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Robert Abela

And we’re live. Thank you for joining us for this first episode of 2026. This year we have some interesting guests lined up, so make sure you join us every week or almost every week. Since the last episode, we released an update of WP 2FA, which now supports Passkeys. In fact, if you would like to learn more about Passkeys, join us on 22nd January. We have a session with Tim Nash, WordPress security researcher to discuss Passkeys and explain what they are and how they work.

For today’s episode, we have a very interesting guest, a very interesting story, started as a writer for a local newspaper in 2002, started his computer engineering course and learning English, in 2006 started his first blog and continued building from there. And nowadays, he is the CEO and founder of rtCamp, an agency, a WordPress enterprise agency of 250 people. 

Thank you for joining us, Rahul. How are you?

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, I’m good. Thanks for inviting me, Robert.

Robert Abela

You’re welcome. Before we jump in today’s subject about enterprise WordPress, can you tell us a bit more about rtCamp and what you do?

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, so as you mentioned in the introduction, So I started my journey as a blogger. So rtCamp initially started as a kind of a media house, which was hosting our blog network. Like we had different blogs under one umbrella. And from there we’ve pivoted into doing WordPress development, initially small business. I won’t say one small business. Our first audience was literally company of one, like people who are doing their own people who are building their career as a professional blogger and they say, hey, I like this on your site. Can I have it on my site?

Yeah, $10, $20. So those were the initial projects. And then, yeah, from there we kept moving. Then over the time we shut down blogging completely and become this enterprise consulting agency over the years.

Robert Abela

Interesting. This is exactly what I want to ask you about, the enterprise, because you just mentioned the enterprise. I see it a lot. Like people use this term enterprise WordPress. From your experience, apart from the code base, what makes WordPress like a business critical solution, an enterprise business critical solution? What’s the difference between that and non-enterprise WordPress installation?

Rahul Bansal

Yeah. So first, like I agree here, enterprise word is used quite liberally in contest, like anybody who wants to charge premium usually say, Hey, this is an enterprise plan, this is enterprise, this is bad enterprise. Yeah, so it’s like, I think, yeah, it means different thing to different people, but more often, especially in open source communities, which are like usually centered around software, so naturally coding heavy, engineering heavy, we think a lot about only core or mainly core when you think about selling to large businesses like large-scale enterprises, which is not wrong completely, core and like a large part of relationship or winning a deal is revolved around the core, like how can you prove security, scalability or performance, like the history of you delivering something at large scale. But then that is literally half, or I would say less than half part of the real enterprise big projects.

A lot of it is about understanding how enterprises operate. And there are so many variations, like the governments operate differently, listed companies operate differently. Sometimes there are like this house of brands, like this is conglomerates, like which are like span across 20 countries, 30 brands.  And there is usually, you need to factor in a lot.

Like the common thing is there is going to be a lot of red taping at every, so you need to have a lot of patience.  Like you cannot expect like somebody will submit contact form or you will get a referral and in a one week you will walk away with that deal. 

Like that never happened to us also like even after like 16 years or let’s say 10 years in only in exclusive enterprise space.  It’s a long journey, involves a lot of stakeholder, a lot of patience, a lot of paperwork, dealing with people who are never going to use the deck, but we’re going to ask a lot of questions.

So, and initially it might sound absurd, like why these people are asking these questions to us, but then it starts making sense because they are also for part of the bigger system. 

Like sometimes the question come from the compliance team, sometimes it comes from the legal team. And once you start understanding all the non-engineering forces that operate within enterprise space, you kind of position yourself better for the success, like in this space.

Robert Abela

So is it fair to assume that the biggest difference between enterprise and non-enterprise is more the, are more the things around it, as you said, rather than the actual code base?

Rahul Bansal

Yep. So I would say that, let me put it in two ways. For winning the deal, the non-code part is actually more important because code will only kick in once you start project. 

If you don’t get the project, the question will not come to that point.  So it’s like first few iterations like the NDAs, like security question, or like sometimes these companies send vendor onboarding forms.  =So there are many, many, many steps in the journey where code is not discussed to begin with.

So usually like, so if it comes from referral or like inbound lead, usually they go through a case study. So some kind of assurance they already have about their engineering capabilities.

So usually first question is, have you worked with somebody in our industry? And in our industry, sometimes they’re in compliance, like they want to know, like, have you done. Have you built any website with HIPAA compliant or meet some accessibility standard?

So it’s like it’s very subjective or specific question to them and we need to get it right. Like what are they trying to understand?  Are they trying to understand technology, like having moved something from AEM to WordPress or Sitecore to WordPress? 

Or are they trying to go through some legal compliance, some kind of government checklist which is applicable in a particular country or in a particular geography or in a particular sector. And the sooner you get it, the more tailored response you give it.  So in terms of code, WordPress is open source. There is no limit. You can build anything on it.

