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 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. 

Gutenberg was introduced in WordPress 5.0, which was released I believe, late 2018. And in 2021 and 2022, the team began work on Phase Two of Gutenberg. Phase One was just the block editor. Phase Two was site editor and Phase Three is going to be collaborative editing, and collaborative editing is going to be happening soon.

But what’s really exciting is we are wrapping up. We’re coming up to the end of Phase Two. And when I say end of Phase Two, we’re not talking about no more work will be done on the site editor. We’re just talking about the  project itself focusing on this stuff. So as that happens, we are starting to see a ton of new features that are going to be coming out in WordPress 6. 3, which the release candidate was just released yesterday and August 8th, I believe is when the official date is, there’s going to be a lot of new stuff coming out to WordPress to kind of wrap up Phase Two of Gutenberg and to help talk about all of these new features that are coming is Justin Tadlock, a WordPress Developer Advocate sponsored by Automattic. Justin is really deep in the woods, and I know he’s excited about talking about some of the new developer features coming to WordPress 6. 3. Before we get into that, Justin, thank you so much for joining us.

Can you just quickly tell us what, what is your history in WordPress again? 

Justin Tadlock: All right, so right now, I’m working for Automattic as a Developer Relations Advocate. That means the team goes around and writes documentation. We talk to other developers in the community and just find pain points mostly. So it’s a little bit educational, a little bit outreach, a little bit public relations.

Before that, I was working for WordPress Tavern as a journalist in the space for about two and a half years and long before that I ran my own WordPress plugin and theme shop

Doc Pop: I was a big fan of your writing over on WP Tavern, and I’m super excited to always have you on the show to talk to you about this stuff cuz you’re very passionate about this. And like I said, we’re gonna dive into some of the things you’re really excited about, which is some of the stuff developers should know about 6.3 and the end of Phase Two, I guess, or the wrapping up of Phase Two.

Did I kind of describe the milestones here and kind of what’s happening with 6.3?

Justin Tadlock: I think you got it just right and just to reiterate what you said is that Phase Two is the end of the site customization phase, but it’s not the end of the work. We’re not going to stop and then move to the next phase. And so the work’s going to continue. 

Doc Pop: And on a high level, we have lot of polish being added and stuff like that. Is there anything you can tell us on a high level about site improvements that users should know about with 6.3?

Justin Tadlock: Yes, pretty much the entire site editor interface has gotten a bit of an overhaul. You’ll be able to edit your styles, templates, patterns, navigation even from like the site editor sidebar. Pages to, I forget there’s so much that’s added.

Justin Tadlock: I’m really excited about being able to play around with a visual interface. I feel like we’ve kind of reached that point that we’ve been waiting for, for like, 5 years or so. And there’s still a lot more work to do, but it should be really nice for especially non coders to make changes to their site in any way they want.

Doc Pop: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff coming into the site editor, a lot of it is very visual and in many ways, things are easier to find. I have a feeling there’s going to be a learning curve though. It seems like there’s a lot of changes.

So I think it’s from my experience with 6. 3 so far, just the release candidate, everything’s really nice and it took me a while to find it, but once I found something I could find it right away, the style books, which are always, I thought, pretty hidden, deep. Style books, you can access just from the theme editor page, which is really awesome. And style book is a feature I think a lot of people don’t know about. 

I think they don’t. Maybe they do, but it’s a feature that just kind of shows you, here’s how all of your paragraphs are going to look as an overall setting on your site. And here’s how all the sentences and how all the italics and how all your lists and here’s how images look.

It’s just kind of this nice style book is a perfect way to describe it. A nice way to scroll through and kind of get an idea of just in general, how things are going to look, and you can make changes there that will sync up with the rest of your site instead of like going to a post and creating quote block and then making changes.

You can just kind of in the style book, find the quote block and make changes to it there. I’m already deep in the woods and in a bit of minutiae, but now they’ve made this where you can just get to the style book right away from the site editor. So there’s a lot of things like that that I’m excited about.

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, I do want to say, be a little patient when you first install WordPress 6.3 and you are using a block theme. It is a little bit of a learning curve, but I think overall it’s a better experience. It’s just going to be relearning things you already thought you knew. 

In terms of style book, it’s easier access to that. I want users to be customizing their styles from a global level and having that exposed, or easier to find will be generally better. I’d rather them not be customizing blocks within a page like changing colors and stuff.

