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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So stay tuned for more Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and this is our Word Around the Campfire edition of Press This. We are joined by Sam Brockway and Mike Davey, the Senior Editor of Delicious brands. 

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

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

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

Mike Davey: I’ll certainly think about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Press This: Word Around the Campfire April 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.

WordPress 6.2 was recently released, and it’s a huge update for WordPress, particularly the way the site editor works. With this release, we’re almost at the end of Gutenberg Phase Two, which focused on Full Site Editing through content blocks. So that means that soon WordPress will begin working on Gutenberg Phase Three, which is multi-author Collaboration to talk about the new features in 6.2. And what’s next for Gutenberg, we are joined today by Justin Tadlock, a WordPress Developer relations advocate via Automattic, who is also a release co-manager for Gutenberg 15.4 and 15.5, which just came out today. Congrats to Justin and the team on that.

Justin, let’s get started with just your origin story. How did you get into WordPress?

Justin Tadlock: I was just telling somebody this morning, April 15th this month will be my 20th blogging anniversary. So, blogging for 20 years, but I didn’t start with WordPress until a couple of years later. What I wanted to do was be a writer, I wanna be a novelist one day, hopefully.

But I needed a way to share my work with the world and that’s really how I found WordPress, because I was tired of just putting all my blog posts in one big, giant text file at the time. I needed something to manage it. 

And after that I kind of stumbled into the theme design world, and eventually plugin development. 

I’m trying to think, after that I started my own business. A theme and plugin business, and I think it was 2007 or 8, around then. I wasn’t great at business, so eventually, I moved on to writing for the WP Tavern at one point, and now I’m over at Automattic, as a developer relations advocate. Just having fun.

Doc Pop: Yeah. That’s awesome. I’m definitely a fan of your writing over on WP Tavern while you were there, and really cool work that you’re doing now with WordPress and with the Gutenberg team. As I said at the beginning of the show, WordPress 6.2 just came out and some folks I was telling this news to, and they were like, “Oh, it’s just a small dot number release. It’s not a big deal.” 

But this is one of the larger changes that I’ve seen to WordPress in particular, when you go into the Site Editor, it’s totally different looking. Justin, in your opinion what is maybe the most important new feature in 6.2 for agencies and web developers to know about?

Justin Tadlock: Well, it’s like you said, the Site Editor, like the new design there and we also removed the beta label. So it’s sort of official that, hey, it’s time to work with Site Editor, build block themes. I think we still have a long ways to go in terms of the more advanced features that some developers may need for custom client builds.

But I think 6.2 for me is the release where we can really say it’s time to build block themes. 

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. 

Justin Tadlock: And in terms of developer features, I mean, there’s so many neat things to me. The smaller things, like you have box shadow supports for blocks. There’s the custom CSS, which also comes in handy with client work if you need to do some cowboy coding on the fly and add some custom CSS from the editor. Maybe you’re on vacation, you don’t have your full build stack or something. There’s just a ton of smaller updates, fixes. I mean, it’s always continually becoming greater, or the experience is becoming better.

Doc Pop: That custom CSS that you’re talking about, that’s new, I guess. I never touched that aspect, but just the way you kind of mentioned how much easier that is, for a developer to come in and they can add custom CSS to blocks now through the Site Editor, right?

Justin Tadlock: Yes. You can add them on a global level, and you can also add them on the block level too.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Justin Tadlock: Before we had the additional CSS option within the customizer. So part of this was like bringing feature parity to the site editing experience. So that’s not split up. I knew lots of people used it for quick things. Some people used it for everything. But I do like the idea of putting some CSS for specific blocks because that’s more of an atomic design approach. Right now the management of that is not where I think it should be.

Say you want to change your heading blocks to have a certain line height or whatever it may be. Then you would have to kind of dig into the editor to find that, because there’s no central location for all of your CSS.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Justin Tadlock: If we can improve that management experience and the next few releases, it’d be one of the best design features in WordPress.

Doc Pop: Absolutely. As just a user, I think one of the things that I first noticed in 6.2 was that new browser mode. Previously you look at a theme and if it was an older style theme, you would use a customizer and now you use the Site Editor. And when you click on a new block-based theme, there’s a whole way to view it. 

The way it opens up just feels really sleek and magical. It’s part of the browse mode and it’s just the navigation’s changed. And the thing that really got me, I didn’t see it at first. I kind of had to look around to learn about it. But the style book feature, which is for some reason the icon’s kind of like an open eye.

But when you click on that, now you can go in and see previews of all your blocks as they would appear, and you kind of see them by categories. So it’s all the core blocks and all your third party blocks. You can see how paragraphs will look and you can kind of make changes in this thing. So anytime there’s anything that I’m like, oh, I need to change the way this looks.

I know exactly I need to go to the style book and make my changes there. And it’s super cool that I can also do it with third party stuff, so it makes sense that I can change how my media displays, like do I want rounded edges or gradients or something like that. And it makes sense that I could edit paragraphs there or lists there.

But also my recipe card block for when I share my recipes on how to make Frito pies or something, my calendar widgets. All those things are in there too. And it’s super cool seeing them on the background as they would look on the site. And to be able to tweak them.

I thought visually that was one of the most striking changes in 6.2 and it was super cool.

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, the style book is one of my favorite features from both a user’s viewpoint and a developer standpoint. We’re kinda trying to get away from this at least in theme design, we’re trying to get away from the developer terminology and say creator more. Because you really don’t have to be a developer to be a theme designer anymore.

So let’s say it’s a great user and great creator feature. I know when I’m designing a theme, there’s a lot of like blocks that I don’t really test or use. And so having a quick reference to those via the style book has been a game changer in terms of not having to set up a bunch of demo content for things I don’t really need for a particular design, but wanting to make sure they look correct.

Doc Pop: Justin, I don’t know if you’re on this team or not, but I was talking to Aurooba Ahmed last week and she suggested the style book should have a book icon. And if you have any say over there, I’m hoping maybe they can switch that, open eyeball to maybe like a literal book preview or something, a little icon that maybe explains a little more clearly what that does.

Cause it’s a powerful tool.

Justin Tadlock: Yeah. I think that’s a great idea. I’m not on the design team, but if there’s a ticket, I will definitely highlight it and try to push in any way I can.

Doc Pop: Yes!

Justin Tadlock: because I think a book makes sense there.

Doc Pop: Well, let’s take a quick break and when we come back, we’re gonna continue talking to Justin Tadlock, a WordPress developer who is also a core contributor working on Gutenberg. And he’s gonna tell us about more of the new features that we might have missed on 6.2 and what’s coming in 6.3 and some of his predictions for the future of Pattern Editing.

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’m talking to Justin Tadlock, a WordPress Developer Relations Advocate and Core Contributor sponsored by Automattic. We just talked about 6.2, which is a huge release, and I think the next thing we’re gonna start talking about is 6.3.

And I think maybe the starting point for this conversation is, Gutenberg is split up into four phases. Phase Two was full site editing, by using block-based content. And Phase Three is gonna be multi-user collaborative workflows. And it is said that Gutenberg 6.3 is gonna be kind of the end of Phase Two Justin, is that right? We are finally finished with Phase Two and ready to start on Phase Three?

Justin Tadlock: I don’t wanna really use the term finish with the customization phase, which is Phase Two because it feels like that’s final and there will continually be new improvements and future releases to the customization components like the site editor, template editing, style book, global styles.

But officially that phase is ending. And so the big features, hopefully some of those happen in 6.3. We’re kind of in that preliminary like planning Phase Three stage at this point. There’s a post on the make.WordPress.core blog that kind of outlines the early talk about what that might look like.

But much of the work will start duuring the 6.4 release cycle. And that is collaborative editing and much more. The most important thing with that will be real time collaboration. So having two or three people like work at the same time.

We actually talked about this before the show, collaborating via like Google Docs. Especially when you’re working with a team, you all need to come in, make comments, change text without you completely overriding somebody else’s work. One of the most exciting things about collaboration might be the publishing workflow. WordPress is not geared toward say news organizations in any real way. There’s just a kind of a draft status and then publish. There’s no really great flows that go beyond like the basic blogging setup. So I’m really interested in seeing what the community can build with that. 

There’s a few great plugins I’m sure that already handle it. But post revisions is going to be a part of that phase. I don’t know what that’s gonna look like. We have a very foundational version of post revision revisions, or we have for years.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Justin Tadlock: There are probably many ways that can be improved upon. But there’s so much that we can still do.

I’m just excited to see what all the developers in the WordPress community come up with.

Doc Pop: I think you and I both kind of come from like news backgrounds, news site backgrounds, so we instantly think about working with an editor, doing collaboration and needing to do it on Google Docs so that other people can kind of edit with us. But I think what’s missing, or what a lot of people aren’t thinking about is this multi-user collaboration.

Multi-author collaboration isn’t just gonna be in the post editor. The actual site design in theory could be done collaboratively as well. So you could be working with your client and kind of making changes real time, not just a post editor. That’s pretty cool.

Justin Tadlock: I heard somebody awhile back talk about that aspect. Working with a client in real time could save a lot of back and forth. Submitting design mockups and just have them there with you. It’s a really great idea. 

Doc Pop: So, is it too early for agencies to start telling their clients about collaboration? If it starts in 6.4, it might not really be something that agencies want to share with their users until near the end of Gutenberg Phase Three, or is it something that’s gonna kind of maybe work from the start?

I’m just kind of predicting here, but I’m wondering if this is something that agencies should already start telling their users about.

Justin Tadlock: I wouldn’t at this point. There’s no roadmap yet, on when a specific feature will land, at least I envision that this would probably start more with the block, like the post editor, rather than site editing. Just like a first revision of it. That’s what I envision anyway.

I don’t know what it would look like. It’s still in the planning phase, you know? So it could be several releases before you’re really talking to clients about what that might look like.

Doc Pop: You mentioned earlier that one of the big things about 6.2 is Gutenberg Phase Two, or the Site Editor is no longer kind of in beta. 

So that is a thing probably clients and agencies should be talking about is, “Hey this thing is now polished. It’s ready to go.” So that’s the conversation maybe they should be having is about the Site Editor, if they’re not already using it.

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, it just depends on your client, how much freedom they have with design tools. I know some people like to completely lock down to just content creation for the client. But if you have clients who maybe want to change a few of those things, sure. Have those conversations, introduce them, create learning material around it. 

Yeah, I think the site Editor is a great tool, but it can have a huge learning curve for somebody who might be unfamiliar with it. So I think that’s just going to be on an individual like agency basis depending on their specific client.

Doc Pop: Before the show, you and I were talking and you were mentioning some really cool things you’re excited about that didn’t quite make it into 6.2 and will probably be coming out in 6.3 and that kind of final chapter before Gutenberg Phase Three begins.

