make every penny on every blog post that you create.

Create the content first, let it rank, and then come back to it at a later time when you have the time to optimize it for commissions.

Doc: Well, I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to continue our conversation with Dustin Howes, and we’re going to dive into the tools and benefits of using WordPress for affiliate marketing. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, chatting today with Dustin Howes. Howdy, Dustin.

Dustin: What’s up, Doc?

Doc: And we are back to talk about the WordPress side of things. We’ve been talking about affiliate marketing. We’ve been setting kind of the definitions for people like myself who maybe don’t know much about it.

And Dustin’s been explaining kind of the different models and the different practices you kind of want to do. And we definitely want to dive into what benefits WordPressers might have from affiliate marketing. So let’s start with that. Is WordPress a good platform for this type of thing?

Dustin: I would say it’s not the only solution, but like the major go to solution for affiliate marketers out there. So there are other Content Management Systems that could work with affiliate, but in my experience, it has been the easiest route to getting a website up, getting it ranking on Google and making your life easier in the long run when you’re building out new content, just because of the ease of what posts and whatever solution you have internally for maximizing the value of SEO, whether it be using RankMath or Yoast or whatever plugins. WordPress is just so simple in terms of making an affiliate’s life easy.

Doc: And my first hunch was going to be, you were going to say, yeah, there’s lots of plugins for this sort of thing, but you’re actually just mentioning the benefits of WordPress in general. It’s easier to spin up and it’s great for getting that SEO tuned. There’s a lot of tools for that, but let’s talk about the plugin side.

Is there like a plugin ecosystem for affiliate marketing or is that not really how this, this kind of a business works?

Dustin: There are definitely plugins that you should be utilizing. Obviously you have your optimization plugins, right, your WP Rocket or whatever you may be using to optimize the speed of your site, always beneficial because affiliate sites are going to rank higher on Google if they’re running faster.

So you need your good WordPress hosting, you need plugins that are maximizing the value of your site speed. But as far as affiliate plugins, one of my most, well, one of my most used in favor is Pretty Links. Thirsty Affiliates is also a good solution here, but Pretty Links allows me to make a link and then share it anywhere on the internet and redirect it through my affiliate link. And it makes it look a lot cleaner. It makes my work easier if I’m spreading the word about one product. And then they change the landing page and give me something else. I don’t have to go throughout the entire internet and change that URL. I just have to do it one time in Pretty Links, and it just makes my life so much easier changing it in one place on my site, and it changes it throughout my entire site. So Pretty Links is one of those must haves for me as an affiliate marketer.

Doc: I want to say I use Pretty Links on all my sites actually. And it’s super handy. I’m not using it for affiliate marketing. It’s very versatile. It’s free in the plugin repository, and it’s great for if you are on Instagram and you wanna create a very short link, you could say like, torque mag.io/newsletter.

And the newsletter could go to that longer form, even sending it off to like a MailChimp signup page or something. So Pretty Links is great. And I can totally see, I don’t use it for affiliate marketing, but I’m sure that’s very easy to see how going from just using it for link shortening, to using it for tracking links and shortening URLs and being able to manage those links after you’ve already shared them without having to, as you said, go through the internet and find every mention of it.

You could just change that, that one pretty link. And you don’t have to worry about the, you know, if the URL has changed, your URL can be just switched to forward to the new one.

Dustin: Yeah, it’s super easy. So Pretty Links is an absolute must. Another suite of my favorites are Syed Balkhi’s suite of plugins out there that he uses. He’s the best affiliate in the WordPress community. He started WP Beginner 10 plus years ago and became a monster affiliate for all these programs.

And then he started absorbing up a lot of plugins like WPForms and he created Monster Insights and the PopIt plugin. I can’t think of the name real quick. Doc, you got it?

Doc: The pop it plugin.

Dustin: OptinMonster, excuse me.

Doc: Oh OptinMonster. Yeah.

Dustin: All those are really great tools for affiliates to be recognizing how their site is, is doing, what traffic is the most valuable. And like WP Forms is great for opt-in situations and getting more into in-depth of where you get the initial sign up so that people come back is super important for the affiliate. You need to be building up your email list today so that you can optimize that traffic at a later time. 

Those kinds of plugins are great for building up your list so that you can promote something that you really believe in 10 emails down the line. Even when they leave your site, well after that, they’re gonna be coming back to you as an authority figure. And if you have their email address captured by one of those awesome plugins, it just makes your life so much easier.

Doc: And you touched on something that I think we could talk about here. There’s no rule saying that you have to be genuinely interested in what you’re setting up a blog for if your goal is to get into affiliate marketing, but I do imagine a lot of folks are really into horses, and they already have a blog that’s maybe doing well, and they want to just write about that, and then kind of start adding in affiliate links.

Is that sort of the normal progression of things, or do you find that people just find a hole in the market and say oh I think I can own that and try to spin up a blog around that?

Dustin: Two theories here, or two routes about this. One is you can blog as a business, like you can start blogging and creating a new site today and start blogging about something you really believe in or you don’t believe in. Like if you just see a niche in the market that you really want to get into that is untapped, then go for it.

But the best blogs and the best content out there is from people that have a passion about something and really want to be a part of that community and vertical. So yes, if you’re starting a blog about horses because you love horses, that is a great starting point. And then you can go and monetize it later with affiliate marketing.

But the best way to be looking for those partners that you could be working with that are based around horses is go and join an affiliate network, go join a big affiliate network like ShareSale or Impact, become an affiliate on their platform, and then you can search for all the merchants, advertisers that are out there that have a product that you could sell on your website easily. 

So for your horse folks, it might be saddles. Go and look for the best saddles out there and find a website that you want to send people to that has an affiliate program. Now, yeah, you could go search the ShareSales and the Impacts and the CJs of the world for advertisers in that space, or you can go directly to the brands that you really like.

Go down to the footer of their page and look for an affiliate program or ask customer support if they have an affiliate program if you can’t find it there on the footer. And then go and join those, those programs for the products that you really believe in. And if you don’t have to believe in the product to be a good affiliate, but it helps, if that makes sense.

Doc: On that note, we’re going to take one more short break, and when we come back we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Dustin Howes, and we’re going to talk about how to manage these tools using WordPress, so stay tuned for more right after the short break.

Doc: Welcome back to Press This. We are talking to Dustin Howes about affiliate marketing and WordPress. Dustin, we’ve talked a lot about affiliate management. Can you tell us what is affiliate management? Tell us a little bit more about that.

Dustin: Yeah, you got it. So affiliate management is the other side of the equation. All the companies that you’re out there promoting as an affiliate need somebody to manage the partnerships that are coming in. So for example, WP Engine, I was running their affiliate program for a few years there. And I was working with all the affiliates that were driving traffic to WP Engine to create the sales that have built it up to what it is today.

So affiliate management there aren’t a lot of courses out there for brands to go and take and learn how to effectively run an affiliate program, but I’ve created one out there. There are literally hundreds of courses that you can take as an affiliate to learn how to be a good affiliate.

But when it comes to the affiliate management side of things, and being a good affiliate manager, you either have to go to a conference or learn this on your own, working for an agency or somebody else. So my particular skill set is running affiliate programs, and it just so happens that being that I’m an affiliate myself, and I’ve worked with so many affiliates in the past, that’s why I could talk about being an affiliate and how to be a good affiliate.

Doc: Yeah, how best to manage Dustin and other Dustins out there.

Dustin: That’s right.

Doc: Yeah, and we did kind of specify earlier that parts of the conversation were about the affiliate side of things, being the people sending the traffic. So it is kind of interesting that you said there’s not necessarily those resources out there for people who are like receiving the traffic on how to deal with those affiliates.

So that’s kind of cool that you have a program out there just for that kind of specific thing.

Dustin: Absolutely, and it’s a do it yourself course that I sell at performancemarketingmanager.com, and this goes soup to nuts of like creating an affiliate program, launching it, and then scaling it up. So one of those things that a lot of companies do is they don’t come up with a good strategy before they start an affiliate program and that is a recipe for disaster because if you think you can just create an affiliate program and all these affiliates are going to show up at your doorstep, you’re absolutely wrong.

So, it is hard work, creating an affiliate program that people actually want to join. So, there’s a lot of intricate details that go into developing that affiliate program the right way.

Doc: Let’s wrap this up. How can people find you online?

Dustin: You can go to dustinhowes.com. Find me at me@dustinhowes.com. And if you’d like. Any advice, being an affiliate or an affiliate manager, or you’re thinking about creating an affiliate program, go to dustinhowes.com/pod15, and I will give you 15 minutes of my time for free to point you in the right direction and help you on this journey.

Because that’s what I like to do. I like to hang out with new people and help them in any way I can.

Doc: Right on. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Dustin. It’s been really interesting learning about this side of things.

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

The post Press This: Affiliate Marketing Insights with Dustin Howes appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

I’m going to tell you a quick secret. I love signing up for newsletters. I think I’m a bit of an anomaly here, but if we aren’t close personal friends, I’m probably not going to follow you on Mastodon or Instagram or Facebook, but I won’t think twice before I sign up for your newsletter.

If you have a restaurant, here’s my email. You got advice for game design? Sign me up. Weekly WordPress news roundups in my inbox? Don’t mind if I do. So I’m already sold on the advantages of communicating to your customers directly through email. But I thought some of you listeners might need some encouragement to explore the newsletter space.

So I’m happy to say that today’s guest is Lesley Sim. The co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a plugin that turns your WordPress site into a powerful newsletter CMS. And we’re going to talk about why you should be getting into newsletters. 

Lesley, let’s kick things off with just telling us how you got into WordPress.

Lesley Sim: Hey, Doc. Thanks so much for having me on. I always love coming on these podcasts and live streams. My WordPress origin story, wow. I think my first exposure with WordPress was in 2016. I was trying to build a site for a craft beer business that I had just started and given where I am now, you can tell that that didn’t work out.

As it turns out, craft beer breweries are hard to run. so we were looking for a cheap way to build our site and that’s kind of the first time I stumbled upon WordPress. And craft beer didn’t work out and I ended up going deeper down the WordPress hole, starting a digital agency where I did marketing and build sites for clients.

And then just before the pandemic hit, I kind of got sick of that. I’d been doing it for a few years at that point and dealing with clients. Sometimes it’s really fun and fulfilling and sometimes it can be really frustrating. And I was like, Okay, I’ve given this services thing a good go, maybe it’s time to try my hand at products.

And since I’ve been working in WordPress for a while now, I was like, okay, maybe I’ll try building a WordPress plugin. And that’s very, very briefly kind of how I got started and how Newsletter Glue came to be because the WordPress plugin that after some trial and error, I decided to build was Newsletter Glue.

Doc Pop: I don’t know if I knew that you were a craft brewery business owner before this. That’s really cool. I always love hearing these extra little stories at the beginning of the show. So, is the craft brewery, how you got into, I need to make a newsletter plugin, or was that, after you already kind of dived into WordPress, you saw this need for that?

Lesley Sim: After I’d already kind of dived into WordPress, so I’ve been doing WordPress for a while and newsletters started getting more and more popular. I think as RSS kind of faded into the background a little bit, which I’m personally really sad about because I always loved RSS, I think people needed a way to stay updated and newsletters were it.