That can be a long term bad thing for your site, being stuck with that red in the middle of a post and at a global level, you should have a blue. So I think exposing more people to the site editor and the global styles interface should kind of help them do things, what you might call the correct way.

Doc Pop: I’m going to talk about one of my favorite features, and then I think after this break, we’ll get in and dive into things you think developers should know about. But I just want to talk about something. I think this is a universal thing that everyone’s going to love.

There’s a new tool called the Command Palette. And if you’re a Mac user, this is very similar to Spotlight. On a Mac, you hit command, space bar, and you open up this kind of search terminal. It’s just text and you can open anything. You can do pretty much anything from within there. It’s just this universal, super easy to use tool.

And something like that is coming to WordPress 6. 3 is called the Command Palette, and from within a post or anywhere where Gutenberg is open, so like the site editor or post editor. If you hit command K, you are opening up a new, search isn’t quite the right term, but a new search window.

And from there you can type in “New Post” and hit enter and it’ll open a new post or you can find out about some UI, there’s little tutorials and things in there to help you understand UI. So it is a really cool way to quickly navigate through your site. And it’s a huge change.

Just like when I learned Spotlight for using Mac, I think I’m going to be hitting Command K all the time when I’m in the post editor or in the site editor, is this a thing you’ve played around with yet? 

Justin Tadlock: Yeah I’ve played around with, of course, I’m just not sure about it yet, but I see a lot of potential for the future with this. I see potential for plugin developers to extend this. So, for me, it’s just going to be about waiting and seeing what the feedback is, and I think it has potential.

Doc Pop: Well, it took me some getting used to because the first thing I wanted to do was like, add a new plugin, but you really have to think about it as a spotlight tool for Gutenberg. If you can’t do it in Gutenberg, which the plugin page and a plugin downloads, that’s not Gutenberg, that’s just kind of like another, old school WordPress site, so you can’t quite access those features yet.

But once you can kind of think about what is something where blocks are visible, if you can think about it that way, then you can access those things. And then there are parts like I might want to hit Command K and then try to make a change to WooCommerce. But you can’t Command K that that’s a different thing, but maybe in the future that could be something that comes out.

We are already at our first break, we’re going to take a quick commercial break. And when we come back, we’re going to keep talking with Justin Tadlock.I’ve talked too much at the beginning about what I’m excited about. We’re going to give Justin a chance to talk about what he thinks developers need to know about WordPress 6.3. So stay tuned for more Press This.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc, and I’m talking to Justin Tadlock, a WordPress Developer Advocate Sponsored by Automattic. He’s here to tell us about WordPress 6. 3. And we talked about the big changes that a lot of users are going to see and the site editor. Justin, tell us about some things that you’re excited about that aren’t going to be something that a user like me is going to encounter, but you think is going to make a huge difference in 6. 3.

Justin Tadlock: I think all features eventually are user features, even if they allow developers to build awesome things for users. One of my favorite things I’ve been playing around with, are the changes to the post template block, which is wrapped by the query loop block.

We have layout support. It has like true grid support, CSS grid. So that opens up a world of possibilities for theme authors to add custom styles that were not as easily done with the previous CSS Flexbox model and there’s a gap support. Which are just like the spacing between posts and those were kind of hard to do.

They’re such simple things that we wonder why we didn’t have them a year ago? But these things are also available in the user interface, so users can more easily change how their query loops or output, when they want to show a list of posts or a grid of posts. As a theme author, primarily that is one of my favorite features.

Doc Pop: I heard about something. I don’t know if that’s coming in 6.3. So maybe this is off. I heard that theme developers might be able to ship a site with plugins not viewable to people who get the page. So like if I’m an agency designing a site for someone, and maybe I don’t want them to have access to the really high level stuff that could break the site, that I could hide those plugins from them, is that something coming in 6.3, is that something discussing now that that’ll be coming in a future version?

Justin Tadlock: I know there’s a new plugin list filter hook. ‘m assuming you may be able to hide things with that. I would not recommend hiding things there. That sounds like bad business. If you have a client that shouldn’t access plugins, then I would recommend doing that through the permissions system, rather than trying to filter out and hide things.

Doc Pop: Mm

Justin Tadlock: There are different ways to go about that. That may have been what you’ve seen, the new filter hook available there. Otherwise, I don’t know.