What are some of those missing features that we’re gonna see in that next release?

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, so one of my favorite features that I’ve been looking forward to is template types that you can add to block patterns as a developer. Say you create a 404 pattern that would specifically be for an error, 404 page. Or maybe you create like three or four different versions of it with different designs, and then you allow the user, when they create their 404 template in the site editor, they can choose between those patterns from the start. 

They can just say, add new template 404, and all these registered patterns show up that are specific to that template. The API for that was added in 6.2, I believe.

And right now, when you go to create a new template, it just gives you a fallback and or an empty blank slate to start from. So hopefully in 6.3, at least in Gutenberg 15.5, theme authors can start registering those and having them ready. It can be anything, 404 patterns, single post archive, whatever you want.

They’re specifically tied to the template creation process.

Doc Pop: And that’s that template types feature in the API, which is in 6.2, but the UI isn’t finished yet, but it should be in 6.3.

Justin Tadlock: Yeah.

Doc Pop: Well, I think that’s another good spot for us to take our final break here before we come back and continue talking to Justin. I actually would like to hear more about how developers can use these block patterns.

So maybe we’ll talk about that when we come back. Stay tuned for more Press This with Justin Tadlock.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host Doc Pop, and I’m talking to Justin Tadlock, a WordPress Developer Relations Advocate and a Core Contributor sponsored by Automattic. Justin, it’s been really fun talking to you today. And I know you were just talking about block patterns and how agencies can use them, or how developers can use them.

As a blogger, I’m not using block patterns that often. They just don’t come up that often for me, and I’m kind of looking to understand more about how developers who work with clients could maybe use these patterns.

In interesting ways, cause I guess I’m used to all this work being done upfront to get the site to look good and I’m just not quite grocking the long-term benefits that could come from working with a block pattern. If you were an agency, what would you be telling me as a user about the beauty here?

Justin Tadlock: Yeah, I think patterns are super useful outside of the blogging world for business websites across the board because as a developer or designer, you can create a specific set of starting points. 

So let’s say you’re a restaurant and you want to add a specials menu or something on a new page. Your developer can design this pattern, You can just stick it in through the pattern inserter, and then change the content without having to create the layout aspect of that. Which can be complicated if you’re using columns and rows or group or stack blocks or whatever it may be. 

So patterns right now are very much starting points for adding an advanced design that you can obviously do with the Block Editor, but that is harder to do for a non-technical user. 

I think in the long term, what we’re really missing is once a pattern is inserted and it’s the editor, it’s no longer a pattern, it is just blocks. What we’re missing is the ability to update those patterns from a developer perspective. 

For example, I had somebody mention recently that they had a client with 30 landing pages that all each individually had the query loop block that was all in three column grids. And they needed to go in and update every one of those query loop blocks to be four columns. And instead of doing that just in one pattern, they had to do it on the page because they had already been inserted. So there’s no way to update all those instances yet. So we need something that’s in between patterns and say reusable blocks, like a middle ground there.

I think theme shops can really lean on patterns a lot because that’s a big selling point. These are your bullet points. You could build any kind of site. We have patterns for those types of sites.

I think those are the things that you would sell as a theme shop. Now, say you wanna do a pattern set for restaurants, maybe a pattern set for a salon. Are you a wedding site? You could build like one master theme or whatever it may be and sell the extras. Of course I’m not in the theme shop game anymore. So I’d like to see what more and more people who are in that world are going to do with them now.

Doc Pop: I mean, that makes a lot of sense. And as you kind of mentioned, being able to change these patterns later, but having them, you don’t have to go and change each one individually. That’s something you can do in a block pattern that you wouldn’t be able to do with the other customized block. But that is something you could do with a block pattern is go in later and kind of change something and it’ll globally change for previous versions.

Justin Tadlock: Well, that’s the problem right now. That’s the problem that needs to be fixed is the global changing of all the patterns while still maintaining the content that the user may have altered. We’re not quite there yet. A theme authors I’ve talked to, that is one of the big feature requests.

So I’m making sure I’m getting it out there. That everybody who’s ever talked to me about that, I just mentioned it on a podcast. 

Doc Pop: I thinkThat’s a great spot for us to wrap up, to learn more about what Justin Tadlock is working on. You can follow him on Twitter @JustinTadlock. Justin, I really appreciate you joining me here today and I appreciate the folks who tuned in and listened.

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: What’s New in WordPress 6.2 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, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Today’s guest is Bobby King, the Chief Operating Officer at the White Label Agency. The White Label Agency is a WordPress agency that specializes in partnering with other digital agencies, and we are gonna talk about when and why agencies should consider partnering up on WordPress projects. Bobby, how are you doing today?

Bobby King: Very good. Thank you for having me.

Doc Pop: Yeah, thanks for joining us. Let’s get started here. If you could just give me your origin story. How did you get into WordPress?

Bobby King: Sure. I guess probably about 10 years ago, maybe a little bit more now, um, I was doing freelancing gigs between my day job and some night classes, running small PPC campaigns, doing SEO updates, et cetera, for some, some local clients in the area. And some of those clients were using WordPress.

So that’s kinda how I first came across it. And it was definitely an adjustment from the text editors and tools like Dream Weaver that I used before that. But I just remember that it was kind of impressive how you could just go and see a bunch of themes and pick one and load it into the site and easily adjust images and those types of things.

So yeah, I adopted it pretty fast once I discovered it.

Doc Pop: Yeah. I think it’s still impressive. It’s kind of magic sometimes when I swap a theme on my site and I’m reminded of like, “oh, right that’s what that experience is like.” 

Can you tell us about the White Label agency? What makes y’all kind of unique in this space?

Bobby King: The White Label Agency, it’s basically a WordPress agency that supports other agencies directly. So instead of offering our services to end clients such as restaurants, dentists, et cetera, we work directly with agencies to support them with WordPress design, development, and ongoing WordPress needs.

Doc Pop: That sounds interesting to me. Before we started recording, I was kind of mentioning that my experience with talking with agencies is very much when they get hired from a client they want the whole pie, right? The idea of agencies working with other agencies is just, it sounds kind of revolutionary to me.

What is a reason that an agency who has a client that wants a WordPress site might also wanna partner up with another agency like White Label Agency?

Bobby King: Yeah. So there’s definitely a few reasons. I’d say the two major ones that we come across the most, would be a lack of kind of expertise or experience in the agency or just strictly a resource issue. The White Label Agency itself was born from kind of a resource issue.

It was a local agency serving end clients. There was a lot of requests for WordPress sites, and one of the partners at the time had a connection to some developers in Ukraine, and they decided to try it out. That went pretty well. So they decided to offer that kind of connection service to other agencies that also had the same kind of need for resources due to kind of a demand for websites.

Doc Pop: Correct me if I’m wrong, it sort of sounds like this is maybe a space that’s ideal for a smaller agency that’s getting started that might have a specialty, like maybe design is a specialty, or calendars and events are their specialty and they’re working with a client that maybe, they’re really good at these things, but maybe the client also needs WooCommerce integration or some other thing.

Is that, is that the sort of partnership that you’re looking to kind of help fulfill? Or is there maybe another kind of ideal agency that y’all like to work with?

Bobby King: Yeah, I think you hit it on the head there. We’re definitely serving more of the smaller to medium sized agencies that just like you said, like a great example would be WooCommerce. You have a client that you can provide the design for. You might even have a developer in-house that can build a site, but they’re just not up to speed on setting up and configuring WooCommerce. So that’d be a good example of reaching out either to an agency, us for example, or another agency that is experienced with WooCommerce and having that piece done by a different agency. You don’t have to turn away the end client just because you are lacking that part of the expertise.

Doc Pop: When y’all get hired, is it oftentimes for the upfront design or is it more maintenance long term, somebody else does the design in the beginning and then you kind of help with support on the long term?

Bobby King: Initially we were just a WordPress development agency, so we would require other agencies to come to us with the design files already done. And then we provide a quote and we’d get the project design and we’d actually build it, and then we’d give it back to them. 

But over time, we’ve evolved the team more and so now we provide more of a full kind of development service, let’s say, where we can provide the design, the development, and ongoing maintenance and support for that site once it doesn’t go live.

Doc Pop: Yeah. So again, that kind of sounds like it comes back to that example I kind of dreamed up in the beginning of like a sort of the artist designer who wants to do the design of the site, but doesn’t necessarily want to inherit supporting the site for long term, it sounds like a good fit for why they would want to partner up with another agency who specializes in that sort of optimization and long maintenance.

Bobby King: Definitely.

Doc Pop: As folks who kind of specialize in partnering with other agencies, what are some of the skills that y’all have had to learn that’s kind of unique versus the skills that someone has maybe, that mostly deals working with, like an agency that works with a large company or large brand?

What are some of the things that y’all have learned to do when working with other agencies versus to do with large brands.

Bobby King: Some of the things that we’ve had to learn with working with other agencies is really getting the communication right up front. What I mean by that is, when you’re working with an agency, there’s typically different stakeholders or different people doing different things in the company.

And when they bring work over to us and we give it to say, a developer, we want it very kind of standardized to what’s gonna be coming across. So I’d say, being able to have those initial meetings. Kind of explaining to the agencies the best way to work with other agencies has been one of the skills that we’ve had to learn over time.

Doc Pop: So, yeah, communication I guess. Is there a special way that agencies talk to each other that’s kind of different? Are they a little more blunt, less kind of padding things and they’re just a little bit more upfront with their communication?

Bobby King: Yeah, that’s definitely true. And there’s even a range between agencies. You’ll have some agencies where, again, we’re talking to maybe the stakeholder is their in-house web developer. So they can come on and basically we usually start with a sales manager or maybe I’ll come into the call and they’ll be like, I can talk directly to your developer and we can just bang this out.

They’ll talk tech and, and they’ll bang it out. And then other times, maybe an agency that, as you mentioned before, specializes in design or maybe they’re a PR firm or branding, and that way we probably bring in someone that’s more a project manager or myself that would actually talk through kind of what’s gonna happen and go less on the technical side.

Just kind of bring up enough to let them know what they’re gonna get for deliverable.

Doc Pop: And I’m making a lot of assumptions here that I keep saying, the first agency might be the designers or whatever, but  just to be clear, is that part of your service that you offer too, is presumably like web design is also something that y’all can do?

Bobby King: Yes, we do have a team of designers. We didn’t start that way, but over time I’m having partners ask, can you guys also do design? We have a lot of new sites that want custom designs. So we did set up a team for that.