So, but that confidence starts from understanding their business. No, not the other way around. Like you cannot just say, we have 50,000 plugin, we can do anything for you. Why not you give WordPress this opportunity? So yeah, so it boils down to understanding the domain business, the invisible forces.

Robert Abela

Interesting. Yeah, we do get effects. We do sell, to some of enterprises. And as you are saying, before you sell, even like I said, sometimes it’s a bit of a big overhead, like even to sell a $99 plugin, you have to first fill in this form to become a vendor with them, and then to approve this vendor, and then they have to send a request for a quote, and there are a lot of…

Rahul Bansal 

I get it, yeah, I get it, yeah, 

Robert Abela

Which is a bit of an over, but is it kind of like also, is it like, what is these enterprises? Do they know kind of thing? Like, because you said us, you as an agency have to understand the enterprise requirements, but do they understand how purpose business typically work? Because as I said, like sometimes to sell a $149 plugin, it’s like it’s almost an over, no?

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, so how do I put like, so first like…They don’t expect, so somebody sending you that kind of data request is like is not looking for something to buy from $100. Like they expect like this is additional risk. So usually this is a suggestion I give to one of the, like my friend who runs a plugin shop, like create a separate landing page, make it as a enterprise plan and add to bells and whistles like. We will help you on board, we will help you training, we will give you like somebody on the phone support and make it like $5000 or something like that.

It should be in thousands, like at least even if about plugin license and then it’s worth your time and then they can also understand if they don’t want to go through it, like you can ask them, go to the checkout page, $99, put your credit card. 

Robert Abela

Yeah, makes sense.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, it’s like, so how to put like, so usually we, ballpark is like something, we have something called like cost of sale. So before you, as soon as the lead comes, like, so something is like $2,000, we kind of have like a sunk cost. Like this is, even if you don’t win this business, just chasing this would cost us $2,000. Like that’s a rough number that keeps changing based on the like a few factors, but so that’s why I said like this cycle is very time consuming, like that fill the question as they send, you cannot fill in blindly, like sometimes you’re entering into legal obligation, you need to understand what are you signing up for, like, because you cannot say that my plugin is GPL, but yeah, that’s GPL, but this is something signed between two legal entities, so it’s binding on top of GPL.

Robert Abela

Now that you’ve dealt, of course, with a number of enterprises, what’s the biggest misconception enterprises have about WordPress, you think?

Rahul Bansal

The typical security is still being questioned. So depending on who we are talking, like if you’re talking people who are not technical, we refer to the big sites like NASA or White House, and we try to say that, hey, if these folks are using WordPress, you can trust like if White House is in WordPress there is like you can trust it but if somebody from the engineering or tech team ask then we show them data points and then we kind of have that conversation like say WordPress doesn’t get hacked it’s a like it’s like the things you see first is WordPress is very popular so number of incidents will be like there will be something in the news always because this is like half of the web.

But then how often you come across a core vulnerability that was exploited in the wild. Like it’s always some theme or plugin, third party, mostly it’s plugin like the WordPress.org themes I don’t remember get hacked as often as the plugins get. 

And then then we kind of explain like what kind of process we have.  We usually we tell them maybe don’t have auto update, everything is vetted.  And so it’s like it’s easier to how to put like so the misconception is comes from all the kind of people like from the engineering to everybody.

But with usually with engineers it’s easy time because they understand technology. So when we explain slide by slide or point by point like this is how we take care of security. Our customer sites usually like which are hosted on some platform like WordPress VIP won’t get hacked.  And then we don’t make it like a blind promise. 

We show the processes in place to like deliver on that kind of security guarantees. And then they understand, okay, like there’s so many like from the web application firewall to code review, there’s so many checks and balances in place. So yeah, that is how things will be secured. It’s usually the, yeah. So it’s like usually the people who are not technical, if they have some prejudice against WordPress, they take time to like get convinced.

Robert Abela

Interesting. Yeah. In fact, I want, because I want to ask you that because I’ve always, I also quite often actually, but it’s been a while to be honest, but I encounter people, especially developers, especially the security. In the security industry that they look down on WordPress on the ecosystem. That’s not the first time I speak to someone and say, okay, it’s an industry of hobbyists and script kiddies. It’s not actually. To be honest, last year I spoke to a recruiting agent because we’re looking for someone.

And he actually has been like, what are there people working full time with WordPress? Like, what do you? So people look down on it as a, as a, apart from the showing them technical aspects, is there something like the WordPress People in the representatives you can do kind of like, or is there like some sort of tips that you can give on how we can speak to these people like, hey, this is not just an industry of hobbies and script kiddies. I mean, like there are large scalable solutions, enterprise solutions, etc.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, so we usually show them showcase like some, for example, like we are in that position that we have already built our portfolio. So usually we are biased. So in our pre-sale cycle, most of the resources we share are linked back to rtCamp, like our own case studies, some kind of white papers where we basically have already addressed those concerns based on the questions received in the past. And now it’s like more like reusing the existing Q&A. It has become like a FAQ for us.  They got asked so frequently, now we have answers ready. Compiled in PDF, Google Slides, Google Docs, website, like in multiple format ready for them to consume. 