Doc Pop: There are performance improvements coming to WordPress 6.3. There’s 170 plus performance updates, including defer and async support for the scripts API and fetch priority support for images. 

Now, the fetch priority, I know about that one. That’s basically, if you’re trying to appease the Google gods and get that premium Core Web Vitals, you want to be able to have some images load faster than others. And you want to be able to sometimes say, “Hey, this is the image that’s going to be at the top of the page. Please load it first.” Because Google punishes you if images load kind of out of order, if your page kind of changes, size or moves a lot, was there a performance boost that you’re excited about in 6.3?

Justin Tadlock: The fetch priority attribute, which is the thing you were just talking about is probably the most prominent, at least from a user-facing standpoint. Mostly I could rant about how we’re making our web pages so large and untenable with the image sizes and video sizes and stuff. And that’s why we need all these features. But I’ll refrain from going on a rant about that. 

But there are other improvements around the cache API, file system API. I think there were 178 there. There’s so many just minor improvements to performance, and they really don’t get highlighted enough compared to some of the bigger features that are in your face. And I think the metadata API had some improvements too. 

Doc Pop: What about image lazy loading? Is that part of the fetch request?

Justin Tadlock: That will work alongside the lazy loading process. So you might lazy load all your images on your page, but that first hero image, you want it to load early. But like we’ve had lazy loading for a while. The code under the hood I believe has changed for how a lot of that’s handled. I’d have to dig into that a bit more to uh to know for sure

Doc Pop: I also see emoji loader listed as a performance enhancer. Do you know anything about this? I’m assuming it’s maybe you can turn off emoji if you’re not using them, but maybe it’s something different. 

Justin Tadlock: This one I don’t know about, I always disable emoji script for all of my websites because everybody has emoji on their phone and computers nowadays.

Doc Pop: So those are some of the things that are coming in 6.3. I think that there are some things that we can go back and talk about like some of the smaller things happening. Style revisions is one that might be a big deal for users. Is that one that you can explain?

Justin Tadlock: I don’t know much more than that. It’s just going to save your revisions like a post or page.

Doc Pop: Yeah, it seems I didn’t get a chance to play with it too much because I just installed the beta today and it kind of only works after you’ve installed the beta, so I don’t have much history. But from what I could gather, style revisions is going to give you the ability to see a timeline of your site’s theme, for instance, and you can go back to how your site used to look in March, if you had 6.3 or higher or whatever enabled. 

And you could go and apparently not just revert, not just like go back to a saved version, which I could do with my host, but this is actually go back and just take that background and not all the other changes.

So kind of go back in time and select certain things you like and make those changes again without having to worry about, well, if I go back two weeks, I’ll lose all this post history or something. It’s not working like that. So that’s a pretty cool system.

Justin Tadlock: Oh yeah, that sounds cool. It’s one thing I just haven’t played around with much on my own but I could see it really being super useful for people working within the site editor. I’m making code changes on my site, so it’s so hard for me to test those things from just a user standpoint sometimes.

Doc Pop: What is the biggest improvement you’ve seen? Well, and you’ve also said because you’re bleeding edge, you have a hard time knowing sometimes what version you’re playing around in, but what would you say is the single biggest new feature in 6.3?

Justin Tadlock: The single biggest feature to me is just the change to the opening up of the site editor, the interface there, and just having easier access. But within the scope of that, I’m really enjoying, editing navigation from the sidebar instead of the content canvas of the editor. 

Doc Pop: Mmm-hmm. 

Justin Tadlock: It feels a little bit more like it did before the site editor, when we had a menu screen. That has been one of my personal pet peeves, is navigation management. The fact that I’m actually enjoying it a little bit is great because it means the core contributors are doing a great job with it.

Doc Pop: Yeah. And so as a note, it sounds like one of the things that’s been tweaked, in the site editor in terms of the navigation is that sometimes to access the Style Book, for instance, you had to go down a certain path, but to access another feature, you had to be in a different area.

And now you can probably more cohesively get to the Style Book from the same place that you could get to the other things. You don’t have to switch around as much. You can access everything from the navigation menu. Does that sound accurate?

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, and then plus you have the Command Palette also thrown in the mix. So once everybody learns that you should be able to navigate any way you want, and get the places really fast. Kind of touching on the Command Palette thing again, I think I will be a lot more excited about that when the entire WordPress administration interface is run off the WordPress blocker component system.