Doc Pop: Okay. Yeah. So not just like doing the grunt work, making the site work, but also doing kind of the, the front end, beautiful stuff as well. That’s pretty interesting. I think we are gonna take a quick break on Press This, and when we come back we’re going to continue talking with Bobby King, the Chief Operating Officer at the White Label Agency about when and why agencies should partner up with other agencies.

So stay tuned.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and I am chatting with Bobby King, the COO at the White Label Agency about when and why agencies might partner together versus trying to do the whole project themselves. Bobby, we were talking about some of the projects y’all have worked on and I was kind of speculating.

Can you actually provide maybe a good example of something you’ve done and why it was a good example of two agencies working together. 

Bobby King: Yeah, I can definitely do that. So one project that we’ve had in the past, an agency came to us that they specialized in doing PR for book authors. So they would find authors that were releasing new books, and then they would be responsible for setting up content around the book release events that would be going on for them, as well as kind of setting up social media accounts, et cetera.

But they didn’t have any WordPress experience and they wanted to set up these landing pages and websites so each author could have a website. So they came to us with that and talking with the project manager, of the company they really didn’t have much WordPress development experience so we could offer them the development skills that they were lacking to get the sites up in a fast manner and turn them around really quick. And they also were at the time hosting on, they kind of just had all their sites together on a very cheap host, and they’re running into all sorts of problems with viruses and malware, et cetera.

So we were also able to offer them a kind of referral to go to a more robust server environment. We ended up actually bringing them over to WP Engine, which has worked out great. So all their sites are faster, they’re performing better and they’re also getting their sites built very fast by us.

Doc Pop: I can see the synergy there, between those companies. It actually kinda gets me wondering how often do y’all partner up with other WordPress specific agencies? Is that common or is it usually kind of digital agencies that might do a little bit more marketing and stuff like that and less website specific.

Bobby King: Yeah, it’s actually, uh, more common that we pair up with WordPress agencies. Typically agencies come to us when they run into the resource issue. So they have an influx of projects and suddenly they don’t have enough developers or developer when a leaves for whatever reason, they go to a different job and they’re kind of left with the void.

Or they might be midway in a project when their developer leaves and they gotta finish it. And that’s typically when they reach out to us and they usually try us on a project basis first. See how it goes. And then, once that works out typically those types of agencies that have the increased demand will end up hiring one of our developers in kind of more of a full-time basis. And some partners we have actually have teams up to four or five developers.

Doc Pop: We talked before about the kind of right size agencies to partner up with each other. And you were mentioning small and medium agencies might be, and particular looking to hire or partner with another agency. But I guess there’s also this kind of specialization that happens a lot.

I imagine that some agencies, as they start to work with you, it can sort of like, loosen their shackles a little bit so they can kind of, rather than having to be good at everything, they can really focus on their specialty and then let y’all focus on, on your specialty. Is that right?

Bobby King: Yeah, that’s correct. So yeah, we do have some agencies that really specialize in, say kind of like lead generation for a certain niche. Like agencies that only serve the lawyer base or other ones that serve only dentists. So they come to us and they very much know what they want. They just need to rely on our technical expertise to deliver it while they focus on getting new business and doing the service that they have expertise in.

Doc Pop: I feel like this questions maybe rooted in a bit of a downer. It’s not supposed to be, but if we’re honestly looking around a little bit at the landscape right now, it’s March 2023. There have been a lot of layoffs at large companies and sometimes those layoffs tend to really focus on marketing seems to be the first impacted.

I have a feeling that’s actually been beneficial for agencies because I don’t think these companies are not still building sites. These companies are seemingly still kind of going full steam ahead. They’re just kind of laying off in-house. And so I’m just kind of curious, have you seen in the agency world, has there been kind of like a lot of new business coming from larger companies because of these layoffs?

Bobby King: It’s funny that you mentioned this year, cause I’d actually say it’s the past few years. There seems to be at least the key base of agencies that we serve, of the smaller to middle size. First came the wave of like, the lack of developers after Covid, it seemed like it was harder and harder to find developers that wanted to come work in an office, work in-house for them. And demand just peaked because with Covid, everyone had to be online, right? 

So the work was going up and the resources were going down and that seemed to continue into this year as well. We really haven’t seen a large drop off, or at least it’s not following what the market’s doing. So, yeah, I’d say that we definitely haven’t seen kind of a waning of agencies. If anything, like you said there’s more demand for services and kind of reaching out to other agencies for support.

Doc Pop: And kind of tying that back in, if there is an increase on demand for agencies to make sites, this is kind of another example of maybe why agencies should partner together. Many agencies might want that whole piece of the pie, but logistically, if there is kind of a bunch of in-house marketing and web design getting cut and so the pressure’s being put on agencies.

Yeah. Like they don’t wanna say no. So being able to take on these jobs and then I guess partner up with people to make sure you know, that, that everyone works together, that kind of seems like a good kind of rounding back up to this pitch of why agencies should partner with each other.

Bobby King: Yeah, I believe so. And I think that the WordPress pie is very big, uh, There’s lots of things other than just the core development service that come off it. So if you can just be that more attractive to your clients and new clients by being able to offer another thing that you don’t necessarily have to go spend a lot of time or a lot of resources to learn it or hire it internally, but you can go to another agency to get that.

I just think it’s a win-win for everybody.

Doc Pop: Absolutely. And on that note, we are gonna take one more quick break and when we come back we will be chatting with Bobby King from the White Label Agency about why agencies wanna partner up with each other. So stay tuned for more Press This.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and I am chatting with Bobby King from the White Label Agency about when and why WordPress agencies and digital agencies might wanna partner up together. And we’ve been talking about pie a whole bunch during this episode, which is making me very hungry.

But kind of talking about keeping a piece of that pie and I was kind of thinking that agencies might be unwilling to partner up with another agency because they don’t wanna lose that income. But I’m kind of curious if there’s a way that by partnering up, a smaller digital agency might be able to actually make more revenue in the long term by partnering up with somebody like The White Label Agency that can help with maintenance on a WordPress site.

Bobby King: Yeah, I think that’s a great question and I think that’s definitely come across as we started to offer maintenance service and just what I’ve heard from other agencies that offer WordPress maintenance service. It’s often seen as the not so glorious thing you have to do for your clients after you kind of design and launch a website and everything’s great and it’s up alive and kind of you, you wanna be done at that point, going to the next project.

But unfortunately there is the, oh, we gotta, we gotta change this out. We gotta do this to this site or this. Some bug came up 90 days later type of thing. And a lot of agencies that we talked to kind of see that as kind of a pain in the butt, but it’s really kind of an opportunity as an additional revenue source.

If an agency gets a client to, to sign up for a WordPress site with the design and the development, and launching and all of that. They can get them on more of an ongoing subscription basis. So there’s that opportunity there. It can be anything from, they can offer the hosting themselves and then maybe offer two hours a month, to go in and do content updates, et cetera.

Take care of plugins, do the core updates, theme updates, et cetera. Make sure everything looks good. Instead of the agency doing that, they can just kind of sell it off and then pass it to a different agency, like White Label Agency, we now offer that. Or there’s many other agencies that do the same.

They can mark it up for what they think is fitting for their client, and then take the difference between that and whatever the maintenance company charges.

Doc Pop: And would their client know that they’re dealing with two agencies now, or would it kind of feel seamless. Like the same experience they had before, but suddenly there’s a lot more support options.

Bobby King: Yeah, I think it could feel very seamless. We are labeled and kind of call ourselves White Label Agency for a reason. It’s basically, the agency’s brand, their feel of their relationship with the clients. and really they never even need to know that, that someone else is on the website and doing things.

And that can be done simply by having the maintenance company use more generic emails, et cetera, to go in and do these updates. Or the agency can provide an email of their own, with their own domain. There’s also some other white label tools so that the maintenance personnel doesn’t have to be directly in the agency.

Doc Pop: Well, Bobby, I really appreciate your time. I am gonna go eat some pie now.

Bobby King: Sounds great. 

Doc Pop: We’ve been talking about pie this whole episode. But I do wanna say thanks Bobby, for joining us. If anybody’s listening and they’re interested in learning more, you can check out thewhitelabelagency.com. They also have a Facebook group that they’re active on, facebook.com/theWhiteLabelAgency.

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: When Agencies Should Hire Other Agencies appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

As an agency or plugin developer, there are many times when running customer support could be made so much easier if you had access to your customer’s dashboard. But there’s obviously a lot of concerning issues about asking for that sort of access and how it could be done. 

That’s why today we’re gonna be talking with Zack Katz. The founder of GravityKit and TrustedLogin. TrustedLogin is a new tool which allows temporary and encrypted access to be shared between customers and support teams, and I’m super excited to talk to him about that for this episode. Zack, you’ve been in the WordPress game for as long as I’ve known.

How did you get into WordPress?

Zack Katz: I started as a web designer and Developer and I started off doing some really janky solutions to allow my clients to edit their own content. And I landed on the old Trinity of; Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. And Drupal was still in beta. Joomla was as confusing as it remains today, and WordPress was an up and comer at like 2.5 I think was the version I started with.

And it was a clear winner and I fell in love and it really has been, what I’ve been developing on top of ever since

Doc Pop: When was WordPress 2.5. What era is this?

Zack Katz: 2007.

Doc Pop: Okay. So you’ve seen some stuff and you’ve been as part of that dealing with customers and support for a long time, and I imagine with your current company now, GravityKit, y’all have grown. First off, why don’t you tell us about GravityKit and then we can talk about TrustedLogin.

Zack Katz: GravityKit, we make applications that go on top of GravityForms. So GravityForms gathers the data that you want to use for your business and GravityKit allows you to build out powerful no-code applications on top of that. So with GravityView, you can display the data with GravityCharts, you can chart the data and et cetera.

And you can do really cool, powerful things with it.

Doc Pop: And as I’ve mentioned before at the top of the show, you have a new tool now called TrustedLogin. It’s a add-on kit that a Developer can add to their Plugin. I’m sure there’s other ways that can be done. How did you first come to need this tool?

And then you can tell us about like what TrustedLogin is.

Zack Katz: So for plugin developers, any plugindevelopers out there, or theme developers, you’ll know that it’s a lot easier to figure out what’s going on with the website if you have access to that website. And the way to do that in the past has been that you ask for admin access. So you can log in and check things out.

But the problem with admin access is that you have access to everything. And every time I asked for admin access, I would kind of, a little part of me inside would be saying, Zack, this is a really bad idea. This is a easy way for a single point of failure. Like if somebody hacks your email, then they’ll have access to everything.

And that’s true. The gates are open when you have administrator access to a website and as a plugin developer and a business owner, I didn’t want to be on the hook. It didn’t seem safe for the business, but it also wasn’t respectful of the company of my customers because I wanted to limit their exposure to any security issues, not just me, but like the people that I work with.