But in general, like I think if you want, like I understand, like if somebody’s listening, this as an agency, you would, you may not want to refer them to resources on other agency sites.

So, and it’s perfectly fine. So I think WordPress VIP is a good place. They have amazing library of resources that you can refer which addresses a lot of different dimensions about different concerns, not just security, scalability, but like productivity, enterprise workflows, how kind of ROIs large companies are driving. 

So I think there is more apart from security or scalability, there are other things also like large enterprises look for like, okay, security is okay, scalability is there, but is this software going to solve my problem? And that is the biggest thing happens. Like every enterprise has a different kind of business upload workflow.

There is more, and usually when we think of like writing something in WordPress on a personal blog or something, we think of go to editor, write something, hit the publish button. That is not how it’s happened in like different company. Like in some companies, there might be SEO team who will…we have one point in that like assembly, assembly line kind of production happens like there’s SEO check, there is a graphic designer check who will be like who will be like task for featured image that can be like that can be micro step and there can be legal checks like, hey, can you publish it?

So, can you map those workflows, their internal org structure to the system? And this is very often overlooked, but there are solutions to this where I think I’m not able to recall on my top of my head, but there are case studies if you go to WordPress VIP site and even other resources, you will find those case studies where apart from security and scalability, enterprises have…

has given this confirmation that they’ve benefited in terms of the increased productivity, faster time to market, like breaking the breaking news faster. Those kind of case studies existent not just across media industries, but outside like the mainstream media, like for large conglomerate which has complex org structure, like 10,000 people working in the company and article need to, and a single piece of article need to go through like 6 to 7 different cross-functional teams.

They also have a history of their guest is where they benefited from WordPress simplifying this collaboration, reducing friction, and improving the overall productivity of their team. So, yeah, so.

Robert Abela

It’s so I’m presuming it’s a setup. There’s a lot of customization, right?

Rahul Bansal

Yup

Robert Abela

it’s no longer the standard WordPress code. It’s the WordPress code base, but I’m sure there is much more customization. In fact, there’s this impression that most enterprises prefer to build custom. Is that true?

Rahul Bansal

So, how to put like, they want to, so he is a fine line like, so I would say they prefer their agency partner like us to verify everything that goes on their like site. And as an agency, our goal should be like that. I always keep telling internally that curation over creation. Like agencies usually get tempted to jump to custom codebase because the usually agency billing happens in like hours, like proportionate to the hours. So the more hours you incur, more custom work you do, the bigger the bill you are, the more you are able to charge upfront.

But in longer run, this is not a good approach. That is something we have proved. So we have this list of vetted plugins, like Gravity Forms is our go-to plugin. Any kind of form, we always recommend Gravity Forms. Like Gutenberg is our go-to page builder.

So it’s like we have these pre-vetted solutions, and whenever client has open-ended requirement, we fall back on this. And then if a customization is required, we still look for like…is there anything in public domain? If not, have you built something in as an internal library?

We try to use as much as possible and we take pride in telling client that even though you had this custom budget, we managed to deliver like say something in like half of the budget or like 2/3 of the budget and we saved you X and we take a guarantee of all the codebase like. So that is where the curation over creation comes into picture.

And it’s not like large enterprises are happy that you saved them 20-30% dollar because their overall marketing budget is way bigger than the budget they usually allocate to a CMS, especially a CMS, which doesn’t have licensing fees. So the only thing they’re spending on the consulting partner and bunch of licenses and hosting.

They are happy because you saved them 20% in time. Like you meet the deadline, sometimes you deliver before the deadline, and that is what they’re more happy about. They keep coming back to you. They keep referring you back. And that is where the real growth unlocks. So even though custom is what they can afford and often they think of as an agency, our goal should be to tap into this vast ecosystem we have created like over this 20 years. This library of more than 50,000 plugins, GPL plugins, we have tens of thousands teams. We have reuse as much as possible and yeah, keep like charge more, like charge premium rather than inflating the number of hours.

Robert Abela

So, it’s…

Rahul Bansal

I was saying, we usually tend to avoid custom work even though we are engineering heavy.

Robert Abela

It’s good to know. It’s good to know that, yeah, first you check if there’s something in the public space, if there’s some solution. You have a lot of experience, of course, working with enterprises. When it comes to evaluating a plugin, of course plugin, or any other type of plugin, maybe this is the answer is more for the product vendors. 