So I think around 2019, 2020 was when Substack started becoming really popular. And yeah, so I kind of wanted to do my own newsletter and then that’s kind of how I got the idea for Newsletter Glue.

Doc Pop: Yeah, definitely pouring out some craft beer for RSS and I was a heavy RSS user, so that might explain why switching to newsletters where it was basically my email now is the RSS aggregator. Right. That’s kind of how it probably works. It’s like something like that.

I mean, I’m sharing my personal information where with RSS I didn’t have to do that, but that’s maybe what you and I have in common with why we got into newsletters. Can you tell us about what is Newsletter Glue and what gap does it fill in the market?

Lesley Sim: Newsletter Glue works with publishers, media companies, and newsrooms, and we help them connect their email service provider, like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, ActiveCampaign to WordPress. That lets them build their newsletters inside of WordPress, the way they’re already writing their articles. So the way I think about it is, if you have a team of editors and writers who are already spending all their time in WordPress writing their articles it’s kind of a pain for them to then switch brains.

To log into MailChimp, for example, and fiddle around with that editor and write their emails in there, and historically that’s always taken a long time and it’s less intuitive because you have to write in a separate pane than what you’re seeing. So we do a bit of all of that. Writers can instead just log into WordPress or they’re probably already logged into WordPress and just spin up a new post or a new newsletter inside of WordPress and start writing. And that experience is a lot faster. There’s no onboarding needed if you have new writers, because everybody, most professional writers, freelance writers already know how to use WordPress.

And the other side benefit of that is that now all of your newsletters are really deeply integrated into your WordPress site, so that means if you want to do paywall stuff or SEO stuff with your newsletters, you now can. Whereas previously, all of your newsletter archives were inside of MailChimp and it’s a different URL and you don’t really have much control over that.

You’re not able to have subscription forms on your newsletter archives because they’re sitting in MailChimp and on and on and on. So just having that deep integration is really huge for growth and branding and all of that stuff.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said about the integration in your site. You’re talking about using the SEO from the newsletters as a benefit to your site, and that’s interesting. But you briefly touched on one thing I just kind of want to address here is MailChimp and Substack. If they go away, which we’ve seen very similar services go away recently, if they go away, then you’re maybe at a difficult position, right?

Because Substack hosts your newsletter and MailChimp has hosted versions and then the version in the email box, but there’s not going to be that archived version where if you’re using something like Newsletter Glue, you can, depending, I guess, on the privacy settings, the public settings that you’ve allotted to each post, you can kind of keep those hosted and people can still find them later, right?

Lesley Sim: Yeah, that’s exactly it. And if you wanna migrate email service providers, then again, same thing, right? You don’t have to manually migrate ’cause everything’s already on your WordPress site.

Doc Pop: You’re talking about email service providers. I feel like we’re near the end of the first section here, but let’s try to get into that. If I’m using Newsletter Glue and I’m going to have to have a host for my site, which I would have to have anyway, am I also going to have to pay big money for an email server of some sort?

I don’t know how that works.

Lesley Sim: Yeah. So, all of the customers that we work with already have MailChimp accounts or ActiveCampaign accounts, and at the size that they’re at, it’s typically really, really hard for them to move off it. They might have a whole bunch of segments, tags, automation set up in there already.

But at the same time, they don’t like the day to day work, doing the day to day work inside of those platforms because they’re not really built for easy writing. And so that’s kind where we come in and help with that day to day newsletter operations.

Doc Pop: So, if I have a site, a WordPress site, again, you don’t have to pay hosting for that, but I would also have something like a MailChimp just to handle the newsletter serving. And what’s the integration like for that?

Lesley Sim: On our end, it’s super easy. So they just need an API key and key that in, and then we connect everything for them behind the scenes.

Doc Pop: Okay. And you probably do that like in the dashboard, in the WordPress dashboard, right?

Lesley Sim: Yes.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I love it. Okay, that totally makes sense. I haven’t used Newsletter Glue yet, but I can totally kind of imagine what it’s like there, because I’ve used several other WordPress plugins. When we come back, we’re gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, I’m gonna continue talking to Lesley Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue.

We’re gonna talk about why you need a newsletter in the age of social media. And we’re going to talk also a little more deeply about how this is going to integrate with your WordPress site and kind of questions about new features that are coming to Newsletter Glue. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Lesley Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a wonderful newsletter plugin that turns your WordPress website into basically, I don’t know, Lesley, what do you call it? A newsletter CMS?

Lesley Sim: Yeah, I would say it’s a newsletter builder, but newsletter CMS sounds good too.

Doc Pop: We talked about my love for newsletters, and I definitely think there’s a place for newsletters. I’m hoping maybe, Lesley, you could try to tell some of our listeners who might be putting a lot of energy into Instagram posts or TikTok videos, and they’re putting all their energy into there.

And maybe they think newsletters and email are kind of dead. What would you tell them? What statistics do you have saying, saying, actually, these are still really common? Or, you know, what would you try to tell someone to kind of convince them that they need to be in the newsletter business?

Lesley Sim: Wow, that’s hard. they’re just slightly different marketing channels. With social media platforms, that tends to be kind of where you go if you don’t have your own audience. So you’re going on a different platform to try to get found in the first place, but once you’ve grown an audience for yourself, you really want to bring them into your world, your universe, your Marvel cinematic universe. And that’s kind of where newsletter come in. 

Because again, when you’re on a social media platform and you’re trying to get discovered, you’re at the mercy of the algorithms. Once your subscribers or your loyal customers or loyal followers know about you, they do want to know about if you’re a donut shop your Friday, you know, donut special. Or if you’re a hairdresser, there are monthly discounts. If you come in every month, you get a 20 percent discount or something like that. 

They don’t want to have missed it because the algorithm didn’t show it to them. And so that’s where newsletters come in really handy. So you bring in, let’s say, something like 10 percent of your social media following into your newsletters and they’re your most avid fans. You can ensure that whenever you have a promotion or a discount or even just a story or an update to share, those people are going to get it. And that’s kind of the best way to build rapport with them, build a deeper relationship in a way that you just can’t on social media. 

And you own those relationships, right? Because people have opted in, they’ve actively given you your email address. They want to hear from you, which is a very different vibe from social media where they kind of are scrolling randomly happen upon you and follow you and then forget about you five minutes later. 

So I would say that’s not an either or kind of thing. It’s not like you either do Instagram or you do newsletters. It’s more like a funnel where, Instagram and TikTok and social media in general is kind of at the top of the funnel where you are going out of your universe into someone else’s universe to find subscribers and followers and then you’re drawing them in deeper into your funnel via the newsletters and then you know at the end of the day to your shop whether that’s online or in person.

Doc Pop: I like that. It’s not either or I think that’s good. I have been stating things as if they’re binary, but like, yeah, Instagram is great for giving flavor to your business and communicating with your customers, maybe having a back and forth and giving them behind the scenes. But if I’m following an artist, I don’t want to find out about their Monday night art show on Tuesday morning. Because the algorithm messed things up. 

And similarly, if I’m following an artist and they have a new album coming out, I can’t click on a link from Instagram, not super easy, but in an email, totally could. So I like that idea that maybe do both. It’s not one or the other, but it sounds like newsletters have a little bit more of an actionable kind of like, here’s a time dependent thing, or here’s a link we want you to click.

And that maybe is their benefit. Does that sound good?

Lesley Sim: Yeah and I think as your marketing operations grow then obviously you can do more. We’ve got lots of publications using us that publish multiple daily newsletters. And so that’s something that you can aspire to. So it’s not just last minute discounts and stuff like that.

Doc Pop: This is another thing too, I’m thinking very specifically about newsletters as a way to communicate to your customers, but there’s a whole generation of newsletters, post Substack, as you mentioned, there’s a whole generation of newsletter writers that are turning that maybe into income, like writing the newsletters isn’t a way to drive business, it is the business, and does Newsletter Glue support features like that?

Lesley Sim: Not directly, we do work well with a whole bunch of different paywall plugins and software. LeakyPaywall is one of them that we work really closely with, Memberful is another one that lots of our customers use, and so on.

Doc Pop: What about Patreon integration? Is there any kind of integration there?

Lesley Sim: Not right now, but that’s really interesting and I’ll have to look at it.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I’m a Patreon user so I’d love to talk to you about that afterwards. 

So let’s talk about some of the features that somebody can get from Newsletter Glue that might be missing from other things. Like I’m assuming you have Gutenberg integration in Newsletter Glue?

Lesley Sim: Yep. So that’s actually one of the big things about us. We use the block editor. So if you’re still using the classic editor, you’ll find that when you use us, you are faced with something a little bit new, which is the block editor. And one of our core features is that we have a whole bunch of different blocks that really dramatically speed up your workflow.

So customers, on average, say that they save one to two hours per newsletter using us, or you could also say that we cut your publishing time in half. And that’s just because a lot of them, when they’re building email digests, for example, they’re sharing links to their website or to other websites. If they had to do that in an email service provider, they would have had to manually upload the image, type out the heading, type out the excerpt, turn it into a link, and do that five times or ten times, depending on how many links they’re sharing in their newsletter.

With us, you just need to paste in the URL or you can set a bunch of features and filters and it automatically pulls out the articles from your site. And so that takes seconds instead of 20 minutes or half an hour, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Yeah, so that’s kind of one of our main features.

And then also, once you’ve got your newsletter all set up, it’s really easy to hit publish and send the newsletter out from WordPress instead of having to go into Mailchimp to do it.

Doc Pop: Is that how you also manage your subscribers and things too, is through the WordPress dashboard? Or is that something you’d be using the MailChimp side of things to do?

Lesley Sim: That would be on the Mailchimp side of things. So we focus really heavily on the building part, like that kind of the daily work that you have to do to send out the newsletter. So we’ve also got really powerful automation features, so it’s kind of like RSS emails, which if people aren’t familiar with, basically you can set an RSS feed to send out as email notifications every time a new article is published.

While that feature has existed for a long time, it’s kind of always given me anxiety because you don’t have any control over what that final newsletter looks like. And so we built an email automation feature where, while you can also send it out automatically based on a certain time that you’ve set, you can also set it to just save as a draft.

And so this lets you automate 90 percent of the work or 99 percent of the work, and then go in that 1 percent, check that draft, send yourself a test email, update the subject line, and if you’re happy with it, then send it out. It saves a lot of time, but also prevents you from being scared that you’ve accidentally sent out something that you didn’t want to send out.

Doc Pop: I guess just one more question on that when you’re filling out this post or this newsletter form, is there also kind of like Yoast SEO integration if you have Yoast SEO so that it works later on down the line or is that kind of a separate thing?

Lesley Sim: Yeah, so because it’s just in the block editor, you can also use Yoast and do all of the keyword stuff and make it search engine optimized.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Leslie Sim about Newsletter Glue, and I guess we’ll just talk about the state of the industry, so stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host and Email Newsletter Addict, Doc Pop, I am talking to Lesley Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue. And I think one of the things I want to talk about, kind of like changing gears a little bit, we talked about social media and websites, SEO, email newsletters.