I didn’t want any of our devices being compromised, bringing down any of their sites. So I thought about different options there are out there forWordPress developers. There are temporary link passwords where you get a temporary link to login to a website. That link becomes the password. So if somebody emails you that link, it’s the same as you having their email and their password.

It makes it easy to share access, but it doesn’t solve the problem of passing around credentials that are potentially insecure.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Zack Katz: So, I was using Codeable one day and I saw that they had an encrypted vault, and I thought that was really neat.

So like while you’re chatting with your Codeable.io developer, you have an encrypted vault where you can keep your secrets and it encrypts it and decrypts it and it works really easily. And I thought to myself that it must be possible to encrypt a key that I could use and my customers could share, and that key, using some public encryption handshaking, could be secure from start to end.

And that it would be a secure way of granting access that would be publicly shareable because it’s not a password. So I started working on the concept and hired somebody from Codeable to develop it. And from there we’ve iterated on it. We’ve been working on it for a long time now, but we’ve been using it internally with GravityView and GravityKit now.

And we use it every day and it saves the support team a ton of time and customers love it. You just click a button, it generates a passkey, they share that with us. And coming out in the next week or two, hey’ll click a button and it’ll automatically do a web hook to Zapier that will post information about their website.

The site health report automatically gets added to help scout our help desk program. And so we’ll not even have to ask them to copy and paste their site health report if they opt into that.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. 

From the user’s point of view, do they see that they’re giving you dashboard access or is it just like a button that says, click here to connect to support?

Zack Katz: That’s another thing that I’ve been seeing on some different plugins. Some plugins do this themselves. They create the account and just kind of email themselves a new account email because that’s one way you could go. You could just say when people click a button, just generate an account and set us the login information. That’s very easy.

With TrustedLogin, one of the primary goals I had was clarity and to make it clear to the customer what they’re giving for how long to whom, like what it means. So we give them a summary page when they’re granting access that says, “A user account is going to be created with this role, based on this role.”

Developers have an opportunity to base something on a role or actually have it be the role. So if you have a customization, you can say based on Editor, but they also have access to this Custom post type. So any customizations to a role can be displayed to the customer.

The amount of time that the login will be granted is displayed and will soon be customizable. So it says within one week they’ll be granted access. It shows the logo of the company who’s integrating with TrustedLogin. It shows information about TrustedLogin itself. It says if you don’t feel comfortable about this, click to go to the plugin developer’s website itself and ask for support. 

So we give all sorts of different ways of saying, here’s what’s happening, here’s why it’s happening, here’s why we need the access that we need, and here’s a way out if you don’t want to deal with this, you just want to go to the developer’s website. That’s an option.

Doc Pop: There’s different types of roles in WordPress, there’s super admin, admin, editor, author, contributor, what are we doing here? Is it editor that we’re giving access to through TrustedLogin? Or is it even some sort of specific thing that’s not actually one of those traditional roles?

Zack Katz: By default we have it be that the developer themselves chooses what the role will be that will be customized or used for the TrustedLogin access. We do have some capabilities that are disabled, which is deleting other people’s users so that you can’t get access and delete people’s user accounts.

You escalate your own account to a higher level. We’re going to be adding the ability for people to request escalation and have that email the site administrator and the administrator can allow for that. But we didn’t want people to get access and to be able to hijack the site by escalating it.

So there are some restricted capabilities that are not granted whenever a TrustedLogin access has been granted. 

Doc Pop: I think there’s been a number of times where I’m on Mastodon on chatting with a friend or whatever, you know, just talking about like a WordPress problem. And then I’ll get a DM from someone who I trust and they’ll be like, “yo, I can fix that just create an admin role for me or whatever.”

I have just ignored those I think I know a bit about WordPress, but just the fundamental thing of like when to grant access to people who wanna help you out or whatever. I just haven’t figured that out emotionally. 

Do you have any advice, like, just in general, like when someone says, “Hey, can you make me an admin and I’ll, and I’ll fix that for you?”

If you trust that person and if they’re like good in the community or whatever, is that still a bad idea or is that like a totally normal thing to do?

Zack Katz: It’s up to each individual to figure out their level of comfort with that. I think if you know the person, and I wouldn’t send anything on a Twitter DM, I would go to the Share a secret website and encrypt it and send it to them and have them decrypt it, like that’s the way to go.

I don’t like sharing plain text passwords. It’s just not a good idea.

Doc Pop: Yeah.

Zack Katz: But at some level you have to trust somebody, there’s zero trust stuff. But like, I don’t know. If you know somebody and they’re offering to help you, I would say make it a little easier then saying, I can give you subscriber access to my site.

Doc Pop: That’s a good spot for us to take a break. Here we’re chatting with Zack Katz from TrustedLogin and GravityKit. When we come back, we’re gonna talk about how to build trust with your customers through encryption, through whatever means that you need to do to make them feel safe. 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’m chatting with Zack Katz, the founder of TrustedLogin and GravityKit. Beginning of the show we talked about this new tool TrustedLogin and how it’s an easy way for a support team to get the access that they might need to make a quick problem go away.

And how TrustedLogin kind of fixes this issue that’s been around this issue that Zack has run into. And I told him that I personally had been kind of trying to figure out when is a good time to use something like this. And that kind of brings us to what you were saying, Zack, about if you are gonna share credentials, you definitely wanna be secure with it. 

And obviously we’re talking about if I’m chatting with someone on Twitter or Mastodon how I would kind of do it. But I think what you’re doing is a whole other level of encryption. Can you tell us about how y’all are protecting this information. And how long you keep it and if you store any personal information while you do it.

Zack Katz: Sure. When a user grants access to their website, it gets encrypted and sent directly to TrustedLogin and it’s stored there, encrypted. And the one thing that’s not encrypted is the URL of their website.

And that allows us to find it a little easier on the support side. Everything else is encrypted. If it were to be hacked and everything downloaded, it wouldn’t matter because there’s a private key that’s generated on the client site. So that we can’t read anything that goes and gets stored on our service.

Then when a support representative logs in the support representative is given a key that the customer gives to the support, we enter that key as support representative ask TrustedLogin, “Hey, do you have anything that matches this key?” That key gets encrypted and then searched for the encrypted key, and then the login all happens.

The nice thing is is that the support representative never has access to any of that encrypted data. It all goes through TrustedLogin. TrustedLogin, doesn’t know anything about the client site. It’s all encrypted. All the handshaking only allows the most limited amount visible to each representative at any specific time so that it’s as secure as it can possibly be.

Doc Pop: Did we mention the temporary credentials?  

Zack Katz: So there’s a whole nother level of security on top of the TrustedLogin, like encryption stuff. Anytime the representative, the support representative, tries to login to the client site, the client site then asks, TrustedLogin one more time before granting access, is this key still valid?

Is the request valid? Is the person allowed and the client site, checks all that stuff before. Then the client site also says, is the time that’s passed within the window of access that I’ve granted, so it is an expired request. And if the request is expired, the login is rejected.

So requests automatically time out, it’s very secure. It’s publicly shareable as a key. I feel like we’ve found a really nice balance, because with every kind of encryption and security issue, there’s always a balance between convenience and security. And I think we’ve found a really nice mix of that, where it’s still really convenient and it’s still really secure, but it’s not too secure to be inconvenient. 

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. And you said there’s transparency is a big focus for you, which I appreciate, communicating to users what they’re giving permission to, and then also flagging site admins if a role needs to be escalated, so that some lowly contributor can’t accidentally grant too much access to a site. Is that right?

Zack Katz: Yeah, the only way that our grant access screen is visible is if you have the ability to create users. We don’t want people who don’t have that capability to be doing this because you’re creating a user in the backend.

Doc Pop: As a WordPress-er who has sometimes reached out to customer support for various plugins. I’m not really sure what’s happening oftentimes on their end. Is there a suite of tools that a lot of plugins tend to use kind of frequently for like, handling customer support that I wouldn’t even see as a customer.

Zack Katz: I think there’s a really high usage of Help Scout in the WordPress plugin community. It’s a help desk where it’s kind of like your email inbox, but it has triage tools and auto-responders and saved replies and integration with some documentation, search and stuff.

So I think Help Scout is one of the more popular sites that’s used by WordPress developers.

Doc Pop: Is Help Scout, is that TrustedLogin compatible?

Zack Katz: So, while if you were to email GravityKit support and say, Hey, I need some help. TrustedLogin widget in Help Scout that we have developed will automatically show whether or not access has been granted for a site. And so while a while a support representative is using Help Scout.

They’ll see, Hey, I can just click to gain access to the site. Click it redirects to their own website, so like GravityKit.com, and then GravityKit.com does the authorization check with TrustedLogin and redirects the customer’s site automatically. So while we’re providing support, if somebody’s already granted access, you can just click one click and into the customer’s website all securely.

Doc Pop: And I think I’ve focused a lot on plugin developers, maybe using this as an add-on. You mentioned that theme developers could use this. Is this also something that like an agency if they built a site for a client, is there a way that they could kind of integrate TrustedLogin into their workflow as well?

Zack Katz: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that agencies don’t always want permanent access to a client’s site for the liability purposes, but also they like to hand it off sometimes and not be permanently involved. 

If a client then wants to have them make changes they can grant TrustedLogin access. We have a standalone plugin that is only trusted log and it doesn’t integrate with another existing plugin or theme, so you can just install TrustedLogin plugin when you set up a website and then whenever the client needs to grant access, they can click grant access and you have access for a specific amount of time. So it’s great for agencies as well. Granting temporary access to the site.

Doc Pop: That is a cool workflow because I kept thinking of it as something that you just build into the plugin, and just have it in there. But having it as a standalone plugin, that makes a lot of sense as well. And I hadn’t really heard about, I guess an agency wanting to kind of be able to remove themselves from a project like that, that’s pretty cool.

That makes sense that sometimes an agency might just wanna build a site for you and it’s up to you to take care of it, and you can’t blame them if something goes wrong later. It’s kind of like in your hands. But if they ever do need to get back in, if they’re billing hourly or if they realize they made a mistake or something, if they ever need that access back in.

This is a way for them to be able to do that, right?

Zack Katz: Yeah. And one of the things we’re building out currently is the audit log functionality. Where for web hosting companies, for example anytime that somebody uses TrustedLogin, we have been logging it forever in the backend, whenever a request is granted so that we can make sure that we have an audit. 

But for agencies, they might wanna say, this is when we were logging in, this is, when access was revoked. So they have a way thing they can refer to and say, this is, you know, confirmed. This is known for security purposes, but also for hour logging. Yeah.