Rahul Bansal

Yeah

Robert Abela

What’s, now that you have experience working with enterprises, what do you look for in a plugin, in a product to qualify as a suitable product for your projects.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, so there are many things. The least is we run PHP coding standard like PHPCS to see if there is a known issue, something like that. If there are minor issues, we will fix it. We often send pull request or patch back to the plugin maintainer. Then we usually say like how the plugin is supported. Is it supported or not?, what kind of maintenance it requires. For example, it is some taxation plugin. So taxation is keeps ever changing. So you cannot have a taxation plugin where maintainer think it’s a one time job. They dumped the plugin and disappeared. So you need it to be actively developed. So it’s like usually who is maintainer first like licensing, even though sometimes clients are not strict about it, but we still make sure that whatever we’re putting on their site is GPL or at least any FOSS license so that if tomorrow the original author or maintainer disappears, we can take over and continue to customize it for them.

Then security, as I mentioned, like the PHPCS is a minimum. And then if it’s coming from non-author or like trusted source, then it’s better. So it’s like if something is coming from WordPress.org, it is trusted more. Then you go to the forum, check the rating, reviews, like some past history. But usually, how to put like after working for a decade, for 90% of the cases, we already have something in our internal list. Like we need a form, this plugin, we need this kind of integration, we need SEO. So in almost…all broader categories we already have pre-vetted, pre-approved, like internally plug-in, vetted plug-in.

Robert Abela

Interesting. So is it fair to say that the enterprises, your clients, kind of, I wouldn’t say hold reliable, but kind of like wants to be responsible for the upkeep of the website? Because as you said, they prefer if the plugin is GPL. So in case for some reason that plugin is no longer maintained, then you can take over. Is it safe to say that it’s maybe part of the offering that you offer as well?

Rahul Bansal

So let me put it this way, to them it’s not, so taking over part is more like an internal. For example, let’s say a WordPress 7.0 is coming and a plugin, like say we built a site, let’s say five years ago, that used some API, which happens very rarely in WordPress, like WordPress has amazing track record of backward compatibility. But say in hypothetical case, in each case, Few lines of code need to change to switch from one API to another API, newer version, or maybe WordPress added some capability, like sometime like the GDPR came. It was a new thing, and if your plugin is doing anything with PII, you need to probably modify it to be GDPR compliant, so, but now the original author disappears, like…

And not in a bad way, like it, they might lost interest in the WordPress community, the plugin they might have created was a hobby, some there would be a number of reason, like they are not able to support the plugin, so, it’s an implied expectation that we, as a vendor, will act as a one one point of contact for the entire ecosystem, so when we, so when we are dealing with an enterprise client, we are not representing rtCamp. We represent the entire WordPress ecosystem, like we represent Gravity Forms, we represent Yoast, we represent everybody.

So then we are the single point of proxy for all these entities, theme, plugins, hosting companies, all are like reverse proxied by us. So if it is in a, so usually how it works, like usually in large enterprise project, there is a retainer on maintenance contract, where like this client space, like say lumpsum, like either they buy hourly blocks. In some way, there’s a commercial understanding reach through which there is a budget, there’s a provision for us to keep maintaining whatever we build for them. That includes WordPress core updates, any security exploits that get reported like by the patch tracker and other sources.

And all that being said, even if something needs literally an upgrade, like no security, nothing, just WordPress 7 is coming. Like sometimes things break for PHP update, like something was built like on PHP 8 and now PHP like five years later PHP 9 will come that they have authorised. So there can be any number of reason basically what is blocking the their upgrade or what is blocking their journey. So a standard SOP in agencies like especially enterprises like check with the plugin author report to them whatever support like for if they are totally unresponsive go fix it yourself and if the later responds, send them like, hey, this is a patch we have created.

If you want, you can take it. So if they take it and release it, then we can again hook into the automated update mechanism. Otherwise, we end up maintaining that fork. Usually, we maintain these forks in internal repos. Because these are not security patches. Security patches, we usually collaborate with the author to tell them like.

Robert Abela

So is it fair to say that premium plugins typically are preferred from enterprises than free simply because of course, I mean, it’s never guaranteed, but the fact that there’s a premium, there’s a business behind this support is at least until the business is there is somehow guaranteed. However, if it’s a free plugin, as you said, someone might just back up and leave kind of thing.

Rahul Bansal

I think yes, because how do I put like, so it’s like, I would say enterprises usually don’t differentiate much into that. As I said, like the agency partner becomes the point of contact or representative of the entire ecosystem. We as an agency need to build so many sites.

Robert Abela

Yeah, but for you as an agency, let’s say, since you are representing, for you, what, let’s put it this way. So for you, maybe it’s premium plugin more attractive than a free plugin?

Rahul Bansal

Yes, not always, but usually, so it’s like some, so it need to be supported. For example, there could be a premium model, like some companies release free plugin. So as I mentioned, like if it is updated, backed by a sustainable business, that is more important because otherwise it will eat my agency’s budget. So if the plugin maintainer disappears and we have to make it WordPress 7.0 compatible. I mean, sometimes we get paid in proportion, sometimes we have the fixed budget.