We haven’t talked about podcasting, which is a thing that Lesley, I don’t know if you know I’m into, and you had just started a new podcast called Sticky. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Lesley Sim: Yeah, we recently moved to focus on media companies and newsrooms, like I mentioned earlier. Before that, we were kind of targeting anyone with a newsletter, which is kind of a classic business mistake. And so once we moved to focus on media companies and newsrooms, I quickly realized, oh, we need a new way of marketing to them.

And I wanted to provide really high quality content that would help people who are already professionals in the business and not just kind of, me for example, in my room studying my own newsletter for the first time. If I was like an amateur newsletter writer, I would need very different content from someone who has been writing a newsletter for 10 years for a large publication, for example.

And so, I quickly realized, okay, I can’t interview myself or we can’t rely on really basic experience when we write newsletter type articles anymore. And that was when the idea for the podcast came about because I realized that the best people to interview to get really high quality expert level content were expert industry operators.

And so, I’ve been lucky enough to have a whole bunch of customers and friends who have been in the industry for a while, and I got in touch with them and set up a whole bunch of different interviews. The podcast launched this week, the first episode drops next week, and I’m really excited.

The quality is really high, and I feel like even if you’ve been in the newsletter publishing business for the past 10 to 15 years, you’re still going to learn valuable insight and advice from the episodes, so I’m really excited about it.

Doc Pop: Who’s your first guest?

Lesley Sim: My first guest is Alyssa Doin. She used to be head of deliverability at ConvertKit. I think now she’s head of audience growth, still at ConvertKit. She’s been working in deliverability for many years now and has dug into some narrowly deliverability issues. And so we kind of covered that in the podcast. 

And I tried to keep it really, really actionable. So you really hear what you should do in this case? What should you do in that case? And I think I’ve already shared it with some people who are in the news industry and they’ve already found it really helpful.

Doc Pop: And speaking of actionable, if you are a marketer looking to get advanced advice on your email newsletter needs, you can go to sticky.fm to find out more or just look for Sticky on your podcasting app. Did I nail that?

Lesley Sim: Yes, that’s perfect.

Doc Pop: nailed it, And also, while we’re talking about call outs, you can follow Lesley on Twitter @lesley_pizza, or you can follow Newsletter Glue on Twitter as well. And I think on that, Lesley, I’m going to thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been great having you on. Is there anywhere else that you want to tell people to visit before we wrap up here?

Lesley Sim: Nope, that’s about it. NewsletterGlue.com is where you can find more about us.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Lesley. It’s been really great chatting with you. This is Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. Each week we have conversations with different folks in WordPress. Next week we’re going to be talking to Jeff Paul from 10Up about a new open source detector that he’s built so you can scan WordPress plugins and make sure they’re compliant for your needs. I’ll let him tell you more about it next week, but it’s gonna be a fun episode just about open source and business, and maybe what 10 Up is up to these days.

I’m also gonna be at WordCamp US, which will be already finished by the time you hear this podcast, but hopefully, if you were there, I got a chance to say hi to you.

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

The post Press This: You Should be Using Newsletters with Lesley Sim appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

Faust.js is a JavaScript framework made to unleash the power of WordPress for headless websites. Faust is one of the only, if not the only, JavaScript frameworks specifically built around headless WordPress, and Faust.js officially came out of beta on June 12th, 2023. And may even have some features coming up soon just in time for WordCamp US, which is happening next week. So my guest today is Joe Fusco, a Senior Software Engineer at WP Engine who’s working on Faust. And we are going to talk about some of these new features and what’s changed since Faust has come out of beta.

Joe, how are you doing today?

Joe Fusco: Good, Doc, thanks for having me.

Doc Pop: Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. Let’s kick this off with just letting us know, how did you get into WordPress? 

Joe Fusco: Yeah, of course. So my WordPress origin story, I started using WordPress in 2013 around version 3.5. At the time, I was just working on an idea that I had, just building out some minor sort of sites and tinkering around and actually got my foot in the door with a local agency in Rochester, New York, building some custom themes.

And from there, I got my first remote job working for Inksub, which is the company behind WPMU Dev, EduBlogs, and Campus Press. So I got a little time with each of those parts. So I worked for those companies and then from there, I actually moved down to Tampa, Florida, where I had an opportunity to work for a manufacturing company that was using WordPress not only for their marketing site, but kind of internally as well for a bunch of different tools. So I got my feet wet with Headless WordPress then.

I did a lot of custom development there. That was during the pandemic, so everything was switching to remote. I actually had an opportunity to come back to Rochester and that’s when I started working for WP Engine. So yeah, it’s been great ever since.

Doc Pop: You mentioned something there, I hadn’t thought about, but you were doing WordPress, working with some great themes and products. And then when you moved to Florida, you were still doing WordPress, but you were doing headless WordPress for a factory. Like that sounds really interesting to me and I feel like you gotta dive into that tidbit just a little more.

Joe Fusco: Absolutely. Yeah. So this opportunity, I just got an email one day saying, “Hey, we like your stuff on GitHub. Can we have you come down?” 

And I thought it was fake at first, it just seemed really spammy. And so I was like, yeah, sure, I’ll come down.

And they offered me a job. It’s with one of the world’s largest door manufacturers. They have a few buildings out in Tampa. And it was really surreal, moved the whole family down there, we were there for three years. And it was a lot of headless sort of components that we started to build out.

So the actual org, the marketing side was very familiar with WordPress. They were very much invested in WordPress. So using WordPress headless kind of made sense just given that we already had those systems set up at the time. So yeah, there was some pretty cool things that were created out of that, like some door configurators.

Doc Pop: I love this, thank you so much for diving into that. 

Joe Fusco: Oh yeah.

Doc Pop: I love that the story took this turn into the world’s largest door manufacturer and headless WordPress technology and it’s all tied together. Let’s get back into talking about Faust. I believe that Faust.js first, WP Engine first launched a version in late 2021.

Like September 2021. And just recently, a couple months ago, they have come out of beta with the official release of the product. Can you just tell our listeners what is Faust.js and what has happened in those few years between the start of the project and it coming out of beta?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, so certainly, Faust.js originally started as a, I believe, a sort of a hackathon project and then evolved from there. Went through a few different sort of phases. One was with GQty, which is a GraphQL Client. From there, it just wasn’t the best tool for that time as we were scaling.

So we decided to switch to Apollo. And from there, we’ve been building out a lot of new features. Most recently coming out of beta, we just wanted to kind of indicate to the community that this is a production ready sort of framework, so while nothing specifically was tied to that 1.0 release, there have been some huge sort of ideas that have come out that we currently have RFCs for on the GitHub. 

Doc Pop: So let’s talk about these RFC’s. First off, I don’t see many requests for comments on plugins in the WordPress community. Oftentimes, it seems like maybe developers are listening, checking on Twitter or things like that. But, the actual kind of opening it up and getting feedback. That’s pretty interesting. Maybe that’s because this is such a big project that that’s why y’all are doing that.

But I was wondering before we get into the specific RFCs, maybe you could just tell us why did y’all go to GitHub and reach out for comments from users?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, so Faust has been an open source project. However, it’s been sort of corporately sponsored by a WP Engine. So with that comes its own challenges. We have our own process internally, but we’re on GitHub open source, and there’s the whole open source culture.

Around that with other engineers contributing back. So there was really just a little bit of a gap that we were noticing with feedback and not everything being out in the open, or I guess you could say building in public with these decisions.

So wanted incorporate RFCs into our workflow. Get some feedback from the community directly and iterate just in public on these thoughts. So it’s been great so far. We’ve loved the feedback that has been provided and look forward to doing this more.

Doc Pop: One of the first tickets that I saw was a request for comments on React components to Gutenberg blocks. This document provides a detailed proposal for converting existing React components into Gutenberg blocks. People listening should know what Gutenberg blocks are, but these are the block-based editing that WordPress has pivoted to. Can you tell us about what the proposal here is for?

Joe Fusco: The React components to Gutenberg blocks. This is sort of the next evolution of the React Gutenberg bridge, if you will, and essentially what we want to do is take existing React components that are in a Next application and just have those kind of automatically sync over to WordPress. So, if you have a Gutenberg block created in one spot. You don’t have to go and duplicate that and install a plugin and have it on both sides with duplicate code. So we really want Faust to be able to handle that and facilitate that sort of connection between the two ecosystems, if you will.

Doc Pop: And what are the challenges with doing something like that?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, so challenges so far, I mean, we’re definitely still sort of discovering different things with this, but we’ve built some POCs so far and getting us like 90 percent of the way there. So some of the challenges right now, one of the big ones is naming. I know that that’s kind of like not a technical thing, but just, what do we call this thing?

Naming’s always hard. But beyond that, trying to make WordPress think that this block, that WordPress doesn’t normally look for blocks like that are remotely somewhere else, but just getting it to play nicely with WordPress. So as far as WordPress concerns, it would just be a traditional sort of block that you would create maybe with the WordPress helper. I think it’s like NPX create block. 

Doc Pop: In the request for comments, have you all gotten any feedback on this specific issue that has helped your team or has shown that there’s a priority that you didn’t expect to hear about?

Joe Fusco: Not at the moment or not yet. I think a lot of the conversation so far has just been sort of conceptualizing what this idea is, because we’re in this space now where like, no one’s really done anything like this, from what I could see. So a lot of innovation here. And with that comes sort of building those mental models for the community to understand.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. This is definitely uncharted territory, as you’re talking about, even with naming. Naming parts of it is difficult, and there’s a lot of working parts, but also I feel like Gutenberg and the Block Editor is still maybe a moving target. Has that been kind of an issue when you’re developing something around Gutenberg that there’s a change from core that was unexpected, or is Gutenberg pretty stable these days?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, great question. So in the beginning, when I joined the team, yes, there was absolutely some changes that were happening that were kind of setting us back a little bit, just different sort of schemas and whatnot. I would say this year, it’s been pretty stable, at least with the parts that we’re utilizing of WordPress.

So it’s been a lot better. We’re really only focusing on those production ready things, but still keeping our ear close to the bleeding edge features of Gutenberg.

Doc Pop: And that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to continue our conversation with Joe Fusco about Faust.js and Headless WordPress, so stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, we’re talking to Joe Fusco from WP Engine about Faust.js and what’s happening with the request for comments for some proposed changes. And we were talking earlier in the show about how not many of the plugins that I follow put out requests for comments that I see, but maybe they do, and I’m not that tuned into it, but we’re talking about the ones that are being put out by the Faust.js crew now, and we talked about one RFC for React components to Gutenberg blocks, another one that I think is worth bringing up is Next.js, AppRouterSupport, and Faust. Joe, can you tell us what is the proposal here?

Joe Fusco: The Next. js App Router support and Faust proposal. We’ve done a bit of research into just seeing how we can support the new App Router feature in Next.js. So with that, we propose some possible solutions here. 

But essentially, what we’re trying to do is AppRouter is using React server components. So what that means is we can kind of fetch data from WordPress on the server, rather than making one big sort of GraphQL query to grab everything as you can currently see in our current examples on the Faust repo. So yeah, we’re all really excited about this.

It kind of opens Faust up to be more framework agnostic as well. Just being able to support React server components in general. So, you can imagine maybe you have some custom fields on a post and maybe some custom fields somewhere else or like a menu. Ideally, we want files to be able to handle fetching those or at least be able to provide utilities to help developers sort of lower that friction to getting started with WordPress and headless.