Doc Pop: I think there’s another good spot for us to take a quick break. When we come back we’re gonna continue our conversation with Zack Katz, the founder of TrustedLogin and GravityKit. So stay tuned. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. My name’s Doc. I’m chatting with Zack Katz, the founder of TrustedLogin and GravityKit. Zack, earlier on the show you mentioned I believe, an upcoming feature in TrustedLogin where you will be able to access Site Health status more easily.

And I don’t know what Site Health Status is on my end. I’m hoping you can explain  just a little bit about that tool and how a company like yours, how a support team might benefit from having access to Site Health.

Zack Katz: Sure. So when you’re doing triage for a bug and somebody says this isn’t working, there are a lot of easy questions that could be answered with the site health report on WordPress. Under tools, there’s a sub menu called Site Health, and that includes things like what version of PHP, what theme are you running, what other plugins are running.

A whole host of issues can be resolved by knowing the time zone, knowing the language and all that information you normally have to do another round trip of customer support and say, “That sounds like a bug. Sounds like something we need to know more information about the site about. Can you share that by copying this information from the Site Health dashboard and pasting it into an email and replying to us?”

Well now with TrustedLogin coming out this next week actually, there’s a checkbox that says send a Site Health report. And if they check that box when they’re granting access, it’ll automatically send all that information to us and it will be just attached to the existing ticket. And it’s gonna be so nice for our customer support team cause they won’t have to ask that round trip question.

And that saves everybody time, including support, saves the cost per support request if that were a metric that we kept track of. And it saves time for the customer who can get their bugs fixed faster and their questions answered faster.

Doc Pop: So I guess the final thing that’s coming to my mind is, as someone who’s working on TrustedLogin, how are you building that confidence with the developers and agencies to try to integrate your product into their system? It sounds like you put a lot of thought into encryption and just being very mindful of how you handle people’s data.

How are you making that marketing pitch to your potential customers?

Zack Katz: I’m starting with people that I know first. uh, they know me, I know them. I know that they have this problem with their customer support flow that we all have in the industry. And so I’m starting with relationships that are already in existence and hopefully from there people can say, oh, this plugin that I use, this company that I trust, they’re integrating with TrustedLogin.

And I can build the message that way. Because it is kind of a complicated story to tell. Integrate with TrustedLogin and granting access to your site is easier, but there are multiple customers with TrustedLogin. There’s the end user and there’s the developer, the Plugin vendor.

And we’re really a product for both. So it’s hard to properly communicate that sometimes.

Doc Pop: But it sounds like you’re gonna overcome it. Have you found any, any troubles so far 

Zack Katz: Because it’s a software development kit that needs to be integrated with a plugin, it can be complicated to get set up and running. But we are working with Josh Pollock, with Plugin Machine so that we can have built a customized file that’s downloadable and easily installed standalone from composer installations, which is a developer thing that can get complicated quickly.

We’re just gonna make it so you can download a zip, unzip it, drop a line in your plugin, and it’s up and running. So we’re working on making it simpler from a Developer side. It’s already, I think, pretty good for an advanced developer, but it’s also not as good for an intermediate developer at the moment.

Doc Pop: So if folks want to learn more about TrustedLogin, if they wanna maybe sign up to test it out, is there a good place to send them for that?

Zack Katz: Yeah, go to TrustedLogin.com and read all about it. Sign up for a mailing list. We’re gonna be sending out updates. And yeah, please express your interest, get in touch with me on Mastodon and ask questions cuz uh, I’d love to talk about it.

Doc Pop: Well, Zack, thanks so much for joining us today on Press This a WordPress Community Podcast. It’s been really fun chatting with you and hearing about kind of the issues that developers and theme makers and agencies might have that I haven’t thought of, even though I’ve probably pinged them. I’ve probably dealt with some of these issues before without even realizing it.

TrustedLogin sounds awesome. And if people want to follow Zack, you can do so on mastodon.social/@ZackKatz. I highly recommend it. 

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

The post Press This: How TrustedLogin Improves the Support Experience appeared first on Torque.

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

Powered by RedCircle

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

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

Have you ever wondered how you can stand out in the competitive world of WordPress development? What if WordPress certification was a way to help you stand out as a Developer? On today’s episode of Press This, we’re excited to dive into the topic of certification with Talisha Lewallen, the founder of CertifyWP and WPConnects through her work at WPConnects, Talisha has been helping military veterans find new careers within the WordPress industry. 

And also through her work, Talisha has seen firsthand that there is a need for credentialing within WordPress. Talisha, welcome to the show. I’m excited to have you here. Can you start us off by telling us your WordPress origin story?

Talisha Lewallen: Yes. And I’m also excited to be here today. Thank you for having me. But I think my WordPress origin story started pretty much like a lot of people when Covid started. As soon as Covid started, there started being a beef shortage and I own a farm. And so when everybody was talking about how shortage of beef there was, I was like, I have a whole field of cows.

So I ended up needing a website. So I reached out to the one person I knew that worked in tech, Corey Miller at Post Status and was like, “Hey, I need a website.” And so instead of doing it for me, he taught me how to create a website and it’s the first one I ever created. It is still live and it still looks like the first one I ever created.

And since then it just kind of snowballed into what it is now, working with WPConnects and CertifyWP.

Doc Pop: I love that Corey helped teach you how to build your own website. That sort of sounds like some lesson like, teach someone how to build a website and they’ll build websites for days or whatever. You know, the fishing one. 

Talisha Lewallen: Seriously, it’s the whole fish. You give a man a fish and he eats for one day. You teach him how to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life. Seriously, one of those. He taught me how to make one, and then I think I’ve made five or six websites at this point.

Still not a lot in comparison to most people, but more than I ever thought I would ever create.

Doc Pop: After that experience, I know that you started WPConnects. Can you tell us a little bit about that organization?

Talisha Lewallen: Yes. WPConnects is a company that helps active duty military personnel, or I should say US military personnel, receive training for their next career path. We have three different training platforms at this time that they go through depending on what stage of their military career they’re in. So the whole goal is for us to train them and then help them be very successful whenever they do separate from the military and they start their civilian life.

Doc Pop: So WordPress is just part of that training? There’s other potential education that you’re doing?

Talisha Lewallen: Yeah. So WordPress is our main focus. So the three training programs we have, the first one is called a Credentialing Assistance Program. That program is for active duty or like Reserve or National Guard members. They get a stipend used for education every year and they could take a credentialing assistance program.

So currently we are using the Web Foundation Associates credential through CIW, but that’s where CertifyWP came in because I really needed a WordPress credential to teach these men and women at that very first stage. 

If they are ending their service contract or after they end their service contract in the last 180 days of their service contract, they can join our SkillBridge program, which is a WordPress SkillBridge program. This is a 12 weeks hands-on, instructor led course where they come into a Zoom meeting. Because we have people all over the us. We’ve had a couple in Germany, ‘cause they’re stationed over there. So we’re trying to make this as all inclusive as we can for people wanting to really learn WordPress. We have a pretty good structure model now. 

We’re also teaming up with Robbie at OSTraining to flush out a couple of the bugs that we have. So either way, they’re gonna go through that CA program, the Skill Bridge program, and we now have an Active Apprenticeship Program. So once they finish that Skill Bridge program, they can apply to join our apprenticeship program that we have hooked up with three other companies.

And WPConnects, also hires apprentices too whenever we’re building websites. So it’s a really three step process.

Doc Pop: It’s through that process that you’re talking about that you’ve actually encountered a need for certification because some of the organizations that you’re partnering with military veterans organizations, they request some sort of credentialing or certification program as you know, if they’re gonna be involved.

Is that right?

Talisha Lewallen: Yeah. So for that credentialing assistance program, there has to be a community built credential. And when we’re even just going through our training, the Web Foundation Associate Credential is a very good credential. It’s lacking in some of the things that we need them to know for our WordPress Skill Bridge course.

So it really got me thinking that we really need a WordPress credential just for WPConnects. But then the more people I talked to in the community, and I worked at Post Status, and the people I talked to in the community while I was over there, there’s just kind of always seemed to be that need. You have people that go to a job interview and they say, I’m a WordPress Developer. 

That can mean a lot of different things. That can mean you made a couple sites to you could handle those big mega corporation websites, WordPress websites. And so there’s just not really a standardized foundation of education. So hiring managers are having problems kind of determining what somebody’s skill level is in an interview.

And likewise with all the contract jobs and freelance jobs, there’s that struggle of I can do this if somebody will just gimme the shot or here’s my portfolio. But just saying that you’re a developer, there’s just not that standardized level of education for people to be like, “Oh, okay, this is exactly what you know, and we can build from there.”

So that’s where it was really turned into, “Okay. So I not only need it for WPConnects to train our military personnel to help them get to this next stage in their personal careers, but also just in the WordPress space in general.” And so that’s kinda where the start of CertifyWP came from.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. It probably goes beyond the organizations you’re working with. I’m sure that working with governments, local governments or federal governments, I’m sure that oftentimes there’s some sort of credentialing requirement that’s not quite there yet.

Like something that some website builder might need to have that doesn’t really exist in the WordPress space, but it might exist in other things. Or in higher education there could be these sorts of credentialing things. 

So this has actually been a topic that’s come up since the first WordCamp I went to, which was WordCamp San Francisco. I think in 2012 or 2013. And it’s been a hot topic for some reason. I would assume part of that reason is that developers don’t think that WordPress.org should be in charge of this. Is that what this comes down to? Or what is the tension that has been around in the past?

Talisha Lewallen: I’ve heard various different things. So whenever I first brought it up, I had some people be like, “Oh no, stay away from that. You don’t wanna touch it. Nobody wants a credential.” It’s almost like a political situation type thing. 

And then I heard other people say, “Yes, we absolutely need this.” And so me being me, I don’t just take a no. I’m like, well what has been the pushback? Let’s see if we can’t figure this out. And some people that I’ve heard is a who should be the one to hold this credential? Who should be the one to do it? And I even heard people say maybe hosting companies should be the one to have the credentialing license or the agencies or who should really just be the one to create this.

And then the other side of it, we’ve heard gatekeeping like, “Oh, you’re just wanting to gatekeep.” When you hear credential, and I talked to previous podcasts about the difference between certification and credentials. And with credentials there is a cost, and it can be pretty extensive on some credentials.

And so I could see where that came from. And so we had meetings with the CertifyWP Board of Directors and our advisory board. And this is something that we want to be able to keep the costs down on in being able to offer where everybody can take it. We don’t wanna gatekeep, it only benefits the community if everybody is able to have access to it.

So that’s where CertifyWP became a foundation. So we are now a nonprofit. And this nonprofit is able to hold sponsorships and memberships to where the price can be cut down and just really trying to benefit the mass. But, as to like, historically, what’s just been that pushback?