We still have a long way to go, but hopefully in Phase Three, we’ll get there.

Doc Pop: And you’re talking about kind of going back to what I was saying, where plugins don’t use that system, but you’re saying eventually everything should be consistently using the same system.

Justin Tadlock: Eventually that’s the plan, I hope.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well, we’re going to take another fast break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Justin Tedlock about WordPress 6.3 and the book ending of Gutenberg Phase Two. So stay tuned for more.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop. I’m talking to Justin Tadlock today. And right before that last break, I talked about book ending Gutenberg Phase Two, because this is a thing we don’t want people to think that Phase Two is done. It can always change and grow.

So rather than coming to an end, I tend to think of it as like little bookends that you can kind of move even though we’re going to start working on Phase Three soon, there’s still room for us to move those bookends if we do add stuff into Phase Two, I hope that makes sense.

And with Phase Three coming really soon, we’re going to be having some big changes. Collaborative editing is going to be the overall thing. Justin, they just started, I think a week ago, publicly talking about how they’re going to think about Phase Three. Is there anything you can tell people who are listening, who are very excited about collaboratively editing a site or collaboratively editing a post

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, so I almost don’t like the name of the phase because it encompasses so much more than just saying two people can edit a post at the same time. Hopefully, we’ll get things like the post list tables overhauled, where you edit posts, and bring them up to use the WordPress component system  that might mean things like faster loading, finding documents you need to edit faster.

There’ll be an overhaul on the media library, which is long overdue and I always think about it in terms of news editing, where you’ll have an editor and a writer together working on a post at the same time. But there’s also a huge potential for client work. Imagine you’re an agency and you get on a call with the client, you both log in to your demo sites and you could sit there with a client and walk them through the design live and maybe even make edits together, you can collaboratively edit with clients and  I think there’s a lot of excitement about that. 

Doc Pop: With that example, I can totally imagine the client previewing a site that’s still in construction, the client can go and make some tweaks to the copy in real time and maybe upload a current image of the storefront and the developer can make sure that if there’s any changes visually, they needs to happen, like color palettes, or width of blocks, or whatever that those can happen.

That just sounds super cool for agencies working with a shop owner in the future.

Justin Tadlock: I feel like you might get rid of some of the back and forth. Send me what you think and then you send it back and that kind of back and forth can, depending on like how you work, that can be kind of draining, demotivating during the process and it just wastes time. But anything where you can collaborate at the same time, it just speeds up what you’re doing and you can go out and make more money the faster you can work.

Doc Pop: I guess on that note, let’s bring this conversation to a close, just as a reminder WordPress 6.3, which will be the book ending of Phase Two, is coming August 8, which will give you plenty of time, a couple of weeks before WordCamp US to dig around and play with it. And if you have any questions, I’m sure there’s going to be some awesome talks at WordCamp US about some of the new features and also lots of people to ask questions.

And speaking of Justin, are you going to be at WordCamp us this year?

Justin Tadlock: Unfortunately, not this year. I’m hoping for next year.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well if people do want to follow the projects you’re working on, what’s a good place to send people to do that?

Justin Tadlock: You can always follow me, Justin Tadlock on Twitter. But if I can, I would just like to plug the WordPress developer blog. That’s where I do a lot of my writing and several of my teammates, but we’re always looking for contributors.

Doc Pop: Yeah, absolutely. Is there any topic that you hope someone will volunteer to write about?

Justin Tadlock: Anything around design development and it could be as simple building something in the site editor to extremely complex development topics field is wide open.

Doc Pop: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Justin. I’m super excited about the work the team is doing on 6.3. Everything I played with so far has been excellent. So kudos to everyone working on that and a great job on the developer blog too. So thanks for volunteering and working on that.

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

The post Press This: Big Changes Coming to WordPress 6.3 with Justin Tadlock 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. 

Now in the realm of marketing and web development, I think we might sometimes fall victim to superstitions. I’m sure I do. For example, when designing a contact form on a site, we might feel that certain decisions might cost us thousands of customers, but we might not always have the data to back up those decisions.

Instead, sometimes we might rely on previous experiences in pushing those superstitions forward, or just hunches, or even things that we heard someone said once that we just took to heart. Today I’m going to talk to Viola Gruner, the head of marketing at Inpsyde, the biggest WordPress agency in Europe.