Doc Pop: And I see as part of the proposal, it’s saying that with the introduction of AppRouter, there is a new file called head.Js that has custom support for fetching metadata, which should help users with SEO. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits there?

Joe Fusco: We’ve been working on or just kind of brainstorming how we want to handle this. So SEO is a huge part of WordPress, lots of SEO plugins, and really on the headless side SEO is not, it’s not really prioritized, at least with headless WordPress. It’s kind of like roll your own sort of solution.

So we want Faust to be able to fill that gap and we think that this metadata API could definitely help us get there.

Doc Pop: And also as part of this change, you mentioned it would help keep Faust agnostic. And I’m seeing here that that’s going to help plugin developers and people who use plugins. Can you talk about what this change means? Why AppRouter support could help plugins work better with Faust?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, yeah, certainly. With this proposal, it’s somewhat of a paradigm shift. We don’t think so much like replacing how Faust is currently set up, but more so like just offering more utilities and a helper. So you can imagine a WordPress plugin has some custom settings. Faust provides a tool to just quickly grab those on the front end in your Next app. Yeah, just kind of help facilitate that connection between those two ecosystems of WordPress and Next.

Doc Pop: The WordPress Rest API was released in 4.7. I can’t remember if it was maybe 2016. And I’m just kind of curious about what GraphQL, ’cause we’re talking about that a lot with Faust.js. What does GraphQL offer that maybe people couldn’t get from the REST API that’s in WordPress core?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, yeah, great question. GraphQL allows, I would say the biggest thing, without getting too much into what GraphQL is, but I just shaping your data like how you want it. So I can decide like, hey, I only want X, Y, and Z to be returned from WordPress. I can send a request that just has those things in the order I want them.

And GraphQL through WP GraphQL plugin will provide that in the exact sort of shape that I want. So I’m not having to filter through a bunch of fluff in a response. That might be like REST. There’s a lot of extra stuff there.

Doc Pop: WordCamp US, I mentioned at the top of the show, WordCamp US is coming up, as far as when we’re recording, it’s next week. I’m just kind of curious if, first off, if you’re planning on going to WordCamp US and if people can reach you there. And secondly, if there’s going to be maybe any Faust or GraphQL representation there, like at the WP Engine booth, or any maybe new announcements coming out about that.

Joe Fusco: Yeah, yeah, certainly. So I will definitely be heading to WordCamp US. Pretty excited about that. This will be my second one. I think my other one was in Philadelphia in 2015. But yeah, I will be there, happy to answer any questions, I’ll be hanging around the WP Engine booth. There will be some other folks with me, I believe it’s Jeff Everhart and Jordan Maslin, so definitely come and say hi and pick our brains.

Doc Pop: WP Engine often has great swag. I haven’t seen any, but are there gonna be any stickers or anything for Faust? I don’t know if that community kind of has its own branding yet.

Joe Fusco: So, I don’t believe that we’ll have right now any Faust specific stickers. I do know that there will be other swag there, but yeah, we’re kind of at the beginning of just starting to somewhat brand Faust a little bit as it matures.

Doc Pop: On that topic, if people are interested, if they’re listening to this and they’re interested in Faust, what is maybe a good thing for them to do to learn about it and kind of dive in a little bit to try it out?

Joe Fusco: We would love to have y’all, anyone interested in trying it out. I would say the best way is to just visit our site, faustjs.org. You can head over there to the Getting Started section, and it’ll walk you through one of our example projects, where you can just set it up with a single command and get it running and see how the data flows and works there.

Doc Pop: For that sample project, it’s web based. Do you know if that’s the same as the WordPress, I think it’s called, I don’t know if it’s the WordPress sandbox, but like the kind of online web version of WordPress where you can kind of try it out without actually hosting it. Are y’all using the same thing there?

Joe Fusco: So we don’t have any of the WordPress Playgrounds set up on our current site, but that is something that I’m personally looking at and I’ve been geeking out about too. So I have a Code Pen I could share after this, with a link that has the Faust WordPress plugin set up with GraphQL in the WordPress Playground.

So that’s definitely a quick way to check out the WordPress side of things.

Doc Pop: On the website that you were just mentioning, can people also find a link to the GitHub? Or should we give them a quick link for that as well?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, I can add a link to that, but yeah, GitHub is WPEngine.Faustjs, and that houses our NPM packages and the WordPress plugin, so come and check it out,

Doc Pop: We’re going to take one more quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Joe Fusco about Faust.Js, GraphQL, and Headless WordPress, so stay tuned right after this short break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, we’re talking to Joe Fusco about Faust.js and some of the things that are coming. We’ve talked about the request for comments. We’ve talked about officially coming out of beta. We’ve talked about WordCamp US. And I guess the last thing I wanna ask Joe is I’m always curious when there’s new technology like this, if there’s ways for me to kind of see it in the wild.

Are there any good examples you can think of Faust.js being used in the wild for people to kind of play around with, or at least just hear about the story of how it’s being used.

Joe Fusco: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re really happy with the amount of adoption that Faust is getting so far. So much so that even WP Engine right now is utilizing Faust and hosted on our Atlas platform. So definitely check that out, see how blistering fast it is and yeah, it’s really cool. 

On faustjs.org, we are planning to add a little showcase section that highlights some of those awesome sites that are currently using Faust. And yeah, one of those being our main site, WPEngine.com, on the Atlas platform as well. 

You don’t need to be on WP Engine to use Faust. Just want to clarify that. It can be used with any sort of platform. But we do feel that Atlas is the best environment for Faust to kind of be hosted on.

Doc Pop: And we didn’t talk about Atlas in particular. Do you want to quickly tie in the difference between like Atlas and Faust? 

Joe Fusco: Yeah, so Atlas is WP Engine’s headless framework. So that’s like, if you want to host a WordPress site, and the Node side, the next step, Atlas is where you want to go. There’s also a bunch of other tools that are offered with that, such as Atlas Search. It’s pretty powerful, a lot of awesome features going into that and actively being developed.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s a great spot for us to wrap up this conversation with Joe Fusco. If you’d like to learn more about Faust.js, you can go to faustjs.org. You can also find them on GitHub. And I’m sure if you look around on Twitter and other places, you’ll be able to find people talking about it as well.

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

The post Press This: How Faust.js Listens to the Community appeared first on Torque.

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

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

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

Wherever you look online these days, it seems like the web is consolidating into fewer and fewer pillars. Now, on this podcast, we often focus on ways to optimize your WordPress website or improve your SEO ranking for Google. But on this episode, we’re going to just talk about a philosophy that celebrates individuality, a realm of freedom and expression that might challenge our perceptions of the WordPress user experience.

Today, we are going to be talking about the IndieWeb, which is a group of web designers and users who are creating the type of web that they’d like to see, a non corporate web. The existence of an IndieWeb, implies the existence of a dependent web. And so these are the folks that are trying to fix that.

So today, we are going to be talking to David Wolfpaw, a website mechanic for FixUpFox, as well as a theme and plugin developer and a contributor for the WordPress Community Team. David, how are you doing today?

David Wolfpaw: I’m doing very well, yourself?

Doc Pop: I’m doing great. I’d love to kick this off by just hearing about how you got into WordPress.

David Wolfpaw: Absolutely. I’ve been doing web development for over 20 years now, looking back before WordPress was around. But I didn’t actually get into WordPress until 2008. So I’d been around for about five years at that point. I’d been using other CMSs. I’d been doing a lot of PHP coding, you know, separate of using any CMS.

And quite honestly, I just wanted to try out a few different tools for managing my own personal website at the time. I was already blogging prior to that, but I was doing blogging in the manner of just writing new pieces of content at the start of an HTML page and uploading it to a server. So finding that there was a tool specifically built for that, it was pretty easy to get on. But I also found that when I started using WordPress, I brought a lot of my own existing habits to the WordPress space. 

So for example, when I built my first WordPress website, I had no idea that there was a navigation system built into the dashboard. So I went in and edited the header.php file every time I wanted to change a link to a page or something. So, you know, not everything is immediately apparent to someone who’s not used the software.

Doc Pop: And WordPress is still your main CMS, or do you tend to kind of explore Joomla and other CMSs as well?

David Wolfpaw: No. WordPress is still my main CMS. I have worked on some Drupal sites before along with some other CMSs and other non-blogging non-site builder platforms. But I continue to return to WordPress time and time again.

Doc Pop: And let’s get into that main topic. What is the IndieWeb in your definition?

David Wolfpaw: Yeah, so I would first direct anybody to visit IndieWeb.org to find out information about a wide variety of IndieWeb related topics. There’s a whole section specifically devoted to WordPress there. 

My personal definition of the IndieWeb is any site that the user is building for themselves for their own purposes, that doesn’t just mean like personal use, but it could also mean for business use, that is disconnected from a third party centralized service. What I mean by that is you are building your own website or using your own social media that is hosted elsewhere, then building a Facebook page to promote your business or using Squarespace to build a website for yourself. Those things have their own uses and their own values, but you have a lot less control over them.

Doc Pop: And what are some of the other CMSs that are part of the IndieWeb? If Squarespace would be a third party that you’re dependent on, what are some of the CMSs out there that are popular in the IndieWeb community?

David Wolfpaw: One big part of it, I guess one thing that I didn’t bring up is that, usually it’s things that you are self-hosting. But I do wanna make a distinction that you do not need to be self-hosting, to do something that you’d consider part of that or at least I don’t think so.

But that you have the opportunity to self-host. So you might use the Ghost CMS, for instance, or WordPress.com. And you may have, those companies host it for you, but when it comes to platforms like WordPress or Ghost, two that I would consider very popular in that realm, you have the opportunity to self host them if you want.

And also you have data portability. So if I start a website on WordPress.com, and I decide later that I want to self host that website, I can do so without losing any of my content, because WordPress has led the way in making data portability very important when it comes to your content online so I can easily take all of my content and move it to my own site.

Doc Pop: That rings true to me. I feel like I’ve talked to Tontek throughout the years about the IndieWeb and heard that self hosting was kind of a big part of it. I always thought it was like a requirement. But the way you just phrased it kind of makes me think the reason I don’t use Twitter anymore is maybe because I want to be able to own my content and move it around and not be dependent on someone. 

And even though I’m not hosting my Mastodon instance, I could, and the same reason I have my personal website on WordPress instead of on some other places, I’m not dependent on that other place in terms if they make a policy change or break something, I can always have my website under my control, but beyond that, I also have the option.

I’m not self hosting. I can’t imagine self hosting my site, but I have that option. So I think the data portability and all that kind of goes together. And just because I’m not hosting my own site doesn’t mean that maybe I’m not still following some of the principles that are building philosophies of the IndieWeb.

David Wolfpaw: Absolutely, I would agree with that. One example, earlier this year, Automatic hired Matthias, I don’t think I’ve heard his last name out loud, Pfefferle, and if I’m mispronouncing it, Matthias, I’m sorry. Specifically to work on ActivityPub related plugins for WordPress, both for WordPress.org users, but also for people on WordPress.com. 

And I’m highlighting that as the larger, what I would consider a more centralized company in terms of if you’re hosting on WordPress.com, you are bound to they’re decision making about the hosting platform, but you still have that ability to do some of the more IndieWeb things such as communicate cross platform. 