I think it just depends on the person and what their thoughts are of an actual credential. The few people that have come to me and said, “Hey, I don’t agree with what you’re doing, and here’s why.” And we’ve had an open conversation of where CertifyWP came from, our goals, what we’re doing and how we’re planning to accomplish that. They’ve actually gone and signed our endorsement form. 

So it’s one of those that I understand where they’re coming from and we are trying everything in our power. We’re not gonna make everybody happy, but we are trying everything just to benefit the community as a whole and just really be helpful the most and best way that we can.

Doc Pop: I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. We’re talking to Talisha Lewallen, the founder of WP Connects and CertifyWP. When we come back, we’re gonna talk about the, the kind of nitty gritty about how this credentialing process will work and the benefits that could come from that.

So stay tuned. You’re listening to Press This.

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and today we’re talking about credentialing and certifications in the WordPress Ecosystem. We’ve talked about the history of what is happening with CertifyWP with our guest, Talisha Lewallen, the founder of CertifyWP.

And now we’re gonna talk about the future. So we talked about how we got to a need for credentialing in WordPress. I want to talk about the way testing will go and all that stuff. I guess the first thing to talk about though is I know there’s a difference between credentialing and certification and Talisha, I can’t make this stick.

Can you help explain the difference between the two?

Talisha Lewallen: Yes. A certification is generally anybody can make it. There doesn’t have to be continuing education tied to it. It’s literally, I took a class or a course and now I have this certificate and I never have to redo it. I never have to update my knowledge or do those continuing education hours.

So then 10 years down the road you could still go to an interview and say, “Hey, I have this certificate. I got my certification.” But technology has changed in the last 10 years, but they can still have it. To me that’s the downside of having a certification. 

Having a credential, it has to be some form of community built and maintained. There also has to be continuing education hours in re-certification of that credentialing license. Our board decided that it would be every three years, the exam would have to be retaken. And it’s updated every year with the new information that’s coming out, or if anything changes. 

That way, it keeps everybody’s education level at the same point. And you’re continuing learning. Everything in tech changes, even if it’s a minute change to a large change. But it’s also a group of people that’s coming together. So it’s not just, me, myself, and I over here saying, this is what I think everybody should know.

It’s a group of community, what I would probably call, leaders in our case, or influential people that are determining really what we should have or what is important to keep in these credentials. So really it just comes down to the difference is one you re-certify every couple of years and maintain your knowledge.

The other one is just a class. Sometimes you don’t even even have to take a test to state that you know what you’re taught or know that you learned the material, you just took the course. So that is the main difference between the two.

Doc Pop: So what is the education process like for the credentialing that y’all do? What is the education process like for that, and what is the testing process gonna look like for that?

Talisha Lewallen: So we are building a course to go with the exam. Our course does not have to be the course you take. There could be other courses. I know that Robbie at OSTraining, I believe, is making a beginner WordPress course. Our course is hand tied to the exam because we have the ability to do that while we’re making it right now.

But you don’t have to take the course to take the exam. So if you’ve been in WordPress for years and you just wanna support the community by obtaining this credential. And just having that on your records and being able to tell employers that you have done this, you could go take the test at any time or take the exam. 

So there is a course tied to it. We are trying to hit almost all the different types of teaching and learning and ways people learn. The holdup we have right now on it is the video. We’re trying to create a video side to go with the script and PowerPoint.

So we don’t wanna just give somebody a PDF and say, here, go read this, and now you know what you need to know. So we’re doing the video. There will be the reading version. If people learn better by reading like I do, then there’s also gonna be the hands-on portion where it tells you how to do stuff and you can work along beside the instructor or the video that’s playing.

For the exam, there’s three levels to obtain the credential. The credential has been titled the WordPress Design and Management or Management Design Credential. And there’s three levels. There’s the beginning, intermediate, and then expert. So you take all three levels of the course, or exam, and then you’re able to obtain your credential. 

So for the first two levels of the exam, it is just question and answer type of things. For the top level, there’s gonna be that question and answer, but we’re also planning on putting in a capstone somehow to where somebody has to actually build the website. And so we’ll have domains and we’ll have this space for people to go through and really do that Capstone Project. So then it’s not just, yes, I can answer a question, but I’ve actually completed this and I know how to do what I just learned. 

So it’s really having that practical application that I think I might have been the biggest one pushing that. So then it’s not just question and answers, it’s legitimately a practical application to show that you have the knowledge and you’re able to that. And that’s been a pretty big selling point for a couple of people that I’ve talked with that weren’t a hundred percent down for the credential, just because they’re well, anybody could take a test, but that doesn’t mean they could do it. And I’m like, exactly, which is why I want this practical application side of that top tier exam.

Doc Pop: So when we’re talking about knowing how to do it, is there gonna be a credential for web design in WordPress or is it gonna be just one? Like you are certified in WordPress Core, go out and do your thing.

Talisha Lewallen: So the original thought was we were just gonna have one, and then after the advisory committee met. I think it was really the first time we realized very quickly that one was not gonna cover it. You know, there’s frontend, there’s backend, then there’s security, and then there’s this side of it.

So the first two that we are looking at building is the frontend, which is this WordPress Management Design Credential. That’s gonna be the frontend of WordPress. Then we’re gonna create a developer course, name pending, and it’s gonna be the backend side. And so the board decided that you need to be able to pass the frontend credential to be able to take the backend credentialing license.

And that’s just because, through some conversations with companies and even things that the advisory board has dealt with personally and professionally. It’s hard to be able to become a backend expert if you don’t know what it looks like on the frontend and how to help your customers on that side.

So there are gonna be different credentials that you can take from CertifyWP. But the main two I would say foundational courses are gonna be that frontend and backend credential.

Doc Pop: This is just focused on WordPress Core. There’s not a WooCommerce credential in the works, correct?

Talisha Lewallen: Right. At least not right now. We have tried very, very hard to stick with WordPress Core, which has kind of caused its own set of difficulties because there’s plugins that are very helpful. But we don’t wanna call any one of those out. We are strictly sticking to the core. So that has been an interesting challenge, especially for somebody like me that doesn’t have that side of experience.

So that’s why I’m not on the advisory board. I get to sit in and take notes and really just help us push forward with the credentialing. But yeah, maybe eventually we might have the plugin extensions or a credential over WooCommerce. I feel like that’s a beast all on it’s own.

Doc Pop: Yeah. And it kind of comes back to a thing you were talking about earlier where, in the discussion of credentialing there’s been, should WordPress.org, along with like their Learn.WordPress and everything else, should they have credentialing there or should this be something that private companies and for some reason hosts usually are kind of mentioned as the people who might, like GoDaddy credentials or WP Engine or Automattic credentials versus official WordPress.org.

And it does kind of make me think when you’re talking about possibly someday, possibly a WooCommerce credential. I’m just kind of wondering, do you think that that would be something that would be better for WooCommerce to do, or do you think that would be something that’s better for like a nonprofit that’s kind of independent to be doing.

Talisha Lewallen: You know that’s a really good question. At this time. I mean, I would definitely say that WooCommerce would be a great place to hold that credential. Like I said, just because to me that is a whole beast on its own. And the few sites I’ve made with WooCommerce, I just wanna chuck the computer into the other room, but that’s just probably my lack of knowledge on that.

But should they hold it versus a nonprofit or a separate entity? I don’t know. That’s the question we get is, why us? Why is this third party company holding this credential and why are we the ones building it? And I always say, why not us? Why not a third party company?

We’re able to look at things a little bit more objectively. I wouldn’t say that WordPress.org is not looking at it objectively, and I don’t mean it that way at all, but we’re just able to remain objective a little bit more, you know what I’m talking about? 

So whenever it got brought up by agencies or hosting companies at one point, if they should be the ones. I heard by a few people, well they might not be as objective ‘cause then they’ll say, well you have to use one of our credential holders.

And then that’s where you could get into the price situation. And with us, we are legitimately just trying to help the best of community and you know, I think WordPress.org is too. But you know, why us? I mean it’s just, again, it’s a why not us? 

We put together a strong board of community members. And I think that if somebody in the Woo commerce space could do that for them and hold it as a separate company and be able to have that strong board, I think that they would be able to do it great. Just like we are.

Doc Pop: I think that’s another good spot for us to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll continue our conversation with Talisha Lewallen, the founder of CertifyWP, about WordPress credentials, so stay tuned.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, your certified source for WordPress news and information. Today we’re talking to Talisha Lewallen the founder of WPConnects and CertifyWP about the importance of credentialing and how it can help WordPress developers get jobs and get opportunities in places that currently require credentials.

And I guess just in general how it could help developers stand out, like Talisha you were saying, you have designed five sites, which is very impressive. I think that’s about how many sites I’ve built in my 15 years doing WordPress. But you wouldn’t consider yourself a WordPress expert?

Correct? 

Talisha Lewallen: Yeah.

You would be sort of an example of you’ve built WordPress, but you’re not necessarily someone that would get hired by a large company to be their WordPress expert.

Talisha Lewallen: Yeah. I don’t think they would want me to. I really don’t think they would want me to. I can build a website and I think that it looks good. However, if you ask the people on my team, they will tell you not to let me touch your website. I probably break my site more times than I do anything else, ‘cause I’m the trial and error person.

I wanna get in there and be like, I know it could do this. I’m gonna figure it out, and the next thing I know I get a 404, the page. And so then I have to call somebody else and be like can you go back and reset that or fix this? Like you’ve done, you’ve built five in 15 years.

I’ve built five and what, 3, 4 years. I don’t know how long it’s been at this point. I haven’t made huge websites, just little ones for either myself or managed a couple other sites for some friends just because they had somebody build it and they needed something done. I just wouldn’t consider myself an expert.

But having a standardized level of education would help stuff like that. So if I went into an interview for a WordPress expert position, I could say yes, I built five websites and I’ve managed, three and I’ve put in WooCommerce and I’ve done all of this, but on the other side, they wouldn’t wanna hire me to do it.

Just because I feel like again that I break my site more times than I do anything. And a lot of things are kind of trial and error.

Doc Pop: So potentially this certification beyond the needs that y’all have at WPConnects. This could be something that if I went to Fiver and wanted to hire a WordPress person to make some changes, or if I was a company looking to hire a WordPress Developer to build our restaurant website, this is the sort of thing that could, beyond your specific needs that you built this for, this is something that could help hiring in general.

Talisha Lewallen: Yes. Yes. I’ve actually brought up Fiver several times whenever I talk to people. Fiver is a great platform. I hire people all the time off of Fiver. And whenever I first started looking at the credentialing, I went through and looked at probably an ungodly amount of WordPress developers and website designers on Fiver.