Viola recently gave a talk at WordCamp Europe 2023 about “Testing Instead of Guessing: Generate More Leads Through Growth Hacking.” We are going to talk today about how to do that, how to test and confirm things and not just rely on our hunches. Viola, welcome to the show. I want to start off by just asking, what is your WordPress origin story? How did you join our community? 

Viola Gruner: Hello. Thank you very much for the invitation. So for my story of coming to WordPress, I haven’t been in the WordPress community very long. It’s now just a year. I worked for a startup and we scaled up and we were building a website that used WordPress. One day this website crashed because we didn’t update it.

I wasn’t involved in this whole topic, but I was there when it broke. So, I met with Inpsyde at this moment. They tried to help me fix the website. And when we were growing with the startup, the founder said, “Hey, we need to relaunch.” So we decided to relaunch. And then the founder said to me, we will now use Type3 instead of WordPress. And that was the day when I quit. And then I came to Inpsyde and they showed me the WordPress community. So yeah, it was amazing seeing this community and being there. And at my first WordCamp US, that was my first big experience with it.

Doc Pop: What year was that? 

Viola Gruner: It was last year. 

Doc Pop: San Diego?

Viola Gruner: Yes, San Diego, it was amazing. Great people, a great community, amazing spirit. Before I worked for a logistics company and it was always a little bit about competition and when I came to WordPress, I saw, wow, it’s one big community. And we are one big team and we want to make WordPress bigger. It’s amazing with amazing people. 

Doc Pop: So congratulations on your talk at WordCamp Europe 2023. You gave a talk, titled “Testing Instead of Guessing.” And you were talking, I believe to marketers, was sort of your audience, about the importance of testing ideas rather than running on assumptions. What inspired that talk?

Viola Gruner: When I started working in marketing, I was very inexperienced and young. I still studied, and I was working for the startup and they told me, “Hey, you are now making the whole decisions for this company.” And I was like how do I make decisions? And so instead of saying, “My gut feeling is saying something,” I started to test. I started to test everything or every bigger decision. And through this process, I saw, very often, all books are saying this kind of thing, but if you test it for your target audience, there are other results sometimes. I tested a lot and I tested a lot with my team and we scaled everything up and it was amazing seeing this and it was amazing to learn.

To see that the target group is always a little bit different. And sometimes we expected that this test will be a success, and sometimes it was, and sometimes it wasn’t. We tried to test significantly. And it was also great for my team because often I heard marketers with a team saying “Hey, you need to do this and that, because of my gut feeling and I’m experienced.” 

But during my experience, I saw if someone says this, there is a risk. My experience showed me, you need to test often to really say that will work or not. 

Doc Pop: I mentioned marketers being superstitious. I think I definitely come from that school. I was in print before WordPress and in print and marketing, we always had these beliefs, like the customer has to see something three times before they actually act on it. This rule of three. 

And that was partially because we didn’t have the ability really to test from doing a weekly newspaper. It was kind of hard to quantify how many people saw something and how many times it took them to act on it. But then I also think beyond the fact that was before this technology allowed us to test, I think even now there’s still some things in marketing. Like we should sponsor this event, but maybe it’s hard to quantify it. You have to rely on it should do well. It felt like it did well and it feels like something we need to do. 

So I feel like marketers are kind of balancing that. But you were talking specifically in your talk about maybe somebody wants to add on a contact form, one of the most important parts of your site. Getting people to convert, to sign up for what you need or sign up for the newsletter. And somebody on the team might want to add an extra dropdown bar for some reason. And it’s very important to them.

And it feels to you, maybe that this is a terrible thing. We’ve optimized this flow. And so you’ve got these two people who are working on the same team, but they have these different priorities and different hunches. How would you solve that conflict? What would be the first thing that your team would do to figure out what the right decision is? 

Viola Gruner: That’s funny that you say that because we had exactly this kind of small conflict. It was not really a conflict but the sales team told us, “Hey, we really need one more form field.” And as you said, for a marketer adding one more form field means, our conversion rate will drop. If you research it, they always say, take care of your form field because the conversion rate will drop. So the first thing I did was ask the sales team, “Why do you want us to add one more form field and what form field do you need?” And they told us, “Because of quality, we want to save time. We need one more form field about volume so we can qualify them better and we can save time.”