The real reason I want to make that distinction that I don’t think hosting is the only thing is it has a lot more in my mind to do with what you can do with the things that you have. A good example is that without using a third party tool that’s just double posting things, and I’m just going to say this is notwithstanding any of the weird confusion going on with centralized social media right now, which, I’m sure all the listeners know, you can’t just make an Instagram post and have that show up as a Twitter post as well.

You can’t post a story on Snapchat and have that also be available for people on Facebook. But when it comes to the IndieWeb, you can do things like that. I can use my Mastodon account to listen to music from a FunkWale instance, which is a decentralized music platform. There’s things like Peertube, so I can I use my account on my Mastodon instance to comment on people’s YouTube channels, for instance, using Peertube, and I don’t need to maintain a separate account somewhere. 

Right now, a lot of the different platforms are seen as clones, I would say, like PixelFed is what a lot of people call an Instagram clone, which is a fair assessment, but I think it’s less, we’re just trying to copy what this platform has done, and more of a these are the ways people have decided to share themselves online the tools that we have, photo, video, text, audio, and there just happens to be a centralized company that’s done that first.

Doc Pop: You mentioned the idea of how we would’ve done that before would’ve been like cross posting or double posting I think is a better way to put it. Where if you want something to go out to all the different places, you literally post it on Twitter and then you copy paste and you post it to Facebook or whatever.

And I like how you’re talking about this positive feature of the IndieWeb through the ActivityPub is how you don’t have to double posts. You can just choose how you follow things and choose how you share things. You could share on Pixel Fed and somebody following on Mastodon could interact with it.

And we are going to bring this back into WordPress because ActivityPub has great integrations with WordPress and there’s a lot of crossover and a lot of potential for how we’ll be able to share and comment. And do all sorts of powerful things from WordPress while still having something that feels like the web we know today.

Just a decentralized version of it, and we’re gonna get back to that after this short break. So stay tuned for more with our conversation with David Wolfpaw, right after this.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to David Wolfpaw, a website mechanic for FixUpFox, and we are talking about the IndieWeb, and we’re gonna talk about how the IndieWeb can help keep the web weird and how WordPress can be part of that. Right before the break, we talked about plugins that are available and the potential for WordPress to kind of crossover with things outside of WordPress.

David, let’s get into that. What sort of tools are there to help WordPress users join the IndieWeb?

David Wolfpaw: The first thing that I would clarify is I think that if you are hosting your own WordPress site, you are already de facto part of the IndieWeb. You are doing all of the things that I would consider core to the IndieWeb ethos. But you probably want to go beyond that. You probably want to discuss ways that you can interact elsewhere or that you can do more with your own site.

The first plugin that I would suggest is the IndieWeb plugin itself, just because it’s an easy name to remember. And the IndieWeb plugin doesn’t do anything on its own, so much as wrap together a lot of functionality of various other plugins. I would compare it kind of to Jetpack in that way, in that you’re installing one tool that helps you manage a variety of different tools.

So some of the things that the IndieWeb plugin itself provides is a way to do web mentions. So when you use a Webmention, you are notifying another website that some activity has taken place on your website. So an example of how I use the Webmention plugin on my personal site is that I can write a post on my site and then I can copy the link to that post and I can write my own post on Mastodon, being like, hey, blah blah blah, I wrote this article, take a look. 

When somebody responds via Mastodon, that will show up on my personal website. So no longer does somebody have to go to your website and go fill out the comment form down there and wait for your approval there. Although I’ll specify, you can still set comments to require approval on your site. So it’s a lot easier way to get engagement and more interaction on your content, which I found that it leads to more engagement because it’s a lot easier for you to see a link and make a comment about it where you’ve seen the link, as opposed to having to follow it elsewhere. 

Another tool that I want to highlight within that plugin is the syndication links. Think about it kind of like canonical links. Basically, if you are cross posting to other places, you have a way to indicate where it’s been cross posted, where people can get other copies, and vice versa, if those sites support syndication links back, you’ll be able to, again, get more traffic to your own site. So one example that I use here is Medium.

If anyone regularly uses Medium to blog, you do have the ability to post to your own website, post the same content to Medium, and then use syndication links to ensure that people are going back to your own website.

Doc Pop: I wanted to just kind of mention, first off, for anyone listening, the IndieWeb plugin that we’re talking about, and probably the others that we’re talking about, these are all available in the WordPress repository, wordpress.org, and the IndieWeb. I love that description of it as sort of like the Jetpack for this, because it is a package of plugins, right?

It’s like a suite of plugins, or am I wrong on that?

David Wolfpaw: So basically it lets you use that as a way to install other plugins. And you can also deactivate them from there. So it’s not saying that Post Kinds or IndieAuth or Micropub are built into this plugin so much as it’s a portal for you to get them, more readily. But it does have its own settings and options that allow you to connect to other plugins.

So what I mean to say is if you, let’s say, have the syndication links active, you can choose which providers you have set up. You can choose how it’s going to look on your website. and you can set up specific API keys to use it for other websites, but you can, you can go in there and say, I specifically want to activate GitHub so that if somebody interacts with something via GitHub, it will come back to my site.

And for developers that can be very useful depending on what kind of project they’re working on. I mean, there’s a variety of different things. There’s also a tool that’s heavily integrated called Bridgy, which is another way that it’s external of WordPress itself, but it can be integrated with this plugin to allow people to do cross posting between websites that allow it.

Doc Pop: That’s cool. You mentioned one of my favorite use cases that I’ve experienced. We haven’t talked about the ActivityPub plugin yet, but I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin. And when I post from my personal blog, it goes up to its own feed, sort of independent of my Mastodon feed. It goes up as a different feed.

And if people leave comments on it if they see it as a post and they’re like, oh, here’s my comment, it shows up on my blog post. And so I go to my blog and there’s this natural feeling. It’s a comment to the post and it’s so cool as a writer to just make that ease where, you know, someone could post on one place and it shows up on another and it just feels seamless and natural.

It’s super cool.

David Wolfpaw: Oh, absolutely. If you were tolook at the back end of my site, and look at posts and look at the comments on posts. I could probably identify the day that I activated that plugin because suddenly there’s so much more engagement and to be clear that engagement is always there or presumably it’s there if you are sharing things elsewhere, but the problem is it’s all siloed in other places.

And I’m not just saying this in terms, like when I’m saying engagement, I don’t just mean like it’s good for the SEO and everything, although I think that it is, I also think that it’s good to be able to as much as we talk about decentralization in the IndieWeb, it’s good to be able to centralize the conversation a bit in a place that you have more control over. 

So again, you both have that decentralized aspect of people can respond on whatever platform they’re most comfortable on or wherever they see it, but you have that ability to combine everything together in a place that it’s useful to me to be able to see it all there.

Doc Pop: We’re running low on time, but I do want to talk about two things: rel= me and ActivityPub. First let’s start off with, can you tell us the significance for WordPress users of “REL=me” on Mastodon and sites like that?

David Wolfpaw: Yes, so rel=me that is an attribute for link elements. Basically, you would post an HTML link element or an anchor element, either or, and you can use that to indicate that you have to verify. So I can go to my Mastodon account. And put in my account, I have DavidWolfPaw.com. And then on my website, on my personal site, I can put a link to my Mastodon account.

Being able to put those links on both directions using that rel=me attribute. is a good enough indicator that I’m an owner of that. So it’s a way to verify yourself on those platforms. When a lot of people moved over from Twitter, they wanted to know, like, you know, how do you verify? How are people having checkmarks in their bio when they’re not verified?

The answer is it doesn’t really work the same, but you can verify in a more I’m proving that I am who I say I am kind of way. And you can do the same with other platforms that are built in, such as GitHub has it built in, and I believe Tumblr does as well, there’s a few others.

Doc Pop: Yeah. Everybody should have it built in. It’s inexcusable that they don’t.

David Wolfpaw: Well they want to keep their walled gardens, but yes, I agree. Everyone should have it. 

And then the other thing is the ActivityPub extension. If you look at my Learn WordPress Webinar concerning the IndieWeb. I didn’t really address that plugin quite as much because while it existed at the time, even though that was only a few months ago, it was not nearly as fully fledged as it is now.

And I think that speaks volumes to, one, how much more work a developer can do when they have the support of a large company like Automattic, and two, how much more focus there is on this. I’ve been on Mastodon for, you know, almost seven years now, but only in the past year or so for various reasons has it really taken off.

Doc Pop: I think that’s a good spot for us to take another final break. And when we come back, we’ll wrap up our conversation with David Wolfpaw about how we can go back to the web’s weird roots. So stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and we have talked about the IndieWeb, its philosophy, how you can apply it practically to your WordPress usage, and also how you use other social media sites and integrate it all together. 

And on this final thing at the beginning of the show, I talked about how it feels like the web is consolidating into fewer and fewer silos. And I kind of hope to see those shaken up, but that may or may not happen. And it seems so different than the early days of the web, which wasn’t just about weird. I mean, it was definitely weird, but it wasn’t just weird. It was experimental. It was fun. It was creative. It was so expressive. 

And I feel like we’ve certainly lost something there. And so, David, just kind of at the end, I wanted to hear your thoughts about how the IndieWeb can help keep the web weird and why that’s important.

David Wolfpaw: Yeah. I’ll just say for myself personally, I am a bingo card of intersectional different marginalized groups. I’m a queer person who is Hispanic and I’m neurodivergent and et cetera, et cetera. I can go on and on about all the different things that the centralized web does not treat too kindly, is probably the most polite way I can put it. So there are a lot of places where I have not felt very welcome online, but a lot of the IndieWeb spaces that I’ve found have really been a much better, healthier, stronger community than I ever had on any other platform.

So I think that’s really important because it allows people who might not otherwise be heard or who might be silenced on a platform because they might make a dangerous suggestion like we shouldn’t be killing trans people, and allow them to say that without being banned. I also think it’s just better when you have a bit more control over the things you’re posting and the things you share online. 

You don’t know what’s going to happen to these platforms over time. I think even a year ago, August 2022, if you asked people what Twitter would be like today, they probably wouldn’t be picturing the reality of Twitter in August 2023. Because it hasn’t even been a year since that sale was made final.

But it’s completely different. I’m completely off that platform after over a decade of using it. And I still keep going with the self hosted Mastodon, and since I have, I just find it’s a better community. 

I’m trying to think of a good way to put this. I think that an important part of keeping the web weird is that it makes it antithetical to advertising. So, while I don’t consider advertising itself a bad thing, obviously we all are doing it for our businesses, for our own sites the people listening to this probably do a lot as well. I think you can understand that the ad industry on the web right now is broken, and it’s been called the original sin of the web.

I don’t disagree with that, and I think that having more personal control means that you don’t have to rely on that quite as much to share what you want to share. I’m not thinking about the economics of posting tutorials to my website to share with others. I’m not thinking of how many impressions I’m going to get on a photo that I take. Because that’s going to lead to a brand deal or something. 

It can sound a bit counter to how a lot of people view being online. But also, all of us are just trying to live our own lives online in some way. And it’s just a lot more enjoyable when we have a bit more control and when we don’t feel that we’re beholden to what someone else thinks is brand safe or appropriate.