And in fixed budget, this is an additional line item. It’s like it is our margin. So we usually try to partner with this because then the thing is, we get update proactively. So usually like…our release cycle is like if WordPress 7 is coming on the beta RC1, we will start testing our client side on staging. And if something is break, then there’s sometimes like the window is small. Sometimes we, oh, we didn’t know this will break.

But if it is professionally maintained, like the premium plugin, then they have to deliver that update for like the 10s of thousands of customers, like in some cases, millions of customers, something like WooCommerce. So those updates comes much more like in time bound manner without putting stress on our resources. So we usually prefer, as I mentioned, like I mentioned Gravity Forms, right? I mentioned the Yoast SEO. So everywhere we are using premium plugin, there are like free alternatives available. And another thing with agencies is that once they locked into a plugin, they don’t change the plugin in that category.

So it’s like, because then we build processes around it, like our internal documentation, project management, it’s like everywhere, and that is where another reason for us to partner with premium plugins, because then we can take that extra effort to make it part of our day-to-day life, not just the project, but our internal processes, our guidelines, our tooling, everything, even the pre-sales documentation, everywhere that plugin is added. So we kind of bundle it as a core WordPress experience in that sense. So when, let’s say, hypothetically, somebody contact rtCap, they are going to build website for the first time. It’s not going to happen in rtCamp because we usually deal with established companies. And they have, we have no idea how our website looks like, so show us what is the baseline website you can build for us.

So we’ll go, this is a business which thrives on lead generation. So we will put Gravity Forms, and we will not tell this is Gravity Forms. You say, this is WordPress, this is your contact form, this is your lead generation form, this is your SEO. So we, and like when we say SEO, it will be Yoast SEO.

There will be like Jetpack, there will be tons of this plugins seamlessly integrated. And presented as a single offering only when it moves to the next stage as a part of like the transparency in the proposal stage, we will like this feature was followed by this plugin. The licensing cost is this. We as agency already have a license, so that is another good thing in WordPress ecosystem. Most premium plugins offer this agency license where either there is like a huge limit on the sites or unlimited sites and for enterprise. Agencies like the large scale would use enterprise site.

I mean, this is a little bit unfair to the premium plugins, but like 100, 100, 100 site license is a big enough for rtCamp even after 16 years because we build like 10 big 10-20 big sites in a year. So it’s like we are, but like then we put everything in this like so how do I put like we bundle the demo. We bundle it in the proposal, we bundle it in the cost of sale. So everything is seamless for the client. And for this seamlessness to continue over a decade, we need Gravity Forms to be around with us like, let’s say like hypothetically, if tomorrow Gravity Forms shut down the shop.

We will have baseline cost to update our internal documentation, processes. Even if there is no client project, even if the existing client said, we don’t care, like it’s a GPL, it’s on our site. So even if they maintain status quo for the new lead flow that will come in, we will have to do a lot of work.

Robert Abela

Interesting.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah

Robert Abela

So basically, as a product vendor, I’m asking, as a product vendor, it’s if you are in touch or have some relationship with an enterprise agency, it’s important to understand that it’s not just about this, but you need to invest time. It’s a relationship. It’s not something, hey, here’s the license by it. You work together and hopefully have this relationship. So it’s worth for a vendor, even if it’s just 100 site license, to invest the time because they build that relationship right with these type of agencies.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah.

Robert Abela

Is…yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Rahul Bansal

And like this relationship also, so usually with large enterprises, I get it like. The dollar per site revenue is a little bit unfair because the sites are big. So the plugin pricing is not in proportion to the value of the site that is being used on. But then this agency channel opens up a lot of code integrations. For example, we have built probably a dozen amazing high quality Gravity Forms add-ons over a decade. As an agency, we don’t have any interest in monetizing these small add-ons. So we kind of expand the ecosystem. So it’s like, so it’s a win-win situation in long run because agencies have this budget to build these additional add-ons, which kind of goes back to the ecosystem.

Robert Abela

As an agency, as you said, you sell. A website, a website, it’s a package, not like this package, etc. Do you typically, is white labeling important for you or you just sell everything like with the brands? You kind of like, do you explain to the, even though you’re just selling a website, do you explain to the end user that there are third parties involved, these third party companies, etc?

Rahul Bansal

So in our case, we haven’t sold a single white label site like in our lifetime, like every, I mean, we are, so it’s like, As I mentioned, like we demo it as a single offering, because we don’t want to break the flow, like we don’t want to add the additional cognitive load of thinking the multiple vendor, like you are getting what you want, what you, why does it matter? Like this form is not from the WordPress core, like you are getting the unified experience, both are GPL licensed, so you have the same ownership control, like you have the same rights, legal rights on the form, as well as the Gutenberg Editor.