So for me, the process was writing their ideas and goals down in a one pager. And what do I think happened? I created a hypothesis, always numbers based, what does it mean adding one more form field? If you research this kind of question, you’ll find a lot of data and the data normally says, by adding one more form field, the conversion rate will drop. And so we added numbers based information that said, the conversion rate will drop from 7% to 6%. 

I added the experiment design, what will it look like, required duration, how long we need to run this to get a significant result. I presented it to my team and after pitching an idea, the team decided to go with the ICE model, which means Impact, Confidence, and Ease. 

We rated this idea on how big is the impact for our conversion rate? If it drops, for example, from 0 to 10, oh my god that’s a big impact. We rated on confidence, how much do we think this test will work or will fail? And my whole team said, yeah the conversion rate will drop. And how easy is it to implement this test? And out of these results, we decided on the best test to start with. So we often collected a lot of different tests.

Every other week we had a growth hacking meeting, and everyone came up with an idea, always in the same structure. We rated it and decided afterwards where we were going to start. So the higher the number was at the end, out of the three numbers from the ICE model, the sooner we ran that test.

And for example, with the contact form, we agreed the conversion rate would drop, so we knew we needed to start with that test. And we started this test and we got the results and we were very surprised about it.

Doc Pop: Let’s take a quick break here. And when we come back, you can tell us about what surprised you and what the results were and get into a little bit about some of the tools that you use for testing. So stay tuned for just a quick commercial break. And when we come back, we’re going to keep talking to Viola Gruner, Head of Marketing at Inpsyde about testing instead of guessing.

Doc Pop: And welcome back to Press This a WordPress community podcast on WMR. I’m your host Doc Pop talking today to Viola Gruner, Head of Marketing at Inpsyde and Viola was just telling us a story about adding a modification to a contact form. And there was a hypothesis that this would maybe result in fewer signups, which is, I think, what a lot of marketers feel.

Instead of just going on that hunch, Viola, you and your team did a whole bunch of testing on this. And right before the break, you said you were surprised. What surprised you about the results here?

Viola Gruner: We were all surprised, the whole team, because we thought, if we added one more form field, our conversion rate will drop from 7% to nearly 6%. And the results were that it didn’t drop. So, we were so surprised that the conversion rate didn’t change significantly. We were running this A/B test for 12 weeks and around 45,000 people visited the two different pages. And we saw there was no difference between the conversion rates. This means we can implement the form field on the new form. That was a big surprise for us. 

Doc Pop: And I think that’s a good example of exactly what you’re trying to say, nobody should be just relying on their hunches. Doing testing is easy these days, much easier than back when I was working in weekly newspapers.

Kind of specific to WordPress, what are some of the tools that your team uses for testing or, what do you recommend for people who want to do, A/B testing would be the main form of testing these days.

Viola Gruner: So I personally was using two different A/B testing tools. So there is one free tool called Google Optimize. And there’s another tool from HubSpot and it’s already included but you pay for it. So with these two tools we were testing. But I also created our own workflow with different sheets and I structured everything. It’s simple to have this kind of workflow where you collect everything, and then you have your pitch card where you talk to your team and you write everything down there.

It’s also important that you document which tests were successful and which aren’t running like you expected. So you should celebrate the test if you finished it and document it well.

Also if it fails for example, you can check it out again in a year and you can think about how you can make this test better for the next time? And could we test this again? And of course, for mathematics, there are different online tools, for example, an A/B test guide that helps you to see how many visitors do I have? How many unique visitors do I have? And it’s calculating for you, how long do you need to run a test to get a significant result?

Doc Pop: I’m kind of wondering, are there some mistakes marketers might be making, is it possible to over test? Or are there any other kind of common mistakes that you’ve kind of come across that you just maybe wanted to talk about here?

Viola Gruner: I’m a big fan of testing [laughs] but I think you also need to be careful to not over test. Sometimes it’s okay listening also to the gut feeling like you said before, if you are going to a big event, and it’s harder to test here and to get significant data. That’s one thing I want to say. 

The other thing I want to say is also, that it’s very important that if you run a test, for example, if you run a test on your contact form, it’s going to influence your conversion rate. So if you are going to test something else at the same time, it can also influence conversion rate. So you need to be always looking at your key metric. 