And the common thing that you saw was, I’m a WordPress Developer or some even said that they were licensed or credentialed in WordPress. And I’m like, you’re full of crap because there isn’t one. But if I didn’t know, and that’s what I try to look at on the standpoint of, if I didn’t know anything about websites, what would I be looking for?

I would be looking for a Developer that was licensed or credentialed because they would know what they were doing. It’s just like an auto mechanic. If you take your car somewhere, you want them to have the credentialing. And pretty much every industry has some form of credentialing. Whenever you get in a car wreck, your insurance company makes you take your car to, there’s a certain credential for the auto mechanics that work on wrecked cars. I cannot think of the credential right now, but there is that. 

The same thing with teachers licenses and nursing licenses. You have to renew those, you have to continue your education. Same thing with chiropractors. But in tech industries and in any type of I’m gonna call it like a hands-on industry, there is credentialing and it’s for that because people that don’t know anything about it, I do not know anything about my car.

I’m gonna look for somebody that is licensed and credentialed to know what they’re doing, to know that they’re not gonna break it or compromise my site to somebody else. And so that’s really the point behind this is, yes, it’s supposed to help companies and hiring managers hire better employees, but it’s also supposed to help those of us that do contract work or are listed on Fiver, but also to give our customers a little bit more protection as well, knowing that the person they have mess, like I’m gonna say messing with, but designing their site is actually somebody that is knowledgeable.

I keep saying knowledgeable in baseline education. But that’s what they need to know. And I would very much hope that Fiver would be able to adopt the WordPress credential as something that their developers need to have on their sites to be able to be that next level on there.

That’s probably a pipe dream. But, you know, I do hope it’s there to give people, protect customers protection as well as helping other people get a job and be able to say that, “Yes, I can do this. Cause I have been trained.”

Doc Pop: Well, Talisha, I appreciate your time today. I know that as part of the process that y’all are currently still rolling out the credentialing process. I know it’s gonna come out probably, in the next month it sounds like. There’s also the letter that you’re asking folks to sign.

Can you quickly tell us about that and then we’ll wrap up.

Talisha Lewallen: Yes. The endorsement letter on our website. The main purpose for that letter is to show that there is a need in the community for the credential. So this need can be from companies saying that, “Yes, I will more than likely hire somebody that has this credential.” Or it could be individuals just saying, “Yes, I do find a need in our community for a credential.”

And the whole purpose behind it is for us to be able to send this credential off to the DOD. And this is where it, it’s been kind of getting a little murky with people and everybody’s like, oh this is only for the military. No, this credential is for every single person in the community. The DOD comes in for WPConnects.

So for us to be able to train the WordPress credential to our military personnel, it has to be approved through the DOD. So these credentialing letters of endorsement help us be able to get it approved through the DOD to train our armed forces.

Doc Pop: Well, I think that’s awesome. I filled out my letter and I encourage listeners to do the same. If people want to follow along, you were suggesting to follow on Twitter @certify_wp. And I think that’s a great spot for us to wrap up today, Talisha, I really appreciate what you’re doing with WPConnects and CertifyWP and huge shout out to all the advisory boards.

I know there’s a lot of volunteers and a lot of people who are excited to make this happen.

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

The post Press This: How WordPress Certification Can Help Developers Stand Out 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, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Now, there’s a lot of discussion this year and right now about the web and artificial intelligence, AI, Large Language Models, Stable Diffusion. Google and Bing have been experimenting with showing AI generated answers at the top of search queries.

And some developers are experimenting using AI tools like ChatGPT to generate code snippets. A lot of fascinating things are happening right now around AI, and as we’re recording, it’s really hard to tell where we are in this technological cycle. Like are we just at the very beginning?

Are things gonna look totally different next year? How is the web gonna be different and how is WordPress gonna be affected? So I’m super excited to have Aaron Edwards join us on the show today. Aaron is a Chief Technology Officer at WPMU Dev. He’s also the founder of Infinite Uploads, a cloud storage plugin for WordPress Imajinn AI and AI Image Generator for WordPress.

And he’s the creator of a new tool called ChatWP. The last two of those tools I think are gonna be relevant to our conversation today. Before we get into AI, Aaron, why don’t you tell us your WordPress origin story?

Aaron Edwards: Sure my short origin story I started out being really interested in WordPress when it was WordPress MU, or Multiuser now called Multi-Site because I was trying to build a kind of network of websites, kinda like WordPress.com. And so that’s when I kind of got into it and started learning WordPress development and actually joined WPMU Dev at that point as a customer and then eventually got hired by them as a developer. And now fast forward, what, 12 years or something? I’m CTO and that company’s grown quite a bit. But more recently I’ve been just building my own little side projects as well. Some of those you mentioned.

So that’s kind of my WordPress story.

Doc Pop: You and I have talked on the Torque Social Hour about Imajinn and we’re gonna talk about that later in this episode. But the newest thing you just launched is ChatWP. Kind of a fun twist on ChatGPT. Can you tell us a little bit about what is ChatWP? 

Aaron Edwards: Well ChatWP is basically, it’s a chat bot for WordPress and I trained it on all the WordPress documentation from WordPress.org. And just so it has that customized knowledge about it. And then I took that to create a custom chatbot, so anybody can ask questions about WordPress and it forms full answers.

Unlike a search engine, it actually answers the full question and gives you code snippets and examples. I mean, you can even tell it to answer in the form of a poem and it will do that, which is pretty fun. 

Yeah, it is really just an experiment as I’m kind of learning this new technology and kind of brand new ways to customize it for your own needs.

Doc Pop: So you said how this would be different than taking your question to Google or looking it up on Stack Overflow, but how is looking up a question on ChatWP different than maybe going to ChatGPT and asking for a technological question like this?

Aaron Edwards: Right. Well, ChatGPT, I’m gonna get ’em mixed up at one of these points, is trained on the entire Internet, so it has kind of general knowledge from back in 2021, I think. Of a whole lot of subjects, but it’s not specifically focused on any one subject. Also they still don’t provide any kind of API to where you can control it yourself.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Edwards: You have to use their interface on their website right now. So there hasn’t really been any clear, easy and as powerful ways to build the same kind of bot for your own content. Whether it’s your own support docs or in this case as a demonstration, I did the WordPress support docs. And so it’s a very relatively new, some of the APIs that OpenAI has released have enabled building products that are very similar to ChatGPT, but building them with your own knowledge base, like custom trained.

Doc Pop: So this is trained on WordPress documentation from WordPress.org, I assume. 

Aaron Edwards: Right, WordPress.org. 

Doc Pop: The site says “ChatWP can make users confident they’re receiving the most accurate and up-to-date information available.” 

And I imagine it’s hard to train a model when you’re using volunteer generated documentation and especially to keep it up to date, can you tell us a little bit about the difficulties around something like that?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, for sure. I mean, obviously whatever you train on, you have to kind of trust that as the source of the truth. Within the way this AI works in the backend, is it specifically instructed to only be allowed to answer things that it finds from WordPress to older documentation? I specifically don’t allow it to pull in general knowledge that it might know from the Internet.

Because you could get bias sources or things like that.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Edwards: Also, a big part of this is I wanted it to be able to provide sources for its answers. So, when you ask it to answer something and it writes the whole answering code snippet, it will actually link right below it, the actual sources to where it got that knowledge from, ranked by which ones like were most associated with it.

So that way it’ll link directly to the relevant documentation pages so you can check his answers to make sure it didn’t make something up, which is something that ChatGPT is known for just kind of making things up. So that’s kind of a very unique thing that’s part of it that we’re able to do with that technology by indexing the sources as well as just the general knowledge.

Doc Pop: So users are encouraged to ask questions. This is a conversational structure. You can’t just say “REST API” or something. You have to ask a question about the REST API.

Aaron Edwards: Right.

Doc Pop: And you also encourage users to ask or provide how they’d like answers, like if they want a code example.

When you’re providing code examples or when ChatWP is providing code examples, is it kind of creating those, or is it quoting those verbatim from the docs?

Aaron Edwards: It’s actually for the most part, creating them. So just like ChatGPT, we are leveraging the general knowledge of language and programming language and everything that OpenAI models have learned from all of the Internet. So we’re using that general knowledge, but then we’re specifically tailoring it or limiting it to only the WordPress specific docs information.

So it’s using its general knowledge of language and general knowledge of PHP programming, for example. And it’s mixed, combining that with the specific details that it’s learned from WordPress.org. So it’s able to create code examples that way, which is pretty amazing.

Doc Pop: And can users say, “Hey, I’m trying to edit WordPress 5.0 or something.” 

Can they ask questions about older versions or is this always assume they’re using the newest version?

Aaron Edwards: It would probably not be able to find or like limit to that kind of context. 

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. 

Aaron Edwards: Just cause we basically just scraped every page from WordPress.org. Whether it’s like the Codex, the Developer documentation about all the code, that’s auto generated or the Learn WordPress site that has tutorials and courses and things like that.

So it’s just kind of pulling in that information and answering based on what it knows there. And then it’s specifically instructed that if it doesn’t find the answer in those sources, like specifically, then it will say, I don’t know, look on WordPress.org. So it’s kind of instructed to not make those things up or make those combinations if it didn’t find them from WordPress.org.

Doc Pop: Yeah, that makes sense. And if documentation gets updated, does it have a way of scrubbing the old information, or is that like a manual process you have to do?

Aaron Edwards: Right now it’s manual, as I mentioned in the FAQ. I tried different ways to get that data, like REST API or different things like that. But I found the most efficient way was actually just to build a web crawler and scrape WordPress.org, ‘cause then you get the full HTML how it was meant to be presented.

I use that for training. So right now that was just a manual process, but I have scripts that I can run to update it manually. But eventually kind of the idea was just for this to be an experiment to learn and play with this new technology and then also, I kind of added a wait list form there with just gathering interest for if people are interested in something like this for their own business, their own documentation.

So I think that could be a fun, cool product to build to where anyone could have a chatbot for their own business.

Doc Pop: Let’s talk about that in a minute. We’re gonna take a quick break to get to our sponsors, but when we come back, we’ll continue talking with Aaron Edwards, the creator of ChatWP about AI and WordPress.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR.fm. My name’s Doc. I’m your host today, and I am talking to Aaron Edwards about AI and WordPress. We are talking so far about ChatWP, a brand new tool that allows you to go and ask questions, get code examples, all sorts of stuff in regards to WordPress, and you can check that out at WPdocs.chat.

And you know, you were just kind of talking about how currently we’re scraping WordPress documentation to kind of provide the answers for these questions on the chat. But are there future plans to kind of do this beyond WordPress? Do you have future partnerships lined up?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, I hope to. I’ve already been working on building this into WPMU Dev, my day job. So we’re testing this technology also with our own documentation there, but eventually I would like to turn this into a service that any online business that has documentation or support tickets, any kind of that data that they can use to ingest and learn from, and they would be able to use that on their own sites.