So, but in, as I mentioned, in the legal doc, we do mention like these are the third-party costs we incur, and we also add one, I would say, like a business side, like we will be allowing renewal on your site as long as you are on our retainer package. For example, you hire rtCamp to build initial site, so let’s say it’s a 10,00-100K project, whatever, six-month project, it finishes. And for some reason, for whatever reason, like it can be like you don’t feel like the site is important enough or like it’s not big enough for you, that you don’t want to go for a retainer project. So if you’re not remaining rtCamp’s client, then we will remove our licenses and we will inform them like, hey, you go and buy Gravity Forms license directly.

You cannot use our agency license sheet and from periodically we go to the all these plugin vendors dashboard because it feels unfair like to the plugin vendors also like why they should pile up because since they’re not with rtCamp tomorrow if something happens on their site they will go and contact direct home directly using our license key so it’s unfair to the plugin vendor to support N number of people under the same commercial license so it’s like you become a retainer 99% of the time. This is the value agencies drive back to the plugin businesses when they act as a proxy between client. 

A lot of support requests they have around how this form works, how this integration works are taken care by the agency. I don’t remember. We might have opened like hardly five or ten support requests with Gravity Forms in almost a decade long relationship. So, that is our advantage, but now we periodically clean these licenses, like even if plugin is offering us unlimited site, we go and check, or if it’s part of offboarding process, like if this client is getting offboarded, go and remove their licenses key, or tell them like, hey, we tell them like this was a part of retainer deal since the renewal is not there. And let me tell them, you have to pay $100 to this plugin vendor $50 here, $100 there. And we tell them, you don’t have to buy the agency license for your only three sites, buy three site license, your 12 sites, buy 20 site license. We educate them and we kind of offload them respectfully.

Robert Abela

That’s very fair of you, especially towards the vendors. Considering, yeah, with WordPress, as you said, there are so many, I wouldn’t say complex, but yeah, like you have different vendors and you’re providing the solution. When agents, when enterprises approach you, are they looking for a website or are they looking for a WordPress website?

Rahul Bansal

I would say mix. Some people have made it like a decision at home, like, hey, I’m going to get on WordPress and I just need to figure out which WordPress agency is going to do my project. Those projects have a different cycle. Like the questions are not around WordPress because they’re already sold on the WordPress. Usually these are the clients who come from the hosting companies referral, like the WordPress hosting companies.

So WordPress hosting companies and agencies have a lot of partnerships and a lot of business exchange going on. So usually hosting companies referral are pre-sold on WordPress and they need, they need to just, you need to basically tell why your agency is better than the other agencies they’re considering.

And it’s actually a lot more time subjective. So there is not like clear lines when they’re coming from open-ended ecosystem like say they’re on Drupal or they’re on Sitecore and they want to migrate like they’re on a platform which is like for some reason like they want to move away.

So then they usually evaluate competing often like WordPress, Drupal most often are evaluated like side by side, usually in open source bucket and then there are proprietary CMS. Usually I rarely see somebody switching away from proprietary falling into a trap of another proprietary CMS. They will mostly end up with a WordPress or Drupal. And that is where like then the

So we need to understand what is the old system. And if you have relevant case studies for their old platform, then your chances of winning it is much higher because you can prove them this is how data was stored in your previous system and this is how it looks in WordPress.

And then that actually that battle becomes easier for us to win because then it’s luck based. Like if you have the relevant case studies in your portfolio, you just show them and you suddenly becomes top three agencies competing in the final round.

Robert Abela

So, you don’t see any requests or you don’t see much more requests from people asking you to build a whole proprietary CMS solution? Or do you still see those?

Rahul Bansal

Not much in our way because we have, so it’s like we are branding and positioning is clear that we are the WordPress company. So I would say like we haven’t got any requests. We do get partnership offers from proprietary CMS companies from time to time. Usually when somebody launches new platform, gets huge VC funding, they end up going aggressive on partnerships and they brute force all the agencies like they become our X partner, Y partner, gold partner, blah partner.

But we are very clear, as I mentioned, just imagine if in plugin categories we have our relationships defined like form, SEOs, like commerce, then that happens at that upper level also in CMS, WordPress is locked. Like sometimes client, so we did go two-three times in this entire decade that somebody was evaluating between WordPress and Drupal. And they asked us, like, if you move to Drupal, will you be open to doing that project? We love your agency, your pricing, your culture. We love you, but we are still not sure about WordPress and Drupal, and we told them, no, you.

You, go to Drupal, it’s open source, so, Drupal is the only platform we tell client, okay, to like, okay, to lose, like, if you’re going with Drupal, it’s cool, and if it doesn’t work out, come back, we will move you from Drupal to WordPress, but we are, we cannot touch Drupal, we don’t want to touch Drupal, and it’s not because Drupal is bad or anything, it’s just that our…strength, our expertise, our experience lies in WordPress and the quality we can deliver you for WordPress is something we cannot deliver for Drupal. And the key reason is we don’t use Drupal.