Doc Pop: I have to say, I have benefited greatly through the work that people have done to make these IndieWeb tools and to make the web more open, and I just think it’s so much better. Things aren’t necessarily free ’cause they’re not paid for by your attention and advertising and stuff like that.

There’s a little bit more of a learning curve, usability, sometimes it can feel different than these other things. But these are tools that have been made that I benefit from. I’m so glad for the work that’s been done, and I totally acknowledge that these tools are created by marginalized people who didn’t feel safe on other spaces and they built all of the groundwork that now I just get to come in and, you know, see this beautiful like Pixel Fed and Mastodon and all sorts of things that have been built by people who needed to create a space for their own, but it’s so inclusive and such a great features to them because of whatever reasons that they had in their philosophies.

That I just think the web is so much better if we can kind of bump off the corporate web. And as WordPress users, we’re already halfway there. So David, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for joining us and for telling us about the IndieWeb and the different tools that are available.

If people want to follow you online, where do you recommend sending them?

David Wolfpaw: Yeah. You can find my personal website at davidwolfpaw.com. And then you can also find me on Mastodon. 

Doc Pop: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and thanks to everyone who’s listened to this episode of Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. We have lots of great episodes in the can as well. We’re a weekly podcast. Check out last week’s episode with Rogier Lankhorst from Really Simple Plugins about SSL and Really Simple SSL.

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

The post Press This: How WordPress Can Keep the Web Independent with David Wolfpaw appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

Today, we’re diving into the critical world of website security with a spotlight on SSL certificates. SSL cert is like a virtual shield that encrypts data and protects your user’s data. Now, if that’s not enough to keep you listening, imagine pouring your heart and soul into making a beautiful website only to have Google slap a big “Not Secure” label on your site when visitors try accessing it through Chrome, simply because you aren’t using HTTPS or SSL.

Here to talk to me today is Rogier Lankhorst, the lead developer of Really Simple Plugins, the makers of the extremely popular WordPress plugin, Really Simple SSL, Rogier, thank you so much for joining us today.

I’d love to hear about your origin story and how you got into WordPress.

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, thanks for having me in the show. Originally, I think in 2016, a customer asked me to get his website onto SSL as quickly as possible. So I installed a plugin that was popular at that time and the whole site went down. So at that moment, I thought I can do this more lightweight and easier, with just one click install.

And I published it on WordPress and it really was a rollercoaster coaster after that.

Doc Pop: Absolutely. And, this was not your first WordPress plugin, right? This was the first one that really took off in such a massive way, but you had some other Really Simple plugins before that.

Rogier Lankhorst: Some really small experiments, things I thought of at the time and published them and they didn’t really take off, as you said. So Really Simple SSL was the first, big hit you could say.

Doc Pop: I always like that analogy about buying lots of lottery tickets. Like you put out a lot of experiments and one of them caught on and you’ve been able to build a business from it. And since we’re talking about SSL, can you tell the listeners what an SSL certificate is? And why is it important for a WordPress site to have one?

Rogier Lankhorst: With SSL certificates, the website encrypts all data before it’s sent to the website visitor and the other way around as well. So it helps secure the web and not only for web shops, but also for any website that otherwise could be impersonated by attackers. And it’s also great for ranking in Google.

And it just looks a lot better in your browser if there’s a lock on your website. SSL is free, so why not install it?

Doc Pop: I mentioned at the beginning of this show, how the first time I ever thought about SSL was when I was using Chrome and came across a site that was not secure and that site was mine. So I was scared by my own site. And had to learn about installing SSL certificates in order to hopefully have a better experience when users come to my site and see it. Once you install SSL and you have an HTTPS address, then Google won’t show that warning anymore on Chrome visits, but does it also affect SEO?

Rogier Lankhorst: Yeah, sure. Google has a lot of powerful tools to get users to do what they want. And the most powerful tool they have is the ranking. So if they want website owners to do something, they just put it in the ranking mechanism and the website will follow.

Doc Pop: And you mentioned that SSL certificates are free these days. I believe when I first signed up for them, that was just beginning to happen, it seemed like it was a painful process and maybe cost some money and then services like Let’s Encrypt came around and really made it easier. On top of that, a lot of web hosts, mine included, started offering free Let’s Encrypt, they started building it into the process to make it as simple as possible, which is really helpful. 

So with these alternatives out there now for being able to install, maybe from my host, is there a reason that someone would still be using Really Simple SSL instead of if their host offers it?

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, Really Simple SSL was not originally built to generate SSL certificates. That’s just something we added two years ago, because I thought, well, if we are Really Simple SSL, we should be able to generate a certificate as well, but it’s not the main reason people install Really Simple SSL.

When users have SSL, they don’t often they often don’t know what to do with it. And in WordPress, you need to do a few things; add redirects, fix mixed content, stuff like that, add security headers to really get all out of the secure SSL you can get out of it. So I think that’s still the main reason, people install Really Simple SSL for just the quickest method to get SSL configured on your website.

Doc Pop: Yeah, and there are some added security features that aren’t, I don’t think of them necessarily as SSL related that are part of Really Simple SSL. Can you tell us about some of the other advanced features that a Really Simple SSL includes?

Rogier Lankhorst: We noticed a lot of people already thought of us as a security plugin. So, that’s when I thought we have to fulfill those expectations. We started with adding some hardening features, like blocking user registration. A lot of website owners are not aware that user registration is opened and things like the debug log location, which can contain important information, like user email addresses or license keys or stuff like that. File editing, feedback on the login screen. 

If you log in and WordPress says, the username is not correct, the attacker knows, I can try again. So all those things are really the start for us to broaden into a full security plugin eventually. And the last feature we added was the vulnerability detection, which is really a great tool to really secure your website as most issues in WordPress websites with security are caused by plugins with a vulnerability, which are not updated. So if users are more aware of that, I think WordPress will become a lot more secure.

Doc Pop: Everything you mentioned, I think, are little pet peeves that people have about WordPress security. And it is really interesting that Really Simple SSL has kind of evolved into this easy way to install an SSL certificate, but also like these things should be patched. Here’s a really easy way to fix that.

I’m kind of curious if bloat is a concern of yours, when you have a plugin called Really Simple SSL. Are you worried sometimes that by adding these extra features, you might be making it a little more difficult. And then I guess on top of that, are you also thinking about changing the name of the plugin as you add more features?

Rogier Lankhorst: Yeah, well, eventually that is the goal that it will become Really Simple Security. I think that will be the beginning of next year. But while talking about bloat, that’s a difficult thing. You want to keep things as simple as possible. So we have worked hard to make it still possible to just do the SSL activation.

And all other things are modular and not loaded when you don’t use it, but at the same time, I think we’re really good at making complex stuff really simple. 

I think that’s where our power is what we can really do for people to make it really simple for non technical users. And for more advanced users, they can dive a bit more into the settings.

Doc Pop: That’s wonderful. I think that’s a good spot for us to take a short break. And when we come back, we’re going to keep talking to Rogier about Google’s push for SSL. And I guess just, we’re going to talk a little bit more about what it’s like having one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress repository.

So stay tuned for that.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. Today I’m talking to Rogier Lankhorst, the lead developer at Really Simple Plugins. And we are talking about SSL because Really Simple plugins makes an extremely popular plugin called Really Simple SSL. Rogier before, before this break I mentioned that a large reason that we’re talking about SSL certificates these days is largely because Google made a push on the web for this to happen. 

I’m also seeing that Google is pushing for maybe shortening the term. So some SSL certificates are for like two years, and Google’s talking about pushing for 90 day SSL certificates. Did you have any thoughts about how Google encouraged people to get SSLs?

Do you think that worked out great for everyone?

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, I think it’s a good thing. At the time that Google started with this, a lot of users still thought SSL isn’t important for me because I have just a small blog. I don’t have any user data on my site, but there are a lot of other ways attackers can use that kind of connection between websites and maybe show wrong information to users, pretending to be there with another website.

So I think it’s very important that all websites will have an SSL connection eventually. So I think although Google always has its own reasons for doing things like this. In this case. It’s a good thing.

Doc Pop: And the 90 day limits, did you have thoughts on that?

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, I’m not very familiar with the reasons behind it, I have to admit, but I know a bit about it and that it’s more secure to have shorter lifetimes of certificates. And I think it won’t make that much difference because the most used SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt are already for 90 days, so it wouldn’t have much impact anyway.

Doc Pop: So let’s go back to talking about Really Simple SSL. There’s a version on the WordPress repository, the plugin repository, the free version with 5 million. I know I keep saying that, but it’s such a shocking number, 5 million active users or more. 

What is the difference between the free version of Really Simple SSL and the pro version that I know that y’all offer?

Rogier Lankhorst: The pro version mainly contains a lot of security headers and I think most users are not really familiar with security headers. But these are some very important headers users can set on their websites, which will also increase security. And not only for their own website, but also for the website visitors, which I think is often forgotten in security.

We make it really easy to configure security headers and we are currently working on vulnerability detection for example. We have a feature which automatically handles the updates or current time, if a vulnerability is detected. We also have some cool new features coming up, which will prevent creation of admin users by any other methods than the WordPress user profile update or creation.

So if you look at recent vulnerabilities, you will see a big problem is when admin users are created. So if you lock that, you prevent a lot of vulnerabilities.

Doc Pop: We had talked about the ranking of this plugin and the WordPress repository. I’m on the popular page on wordpress.org/plugins right now, and I don’t know if these are ranked in terms of order, but these are all plugins with 5 million active installs or higher. I see that just on this list, Really Simple SSL is the ninth down. I think that might actually be meaning that it’s the ninth most popular plugin at the moment in terms of active installs. 

Rogier Lankhorst: Absolutely. Yeah.

Doc Pop: Wow. That’s incredible. It’s not a big surprise to see Yoast and WooCommerce and Akismet here. I don’t get to talk to people who created such popular plugins.

I don’t get a chance to talk to them too often. I’m just kind of curious while you’re here, what is that like? I mean, I guess here’s my first question is when you have such a crazy popular free plugin, I imagine it makes it really difficult to, you probably get a lot of requests, a lot of comments, a lot of questions and help requests.

How do you handle that for a free plugin?

Rogier Lankhorst: I think it’s not as many support requests as people often think. During the development of the plugin and the past like seven, eight years, I’ve always tried to either create an article on the website when there was a question or create a solution in the plugin itself, or make it more clear in the plugin.

So that approach has really kept support down. And we are now with a company of 10 and with just two support reps. We also have two other plugins, with I think in total, over six and a half million installs. So I think the support load is not as big as many people think looking at the numbers of the installs.

Doc Pop: Can you talk about the business model of a free plugin like this? How does a company like yours enable 5 million active installs on Really Simple SSL and still be a company?

Rogier Lankhorst: Well, of course, for every 100 free users, there’s someone who buys the premium plugin. That’s where we can build a company from the upgrades. Sometimes free users complain about the upgrades. And we want to tell users what we offer.

And they always say, well, I think it’s a great deal because the premium plugin allows us to develop for free for 5 million users. 

Doc Pop: And in terms of balancing what goes in the free and what goes in the pro versions, do you have thoughts on how you sometimes determine how things get charged or how things stay free to help promote the larger product. Is it tough to decide when new features get added if they’re pro only, or if they’re free?