So whether customer facing or even it could be used for like internal company documentation where you index that. You have for example, a Slack bot or something in your company, and then you can ask how many days off do I get, you know, when’s the next holiday or whatever. And it would be able to give you answers instead of having to search through piles of HR documentation, there’s so many use cases for this.

It’s just really fun to think about.

Doc Pop: I hadn’t thought about using implementation like this, like chat implementation for intranet, internal web stuff. That is pretty interesting. You mentioned that possibly something like this might come to WPMU Dev, and so that would be, y’all have documentation for your mini apps, mini plugins, and so that would be sort of like on your site as well and it would help users of those plugins maybe find answers to questions.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, exactly. So we would just expose it as part of our support options where people could ask the AI for the answers they want. And of course I also have plans, for example, we have support forums and you have support tickets. Like you may have help desk software.

Would it be possible to actually write a draft answer to support tickets automatically based on your company’s internal knowledge or even based on training it on all the support tickets that you’ve already answered in the past? So, I mean, almost any online business has a help desk or something like that, and they have a huge amount of data already that the AI could learn from.

If you could build a custom one and then you can use that to help answer people’s questions in the future, which was a pretty amazing thought.

Doc Pop: Regarding ChatWP. This is paid API access that you have, that you’re providing, kind of complimentary. And you do mention on here, I think I saw a tweet, “If you do hit the rate limit, we provide a way to make requests using your own OpenAI API key instead,” is what you said. 

For people who are listening, if I was using this and for some reason, your API key had been maxed out, your quota had been reached, what would be the process if I wanted to keep using this but not pay money?

Aaron Edwards: Well I have a rate limit that I just set up right now that’s basically per user or visitor or whatever, and I’m just trying to keep someone from spamming it or putting a bot or whatever and costing me a ton of money because every question is costing a number of cents.

So that can add up quickly when you have thousands of people that are asking questions. So I just kind of put a basic rate limit there. And if you hit that rate limit, which resets daily right now, then it will just actually prompt you to enter your own API key, which anyone can create an open AI account. 

And they give you $20 of free credit. So then you just put in your own key and then it would use that to make the request instead. And so that frees me from having to block people and they can just continue to use it using their own credits.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s cool and I do have to say I appreciate at the bottom of the page you say, “Help contribute to WordPress and improve this bot by joining the documentation and training teams.” That’s a nice call to action there and shout out to those teams. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah for sure.

Doc Pop: And I think anything that, anything that kind of helps make their work more visible is awesome.

I wanna switch things up a little bit and talk about other AI WordPress implementations that you’ve worked on. You and I have talked on the livestream about Imajinn AI, but I don’t think we’ve introduced that to our Press This audience.

So why don’t you tell us about Imajinn AI.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, sure. So I was following really closely when OpenAI came out with Dall-e, which was their image generation model, and it was very hard to get into the beta testing. I think I finally got access back in July or something. So playing around with that, at that point it was like, this is amazing, revolutionary as we’ve seen how it’s affected art and image generation and things like that and the things that can be done with it.

And so once the first kind of open source model that was capable of doing that came out, which is called Stable Diffusion. I was following that very closely, just waiting for that to drop and the second it did, I just started getting to work that weekend and trying to build a proof of concept for how you could generate images like that within WordPress since it’s a platform I know and what I’m best at developing for.

And so that was back in August and I kind of tweeted that out and shared it. It went pretty viral and um, so we released that plugin, Imajinn. Back at the beginning of September. So that’s our plugin for generating images. And so since then I’ve maintained that plugin and added new features, but also have pivoted as newer technologies have kind of come up.

So I turned it kind of into a SaaS. So that isn’t necessarily WordPress dependent. So we have a whole bunch of different little mini products that we launched on that, which you can see at Imajinn.AI. But we’ve done everything from where you can custom train product photos or pictures of yourself so you can generate all kinds of images. You’ve seen that kind of go viral too, like with avatars, AI avatars, profile pictures, that kind of thing.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Edwards: We’ve also built ways that you could make a printed portrait for Valentine’s Day. My wife and I released a children’s book that uses that underlying technology to turn the child’s pictures into like a superhero and a doctor and construction worker and all these different things within the children’s book.

Most recently we launched a product photo visualizer. And that’s actually free. So where you just upload your product photo and then it can totally change the style and background. It’s kind of like a virtual photo shoot,

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Edwards: That’s kind of fun. I’m hoping to integrate that into the plugin and so it could be used like maybe for WooCommerce images, things like that.

Doc Pop: Oh, cool. For anyone who is hearing this and wants to research it more, it’s Imajinn.ai and you can find out more about it. And one of the things that really got me about the Gutenberg Block, the Imajinn Block, is just how cool it was to be able to kind of interact with Stable Diffusion within a WordPress block.

It just felt really polished and it was one of those things that really, if you were still on the fence about blocks. This is one of those implementations you’re like, okay, this really shows how cool a block can be. It was a really cool implementation and shout out to y’all for that.

Aaron Edwards: That was my first Gutenberg block that I built, so that was a fun learning experience too.

Doc Pop: We’re gonna take another short break and when we come back we’re gonna talk to Aaron Edwards about predictions for the web and AI and WordPress. So stay tuned after this break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Committee podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and today I am talking to Aaron Edwards, who’s a busy dude making a ton of cool projects like Infinite Uploads, Imajinn AI Chat WP, and of course he’s also the CTO over at WPMU Dev. We have spent all of the show so far talking about ChatWP and Imajinn AI, kind of two specific WordPress implementations Aaron, you’ve been working on.

I kind of just want to take a step back and see if you have any predictions for AI and WordPress. Right now it’s hard to tell what’s the fad and like, what’s gonna stick around and how much more advanced things are gonna get. Are we kind of like seeing something that we will see like a year from now?

Will it look the same or is this technology gonna look totally different? I’m not gonna ask you all those. I’m just gonna ask you, just give me your predictions for AI and WordPress.

Aaron Edwards: That’s a big concept. I think it’s just been interesting, I mean, what has happened in the last year is ridiculous, whether it’s the image generation or ChatGPT, large language model text generation. It’s really just a kind of revolution. It’s kind of in that phase where everyone’s just super excited about it.

I’m sure that there’s gonna be that crash soon, that trough of disillusionment they call it, with new technology. And then from that is where we actually see the real tools that will be actually practical and they’ll just gradually get integrated in everyone’s workflow and everyone’s everyday life. So definitely there’s a lot of hype right now. But it’s exciting ‘cause every day, new things are being invented, new ways to use it. Like even this ChatWP that I built that’s very new, it was only enabled, OpenAI released the API needed for that just in December, and then the embeddings API, which I used to actually train it, they reduce the cost of that and improved it like tenfold, how well it works.

So they reduced the cost by 10x and it basically works 10 times better. And that was only released on I think December 22nd. So this is a very new technology thing that everyone is just starting to learn about and learn new ways to use for building products, building practical things.

So as far as WordPress, I think that, obviously WordPress is all about content. So content is a huge thing. So I think that the image generation, those kind of tools will get better and easier to use for when you’re writing content. Then of course we have AI writing, which has been around for a while.

You have ones like Bertha, plugins that allow you to like insert writing. Then of course you have some big companies like Jasper and things like that. Some of them have browser integrations just to help you write content. And of course that’s another subject when it comes to SEO and if that’s to write content using AI, so I don’t have any specific things, but I think that content is probably the biggest thing that’s gonna impact WordPress for sure.

Doc Pop: SEO is kind of a surprising element that I think WordPressers talk about when we think about AI and I think in the beginning my biggest fear was that AI generated content, largely through WordPress sites would flood Google, right? Like you wouldn’t be able to find anything because everything was gonna be just people competing using bots to generate content that just does really well.

That was my fear. And it’s funny, that was like a month ago and now my fear since Bing and Google have experimented with adding ChatGPT answers to things. Now my fear is the opposite is that Google won’t be sending traffic anywhere because they’re gonna be uh…

Aaron Edwards: SEO won’t exist anymore.

Doc Pop: Yeah. So there’s theories that I’ve seen people saying that in order to stay relevant within a world where ChatGPT answers or AI answers are at the top of search results, large publishers might end up partnering with Google to make sure that they’re training Google on their results. So in order to be maybe the most relevant thing that shows up in a chat answer, New York Times might be like, “Hey we’re giving you quick access to all of our content to make sure that you’re really well trained in case anything comes up.”

Right? It reminds me of AMP in a way of like the Google Amp, and kind of like Google showing AMP results up at the top. And so publishers were incentivized to use AMP. I kind of feel like we’re maybe gonna see some sort of pressure there to team up with Google. I’m really going all over the place here.

But like that’s what’s happening with SEO is our concerns are just pivoting from one thing to another. You know, since AI’s come around

Aaron Edwards: Exactly. I think the focus will be less on SEO and more about actually providing answers to people’s questions. And that will be integrated, you know, into these Large Language Models more easily. So I think it will have a positive benefit, honestly ‘cause really SEO has become a very unfair game.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. That’s true.

Aaron Edwards: That’s my personal opinion. I hate that space, even though I have to do it for my own business, pay that tax. Another thing that I’ve heard, which is a very interesting way of looking at it, is if you know how these Large Language Models or Large Image Models, how they work, they work in, they call it latent space.

So it’s kind of like a higher dimensional space of vector numbers. So basically they’ll take a piece of text and they’ll convert that into a set of 1000 to 4,000 unique numbers called vectors. And that’s how you’re able to compare and that’s what encodes not just the words, but it’s actually encoding the patterns and things like that in text.

With that though, it’s actually a very strong form of lossy compression. Kind of like when you have a JPEG image, it doesn’t encode all of the details in it. It may look okay, like good enough for a human to see, but it’s actually missing a whole lot of information and a whole lot of data.

And these AIs basically work the same way. So it’s a very lossy compression, so it can make something that may look okay and work okay for many applications, but it doesn’t have the same level of depth as a human written thing or human generated art in that regard, there may always be that place for real human content, and people will categorize those differently as different levels.

If they want to know just the general knowledge or if they want to know the in depth, real human insights.

Doc Pop: Mm-hmm. Aaron, I appreciate your time today. It’s been really fascinating to talk to you about, uh, your predictions for AI and WordPress, and the tools you’ve already created. 

If people wanna find out more about you, they can follow you on Twitter @UglyRobotDev, and I want to say thanks so much to everyone who’s listened to this episode of Press This, a WordPress Community podcast on WMR.

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

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