So everything rtCamp sells in its portfolio as a service in main menu is internally used. So we use WordPress. We were using WordPress as a media agency. That’s how we ended up with the WordPress. So long history and that is where client gets benefit. So we, we don’t, proprietary is out of question, but we don’t even build Drupal websites also.

Robert Abela

Yeah, I was just trying to gauge how popular WordPress is, kind of their prices, cost.

Rahul Bansal

Like, yeah, it’s very popular, so I have, let me put it this way, let’s say, because if we win a lead, that’s going to obviously end on WordPress. What about the leads we lose? And among the leads we lose, 80% of them ends up in WordPress with other agencies or in some form or the other. Only a few of them goes to Drupal. And I really, like, I’m not just making up. I don’t remember. 

We have seen significantly people moving from one in-house proprietary solution to another proprietary solution. I haven’t seen much people moving from Sitecore to AEM or AEM to Sitecore, like between all these proprietary solutions. Extreme, extreme case they might end up just building the whole like stack in-house, like they might just build end up building the new CMS in-house, which is again a rare, so it’s like WordPress.

Robert Abela

Are there companies who still do it, but their own CMS?

Rahul Bansal

Very rarely, very rarely, very rarely, and they regret it.

Robert Abela

So it’s like, I was going to say… 

Rahul Bansal

They regret it like, so usually, so how do I put like, you know, like…it ends up to the bias, like the notion of control. And that is why we launched this campaign called OnePress, where we say that you. So the idea is that you want to build your own CMS, you build it. You just start with WordPress rather than starting with like, say, Laravel or CakePHP or like, say, Django. So don’t think WordPress is a CMS. Think WordPress is a starting codebase. And what you accept from your CMS, ownership. You got it. GPL, 4 freedoms, all yours. Nobody’s going to knock your door and say, stop using WordPress, or I need more money if you want to use WordPress next year.

You want control, whatever you want. So that’s the idea behind that OnePress campaign we created. So we understand that people still have this itch to build their own CMS. So we changed the narrative that we want you to build your own CMS, but rather than starting from scratch, and you’re not going to build in PHP, it’s like 2026. You’re not going to go custom PHP all the way down. You’re going to use some framework. More likely, if you’re building on PHP, it is going to be Laravel. If you’re building in Python, it’s going to be Django. In Node.js, it’s going to be Strapi.

So think of WordPress as a framework, not a CMS, and customize it to your heart, like whatever you want, however you want. And that’s, we call it OnePress, like, and people customize it, right, to the point that if somebody decide to move it or move them away from WordPress, they are looking at similar effort as they would be moving somebody from proprietary platform or custom in-house platform because they customize their workflows, they have their own theming, onboarding.

So to the point that usually conglomerates, when they acquire a new company, they have this complete documentation guideline written like how to bring that new company’s website to…this is their internal stack, even if it is on WordPress, so sometimes they move aside from WordPress to WordPress, like some other page builder to Gutenberg, some other form library to like the Gravity Forms, or like some other like SEO plugin to this SEO plugin, so they have this WordPress to WordPress migration also, because…

They have invested so much in WordPress that they have this, their version of WordPress, like their starting site, their developer environment, their tooling, their CI/CD pipeline, everything is customized at an enterprise level. So it’s like, it’s just built on top of the WordPress, but completely a customized experience. Like sometimes you may not even recognize you’re working in WordPress.

Robert Abela

Interesting. Yeah. Talking about customizations. Do you build more, or do you see more WordPress being used as a what we know as a website at enterprise level, or more as a web application, some backend, some engine, or some?

Rahul Bansal

I think it’s still CMS, but usually there are often some microservices coupled, like depending on like data pipelines. So, for example, we had one customer, they had this like a Groupon website, it used to look like Groupon, like there was a lot of deals and huge website, like a lot of content aggregation. So when they came to us, we noticed that they have like, they’re scraping and processing tons of data from so many APIs and all in the WordPress. So, and it was slowing down a lot. So we moved that part to a separate microservice and then it went all smooth.

So it’s like, so let me put it this way, if people are using WordPress, there is going to be website somewhere. But in many cases, the website will have some part like, there can be a personalization engine which might be talking to a data hub or a data warehouse and pulling some, pulling some like pieces of data chunks as the page getting assembled.

So it’s like a, the end is WordPress, or that would be wrong to say, because in some cases WordPress is behind and the front end is headless, but WordPress, whatever people are storing in WordPress, the expectation is it is going to get displayed somewhere, like either on the internal site or in a mobile app or…on a decouple site, but it’s going to be a it’s it’s a content hub. I won’t say so website is very restrictive. It’s a it’s a it’s an information of content hub for large enterprises and then that content can be exposed across multiple channels.

Robert Abela

Is headless popular, headless WordPress enterprise.