Rogier Lankhorst: Yeah. That’s always a difficult discussion to think about, what should be in the free and what should be in premium. And we usually give away a lot, I think. Our main approach is like with the vulnerabilities, the detection is free and everybody can see if they have a vulnerable plugin, but the automatic solutions for that are premium.

So that’s how it’s divided. And with the last of the coming updates, I think we will add more in the premium plugin like login protection, two factor authentication, and limit login attempts, stuff like that. That’s also because we think there’s already so much in the free plugin that we want to keep the balance right. We want to start putting more in a premium right now.

Doc Pop: And I think that’s a good spot for us to take our free episode of the podcast into commercial break, which helps keep it free. That’s a nice segue. 

Stay tuned for after this short break, we are going to come back and wrap up our conversation with Rogier from Really Simple Plugins about some of the other plugins that Really Simple are offering right now.

So stay tuned for more.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Rogier Lankhorst, the lead developer of Really Simple plugins. We’ve been talking about SSL certificates and Really Simple SSL. We also talked about the fact that Rogier, you have several other plugins out there.

What are some of the other plugins that you’re currently focusing on at Really Simple plugins?

Rogier Lankhorst: We have Complianz, which is a privacy solution. And it’s the fastest growing plugin apart from Really Simple SSL. And, it offers a cookie banner, and also blocks services that require consent, according to local privacy laws like the GDPR in Europe. Canada is creating an opt in privacy law as well. So a lot of things are changing in privacy legislation. So the plugin offers a way to handle that automatically. 

And we also have a statistics plugin, which is pretty new. It recently hit 100,000 installs, and the goal there is to provide a privacy friendly statistics solution, so you don’t have to use Google Analytics, which requires consent in most countries, so you lose data there.

Doc Pop: It’s really interesting you’re talking about this because I have been thinking a lot lately about Google and the web’s relationship with Google. And I’m thinking, I don’t really need to have Google analytics on my site anymore. I don’t need to have people opting out of the cookies if the only thing really there is Google analytics.

So I’m like, you’re talking about burst statistics and you’re talking about it being an alternative to that. I’m all ears. I’m definitely interested in that.

Rogier Lankhorst: Yeah. It’s pretty cool because I think most users only know Google Analytics and they don’t know there are more solutions. And most users are also not aware of the privacy issues that Google Analytics raises, especially in more strict privacy legislations.

Doc Pop: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking about the work that y’all are doing and about SSL in general. It’s been very interesting chatting with you. If people want to find out more about what you’re working on, what’s a good way to keep track of Really Simple plugins and maybe what you’re working on.

Rogier Lankhorst: Follow me on Twitter. Or sign up for our newsletter on ReallySimpleSSL.com we’ll be sending newsletters on our latest news every few weeks.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s great. I really appreciate having you on the show. Uh, thanks to everyone for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast from WMR. We’ve had a lot of great episodes lately, and soon we will be going to WordCamp US, which hopefully we’ll come back from there with a lot more interesting stories and interviews with folks.

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

The post Press This: Really Simple SSL with Rogier Lankhorst appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

Each month on Press This, we invite a few special guests to come and catch us up on all the news that’s been happening in the WordPress community in the past month.

We call this our Word Around The Campfire edition. And this month we’ve got some great news about WordPress 6.3, WordCamp US, and a lot more. We’re going to see how much we can fit into this episode. And to help me out, we’ve got a couple of special guests. First up is Damon Cook, a Developer Advocate at WP Engine.

Hello, Damon. How are you?

Damon Cook: Great. 

Doc Pop: Thanks for joining us today. And also joining us is Mike Davey, the Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. Howdy Mike. How are you?

Mike Davey: Hi, Doc. I’m doing well. Thanks for having me.

Doc Pop: Well, we’re going to kick things off. As you can tell, I’m in a rush to get into this news because there’s so much to talk about. And I think one of the biggest things is WordPress 6.3, which is coming out on August 8th. And as we’re recording this, we have release candidate 2.

And I’ve been playing around a little bit with it and I actually love it. Matt Medeiros from the WP minute recently asked if WordPress 6.3 is quote, big air quotes here, “the best version of WordPress so far,” which I love that click baity title. And so here to tell us more about WordPress 6.3, Damon, why don’t you kind of start us off with what you’re excited about?

Damon Cook: Yeah, I think it is shaping up to be a great release. They’re always such vast, huge improvements and so much contribution time put into each of these releases. Some of my favorite features that are coming out, everybody’s talking about the command palette. I mean, that’s pretty neat functionality that is available in the post and site editor, and there is already some APIs available for plugin authors to extend and add their own commands. And actually, this afternoon I was tweeting about how it would be neat, a possible idea for a plugin author to maybe bring back the sidebar templates in the block editor and have maybe a command palette that you can switch left and right from.

That’s a really neat feature and the APIs for that should be fun to extend.

Doc Pop: Just to kind of visualize this for listeners, if you don’t know what the command palette is, if you’re a Mac user, it’s called the spotlight tool, and I’m guessing there’s probably something similar for PC and other users. Basically when you are in a post or you are on a page or you’re editing the site, if you’re anywhere where the block editor is present, you can hit command K.

And a little white kind of search bar pops up. And from there you can basically access anything else that also has the block editor. So you could type in “new post” or you could type in “new block”. And instead of having to search around for stuff or navigate stuff, you can very quickly surf your site through this command palette.

And as Damon’s saying, there’s a lot of potential for APIs there. Like some people are talking about integrating AI to maybe be able to do things where you could say, create a new post that has a picture of a cat or something. And so instead of just opening a new post, in theory, the command palette might have some functionality that could do multiple things at once, right, Damon?

Damon Cook: Definitely. Yeah. The possibilities are endless.

Doc Pop: And what about for developers kind of focusing more in there? Is there any new features that they should be aware of?

Damon Cook: In relation just to the command palette or in general with a 6.3 release?

Doc Pop: With 6. 3?

Damon Cook: Yeah, I mean, there’s tons of new features there’s performance improvements that allow for the scripts API, there’s async and defer, which should help with front end performance and with images, there’s a fetch priority attribute that has been included.

So, those can be utilized to get front end performance impact and make your sites faster for sure.

Doc Pop: Yeah, the performance team has really added a bunch of new features to this version. And I think one of the other notable things about this version, this isn’t exactly developer related, but this marks the end of Gutenberg Phase Two, right?

Damon Cook: Yeah, it’s already kicked off the collaboration and a lot of planning and discussion around what those projects are going to involve. So yeah, it’s exciting times.

Doc Pop: So the release candidate is out now. Some of us are playing around with it and sharing our feedback and August 8th is when this should hit the world. With a book ending of Gutenberg Phase Two, this really is a good chance if you tried the block editor and didn’t really like it years ago, this is a good chance to come back and try it out because things are easier to find, they’re more consistently placed. A lot of the issues have been really worked out.

This is the best version of the block editor so far. And I think it’s a really big step for WordPress as well. So August 8th is when that’s going to hit the shelves. And another big update is coming out, ACF 6.2 will be coming out real soon. Right, Mike?

Mike Davey: That’s right, actually. The beta for ACF 6.2, I think we’ll probably be out by the time this episode is live. I’m almost certain, but we don’t really like to be held to exact dates all the time like that, but I’m almost certain it will be out before this episode goes live.

Doc Pop: And let’s assume ACF 6.2 does go out and beta by the time this was live, how much longer before the full release hits everybody.

Mike Davey: That I cannot say. I think again, fairly soon, but they do need time to people using it, get enough feedback to really make sure that they handle everything for the full release, see how everything’s working because they’re introducing some really big new features.

Doc Pop: Like what?

Mike Davey: It’s always been possible to set up bidirectional relationships in ACF in code. But with 6.2 and 6.2 Pro, you can now do that right in the UI with certain fields with the relational fields, which is, post, object, relationship, user, and taxonomy fields.

They display a new advanced tab when you go into their settings that has a bidirectional toggle, right? And you can just kind of flip that on and then you can select one or more target fields, which will be updated on each selected value for that field and it’s back to the item being updated, right? It’s a fairly powerful and complicated feature.

It’s really the sort of thing that you do have to see an action, I think to really understand. Iain Polson did a demo of it on a session of ACF Fridays, our open office hours, and we can link to that. And that really shows exactly what you can do a little bit better.

We’re also introducing admin UI registration for option pages in ACF Pro 6.2 and Damon Cook actually can speak more to that because he just did a workshop on how that’s going to work just the other day. 

Damon Cook: Yeah, yesterday I did a workshop on that and I just posted the video to the WP Engine Builders channel for the recording of that, but it really makes registering these option pages so fast because while. Power users were definitely doing it with code before now you could just do it right in the UI and you can even do it while you’re creating field groups.

You can associate those right on the fly with the little built in modal, so it’s really a great enhancement.

Doc Pop: When we’re talking about options pages, and the changes here, are these options on the backend or are these new advanced options that can be shown for the users?

Damon Cook: Yeah, these are option pages, so typically a builder might create an option page to allow a client to set their Google analytics ID or add some social links and just give them a centralized place to change some settings and toggle things on and off.

Doc Pop: That’s cool. Anything else we should talk about with the ACF, Mike?

Mike Davey: Yeah, one last thing, actually. We’ve had multiple requests over the years to support saving JSON to multiple different paths, and ACF 6.2 is finally going to bring support for that to the core plugin. I don’t want to get into all the technical details, in part because I can’t explain them, and in part because it’s, again, another thing that’s easier to see rather than hear about.

But starting in 6.2, you will be able to have multiple JSON save locations.

Doc Pop: Speaking of save locations, everybody stick around. I’m trying my best to make this into a segue, where we’re going to save this thought and we’ll be right back after these messages with more WordPress news, including WordCamp US news and some conversation about WordPress and AI. So stick around after the short commercial break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to the Word Around The Campfire Edition of Press This today. We’ve got Damon Cook, a Developer Advocate at WP Engine and Mike Davey, the Senior Editor at Delicious Brains here to catch us up on WordPress news. And so far we’ve been “caughted” up on Advanced Custom Fields, 6.2 ACF, 6, 2, and WordPress 6.3. 

And we have a lot more to get into. I think one of the things I wanted to talk about is yesterday. I guess I’m just going to brag. Yesterday I had my site linked from Hacker News and first off, man, Hacker News. I wasn’t even like the top of the page and Hacker News sent me 12,000 views, which is more than I get from like Boing Boing these days or Reddit or whatever.

So they still have some serious traffic. And while I was there, I found out that a couple of weeks ago, the WordPress playground or the WP Playground was up there. That’s a WordPress instance that runs entirely in your browser. And that was up on the top of Hacker News. They were excited about that.

Damon, can you tell us about WP Playground?

Damon Cook: Yeah, that’s a really neat and interesting tool. It’s built on WebAssembly and allows you to spin up a WordPress site right in your browser and everything is installed, including the PHP, and you can log in and it’s really got an extensive API. So it’s really setting up the possibilities for even plugin authors and theme authors to pass along some query parameters and spin up a demo site of their theme or their plugin, and you can just embed it in your site anywhere.