For example, if my key metric is the conversion rate, I cannot say spontaneously, I’m running two different tests because they can influence each other. It can influence your conversion rate. So you could say, I will run a social test on social media, and I will run a test on my website. That’s a possibility you can do but be careful that you’re not running two different tests for the same key metric. 

Doc Pop: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Definitely don’t cross the streams, and mess up your data. Prioritize one test at a time, or at least have different groups that aren’t being tested on at the same time. 

Well one thing that you mentioned earlier in the show is you have a growth hacking meeting at Inpsyde, like a kind of weekly growth hacking meeting. What is growth hacking? How do you describe that?

Viola Gruner: So there are a lot of different descriptions for it and many people are using it already. They’re growth hacking this and that. But for me and my team, making number based decisions and changing things without investing a lot of money.

So it means to come up with new ideas with clever ideas without really having that much money for it and test it. In the previous company I worked for, we were growth hacking a lot. And we had very successful tests with some landing pages and we could improve the conversion rate a lot without really paying a lot. It was our time and that’s it. And we were growing a lot. 

Doc Pop: I think that’s a great spot for us to take our final break. And when we come back, we are going to talk to Viola Gruner about the one final message I got from the talk that you gave, don’t be afraid to fail test. I want to hear more about that. So stay tuned after this short commercial break for more Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This. I’m your host Doc Pop talking to Viola Gruner today about testing instead of guessing, and we’ve talked about what is growth hacking. We’ve talked about how and why you should be testing your ideas rather than just sticking to the hunches or the previous experiences you’ve had. And I guess it should also be mentioned, and you mentioned this at the end of your WordCamp Europe talk, you said every target group is different. And I feel like that’s also maybe a reminder that just because you ran this test once at a different company or once even at the same company, but two years ago, that doesn’t mean never test again.

Like this is probably a chance to reevaluate things because you’re not always going to have the same results each time you test it. Also at the end of your talk, you said, don’t be afraid to fail test. And I thought that was really interesting. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

Viola Gruner: There is no failing for me if you test. Every finished test, like I said is a success because you get to know your target group better. And if you have a team, the nice side effect also is that you made something new with them. You gave them the chance that their voice gets heard and it’s indescribable motivation for them to see if this test works or not. And you learn a lot. 

You should see every test you did as a learning opportunity and it brings you further. It makes you understand your target group better, step by step. And like you said, if you change to a different company, it doesn’t mean that this test will work or not. So many people came to me asking me, what would be the perfect test for my company? And I said, there is no perfect test for your company, or perfect growth hack. You need to test.

Doc Pop: Well, I really enjoyed your WordCamp Europe talk. Congratulations again. You mentioned in the talk that you have a workflow that people could download. People can follow along with that. 

I didn’t make it to WordCamp Europe this year. Did you have a good time there?

Viola Gruner: Wow, yes, it was amazing. It was great. It’s a great community and people are so kind and open. And it was also very well organized. And I feel so thankful that I was allowed to be a part of this, and that I had the chance to speak about this very important topic for me. 

Doc Pop: That’s great. Thank you so much for joining us today, Viola. If people want to follow you, what’s a good way to keep track of what you’re working on.
Viola Gruner: Viola Gruner that’s my name on LinkedIn. Or Twitter at GrunerViola that’s it. 

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: Test, Don’t Guess with Viola Gruner 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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They all have different ways of using the web.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It just sort of makes the experience better for everyone.

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

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

It’s just different.

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

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

Can you tell us about that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And please do.

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

Bud Kraus: Yes. Thanks, Doc.

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

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

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does it work? Just give us the rundown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: And what does XR stand for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that kind of a good description?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

She works for a small agency in Ireland.

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

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

Doc: Straight for it.

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

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

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

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

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

Doc: Mm-hmm. 

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

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

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

Doc: Hmm.

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

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

Or a coder for the same matter, right? 

James: Yeah, absolutely. 

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

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

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

Doc: Mm-hmm. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc: Mm-hmm.

James: I should emphasize the yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that a good way to put it?

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

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

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

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

Now is the time to do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s great.

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

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

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

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

The post Press This: The Frost Theme is Here 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems like a long time ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Press This: New Features in ACF 6.1 appeared first on Torque.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they needing to learn machine learning and Python?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Press This: AI’s Place in a WordPress Agency appeared first on Torque.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So keep listening. We’ll be right back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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