So it’s a really neat feature. I think there is also an API, so you can spin up pull requests. So I think there is functionality with the Gutenberg plugin. So if there is a new pull request submitted, you can do per branch sites that are spun up. So somebody could test a feature that’s in the Gutenberg project, but that also has the potential of being pulled into personal projects and client projects. 

So it’s a really neat tool and you can even do sandboxes. So if you need to spin up a quick WordPress site and test something, just go to WP Playground and spin it up and take it for a spin and install some plugins and see if you can break things. but yeah, it’s a great, great tool and I think it’s going to get even better as it goes along for sure.

Doc Pop: I think that URL is playgroundWordPress.net. You can also just find it from searching WP Playground. Damon, who do you think is the target? Who is this meant for? What is this tool meant for?

Damon Cook: I think it’s got a few different use cases, but it certainly, I think, will be useful for the WordPress project in regards to documentation and testing. The thought that you could possibly have an up to date, up to the minute project, a WordPress site embedded alongside documentation, so you could actually, be reading documentation in line, take something and test it out and run some code that is super useful.

So I think the possibilities there are really interesting. And then also just for everyday builders, as a training resource, you can spin up a sandbox site and install some themes and plugins and just kind of test things out and learn as you go. As a training mechanism as well, I think that’s another useful feature, but I think a lot of use cases are yet to even be explored or come to, come to enlightenment, I guess.

Doc Pop: Yeah, mostly right now, it’s just like, that’s cool. There’s an instance of WordPress in my browser. And I think that’s where a lot of us are, but I was kind of thinking when I first heard about this is maybe a good way to show potential new WordPress users who may be nervous about going through the whole process of installing WordPress, maybe just kind of showing them like what it’s like.

Just giving them a chance to browse around and see how the block editor works and editing a post works and things like that. So that’s kind of what I was thinking when I first heard about it, but I hear more from developers and I’m like, man, this is a lot more powerful than just some sort of example tool for new WordPress users.

On the subject of new WordPress users, I want to pivot over a little bit to talking about one of the things I’ve heard in the WordPress and artificial intelligence space. Some companies like Bluehost and Hostinger are using AI to reduce the friction of creating new sites for new users.

So they’re trying to use AI to help ease people into the space. We’ll talk particularly about Bluehost’s new tool, which is called Wondersuite, and there might be some more out there that I don’t know about, but Wondersuite was the one that I was taking a look at. And this basically starts users off with a series of questions, a series of like kind of check boxes.

One of the very first ones is like, “Hey, have you, have you used WordPress before and are you kind of beginner or advanced or intermediate?” And if they are a beginner or maybe intermediate, then the rest of the flow kind of walks them through. What sort of site are you looking to build?

Are you looking to build something like a site that sells things or a personal blog? It kind of goes through that stuff, but then afterwards it uses AI to walk them through adding plugins and messing with blocks and changing themes. It sounds pretty neat. It sounds like the sort of thing we might’ve done in the past.

Where if we had more of a rails-y approach where we force people to like, okay, now go to plugins and do this, which is a little stiff, but this is maybe a more flexible way if it works as good as it sounds, where people can on their own, play around in a site and these little messages might pop up saying, “here’s what this thing is. And here’s how you should use it.” 

I just thought it was kind of a neat use of AI. I haven’t personally played with it yet, but it sounds pretty cool. Damon, have you heard of any new like WordPress and AI stuff that you’re excited about? 

Damon Cook: Yeah, it’s a really neat time. Some of these tools are coming out. I haven’t had a chance to test out the Bluehost, but I did read up on it. The whole onboarding idea is always being explored. I know there’s been other attempts, but I think pulling in AI is definitely a space that’s worth exploring and that’s a neat tool that they have developed.

One thing I saw recently was StaffUp.AI, which was a neat service. So it offers a series of about a dozen bots and I thought it was clever because they give the bots names and personalities and pictures. And there’s one that’s actually a WordPress developer and you can utilize it to write documentation or help flesh out some of the features that might be in a plugin that you’re not sure how they’re working or even write posts for you. So it’s a really interesting service and I was just exploring that the other day. I think they have a few other bots that are related to developer centric personas, but it’s a neat service and I think we’re going to see a lot more of it.

Doc Pop: I just remembered that Jetpack has really gone into the AI space as well. I think three months ago on a Word Around The Campfire, I talked about how I played around with some of their generative AI blocks. One of them was, you know, type in a description of an image and it would create an image using stable diffusion.

One of the others was, you could have it analyze your post so far and it would write the next paragraph or something like that. And those are pretty basic experiments in AI. I think they are still experimenting more now. Jetpack AI assistant is kind of out and it seems like Jetpack is really leaning into the AI space, but I haven’t had a chance to test this yet. 

One of the things I keep waiting for is I’m not really looking for something to generate the content for me, but I am interested in having tools help me with the mundane task of filling out the SEO fields and maybe even, and I know there’s some tools that do this, but maybe even AB testing headlines or something. I have a small site, other than my 12,000 visits I got in one day yesterday, it’s usually under a hundred.

And so I guess I don’t really need to be worrying about AB testing on my site, but it is a sort of thing that I’m like, Oh, this would be a cool use of AI.

Damon Cook: Definitely.

Mike Davey: I could really use a fact checker bot.

Doc Pop: Yeah?

Mike Davey: If I had an AI system that just checked facts I fed it. Just fed it like an article that say I had generated through AI, please fact check this for me. And then I could at least, see its report and see if the fact checking was any good.

Doc Pop: Yeah.

Mike Davey: Cause that’s probably the slowest part of using AI tools in a lot of cases is checking its work.

Doc Pop: And it sneaks in stuff. It just sounds so smart that when you’re generating texts with it everything seems kind of confident and good, and it lulls you in. And the idea of using AI to fact check AI, that’s very fun to me.

Mike Davey: Yeah. It doesn’t actually have a very good track record of doing that. I believe Chat GPT 4 does have an AI detector.

Doc Pop: Mm hmm.

Mike Davey: They tried using Chat GPT 4 as an AI detector and it did okay at first and then apparently has gotten worse over time. I seem to recall.

Doc Pop: Yeah.

Mike Davey: Don’t quote me on that.

Unfortunately, I’m saying it on a recording, but I seem to recall seeing that.

Doc Pop: Well, all of this reminds me of one more feature in 6.3 that we didn’t get into. It’s a small one, but they added a footnote block into WordPress 6.3, which allows you to basically add footnotes, right? So you can have paragraphs of text and you can highlight one specific sentence or word as if you were going to hyperlink it, and instead you can associate it to a footnote lower on. 

And so that footnote is like its own block. It’s got this cool functionality where if you click on the thing, it takes you down to the footnote block and it keeps you on the page. And of course, the very first thing I tried was to create footnotes of footnotes. And also to see if I could get a footnote to link to itself. Get a little regressive footnotes going ’cause that’s what I do. I break things and I use tools incorrectly. And I get very excited about stupid stuff like that. 

Damon Cook: Yeah, there’s another actual block, the details block, which looks really interesting coming out in 6.3 as well. It toggles open and closed.

Doc Pop: Yeah, the details block, I think also known as the spoiler block. Is that the same one?

Damon Cook: Yes.

Doc Pop: Yeah. Well, this is the cool stuff coming in WordPress 6.3. We are going to take one more quick break. And when you come back, we are going to finish up our conversation by talking a little bit about WordCamp US and some upcoming WordCamps.

So stay tuned for more Word Around The Campfire edition of Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress community podcast. This episode, we’re talking to Damon Cook and Mike Davey for our Word Around The Campfire, where we recap all the news that’s been happening. And we’ve talked a lot about AI and WP Playground. A couple of new features coming in, ACF 6.2 and WordPress 6.3. 

And just at the end, I just wanted to give people a little bit of a heads up about some upcoming events in the WordPress space. We’re going to have WordCamp US happening August 24th through the 26th. Emily, the Editor of Torque and myself are both going to be there. I’ll be recording videos and interviews.

Emily will be live tweeting some of the conversations. I’m curious. Matt’s State of the Word used to happen at WordCamp. Do either of y’all happen to know if Matt is going to be doing his state of the word at WordCamp US this year, or is it going to be its own standalone event again?

Damon Cook: I’m not sure to be honest.

Doc Pop: Well, I guess we’ll find out. but this is going to be happening. WordCamp US is happening August 24th through 26 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Damon, you said that you’re planning on going, and this is a big WordCamp for you, right?

Damon Cook: Yeah, that’s my first WordCamp US and I’m really excited. I’ve been to WordCamps in the past, but not the big one. I think I’ll be there actually. Yeah, I signed up for one of the Contributor Days as well. So, I’m excited for that. Cause that’ll be a first time for me as well.

Doc Pop: Oh, right on your, your first Contributor Day on August 23rd. No, that’s on the 24th, right?

Damon Cook: Yeah. 24th. Yep.

Doc Pop: All right. And also coming up is WordCamp Niagara Falls. We don’t know much about it. But Mike, I know that you said you’re planning on being there. Can you tell us what you do know about it so far?

Mike Davey: WordCamp Niagara Falls is scheduled for September 16th, 2023, and that takes place in Niagara Falls, Ontario. I am planning to attend. It’s going to be my first one. And as you said, we don’t really know much about it yet, but I’m really looking forward to it.

Canada does not seem to get a lot of WordCamps. And having said that, maybe I’ve now put myself on the hook for organizing more.

Doc Pop: If you do, I’ll come, I promise. All right. Oh, and there’s another WordCamp coming up Damon, can you tell us about that one?

Damon Cook: Yeah, I just saw that WordCamp Rochester just announced. I think that’s September 30th I’m going to have to try to get tickets for that because that’s out here in my region and probably get a few speaker proposals in. I think that’s rochester.wordcamp.org and that’s September 30th.

Doc Pop: And I think really quickly, some of the other WordCamp just kind of in our area, North America, WordCamp Atlanta is going to be October 14th and I do see that there’s a WordCamp Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, September 23rd. So that’s the only Canadian one I see so far, but Mike, you got your wish.

Mike Davey: To be honest I’m actually looking up directions to Rochester, New York as we speak, cause that’s a lot closer. It’s in a completely different country, but it is much closer to where I live in Canada than Vancouver is.

Doc Pop: Well, on that note, I’m going to wrap up this episode and I do want to give both of y’all a chance to kind of shout out how people can follow you online. Mike, what’s a good spot for people to keep up with what you’re working on?

Mike Davey: I would swing by ACF advancedcustomfields.com on a regular basis. Same with Delicious Brains.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at, @MediumMikeDavey

Doc Pop: Right on. Damon, what’s a good place for people to follow along with your projects. 

Damon Cook: I’m on Twitter. And also, I would check out wpengine.com/builders, for all the latest posts coming from DevRel at WP Engine.

Doc Pop: Well, thanks both of you for joining us today. And thanks to everyone who’s listened so far. I want to say our next episode is a really fun conversation with Roger Longhurst from Really Simple Plugins about Really Simple SSL, which is the ninth most popular plugin in the WordPress repository. So we talked to Roger about why WordPressers need to know about SSL and some of the other alternatives out there, even beyond Really Simple SSL for installing SSL. 

And we just also talk about what it’s like having such a popular plugin and what his, what his time is like spent, like how bad are the tickets and stuff coming from there.

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

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