Rahul Bansal

It’s it’s aspirational I would say like many so it’s like how to think. So it’s like utopian, people think like all my problems will be solved by headless. And since it’s prohibitively expensive in most cases, they don’t end up buying for the headless when they, oh, that day we will have headless, all this will be changed. But yeah, so we tried making headless more accessible. It’s like, but it’s a big struggle like. And over the time, Gutenberg evolved so fast that now we feel like. 

For if somebody’s going for headless just for the some score web vital or those SEO goals, that’s not worth. That would definitely like don’t approve. Like if you just want headless for the speed or SEO or those benefit or security, all those. So typical headless, like I would say top 10 isn’t to buy headless. Eight of them are no longer valid the way WordPress evolved.

Robert Abela

Interesting. Since we’re talking about enterprise, I usually, as we said, enterprises have a lot of processes in place, a lot of checks and balances and similar stuff. And so going to security now, because we mentioned that as well. Do you see the same, considering they have all these processes and checks and balances, do you see the same problems, security problems in enterprise websites that we see in the small websites usually like user accounts hijacked or outdated software is it are they some problems or they have a different scale or different type of security problems usually?

Rahul Bansal

I would say they have however like some practices which kind of foresee which problems could happen and they have a lot of preventive measures sometimes or them. They put over extra layer of securities, like the WP Admin is locked behind, Cloudflare Zero Trust firewall, then you log in, then the two factors, SSO login. And that is why the way we have it rtCamp level also. So now that’s like, we kind of socialize so much with the enterprise, some of the habits we picked also, like on all rtCamp’s properties, WordPress properties, you can only log in via rtCamp’s Google account.

If, somebody gets fired, or leaves rtCamp, we disable their Google account, and they automatically get removed from all WordPress site, so, usually they have this onboarding, offboarding, user, these APIs are there for employees’ access. Then usually automatic group level permission like roles are also assigned like somebody from marketing team will might get a little role just because they’re in Azure Directory, their Active Directory, they’re part of like this marketing group.

So they centralize a lot of things. So these issues are very rare. I mean, these are rare because these are thought ahead of time like that this and this is where this how do I put like a lot of checklist experience comes into picture like and then there are like sometimes sometimes like there are like absurd rules like around like the password length and all and which I find absurd like I mean some sometimes they are like very strict like 1 customer has like they have the upper limit as well as lower limit.

I can understand like password must be longer than 8 or 12 characters long, but why it need to be less than 20 characters? Something like that. No, it has to be between these two limits. But it’s okay. Like, so I mean, we write customization, we write filters, and then we add those restrictions. But usually, so depending on the client you are dealing, some clients come with like really this kind of checklist. You just have to follow it and it covers most of it out-of-the-box.

And then we as an agency have our baseline practices like disable this, disable that, add this, that, that. So in large enterprise, I would usually say the WP Admin is mostly accessed by their staff, and that is where a lot of security is taken care. They do not have, unless they’re using something like WooCommerce, there is no, the user cannot create account. Like we deal with mostly media clients or large conglomerates which build their marketing sites. So their customers usually end up filling a form. Media customers go watch video or read article at the max, publish a comment. So usually in the WordPress user creation doesn’t happen in most cases.

And in some cases, there are customization that the WP Admin or the WordPress user is reserved for the staff. And if they have CRM or some kind of another system where the user loyalty point or somebody to check, then the website make it look like seamless, but behind the scene, the user login, registration, both are happening over API with some microservice or some other system like CRM or some kind of data.

Robert Abela

So they keep them separate kind of thing, you have the users, 

Rahul Bansal

But like in most cases, but like if they’re using WooCommerce and they want people to create account, we do that also. We just, then we have to kind of have like a different login flow, like, oh, this is for employee login, this is for normal WordPress login. There are like additional checks and balances, but usually like, how do I put like any large enterprises won’t allow employees to have a separate WordPress account, which is like, which leaves in isolation.

Like employee identity is tied across organization, like you, like somebody leaves organization, not only WordPress, they will be removed from Slack, Google Workspace, GitHub in multiple places. So that kind of, so as an agency, we need to make sure that the connector we write is bug-free and very well coded and very well tested. Then once in motion that it just works.

Robert Abela

So usually, especially for the team who is accessing the WordPress backend, you see a lot of integration with SSO such as Google and you have one central account and that takes care of everything.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah. And also, in many cases, we have seen, even with SSO integration, not everybody from the company is allowed to log into the site, even as a subscriber. Like, it’s like, for example, like there’s a sales and marketing team example. So marketing team will have access to the WP Admin to update the landing pages, create blogs, and other things. But sales will be restricted to the CRM.

Once an inquiry is captured in WordPress, through some integration, we’ll push it into the CRM, like Gravity Forms Salesforce Connector, or something like that. And then the sales team will only be dealing with Salesforce information. And if you want to capture additional behavior data, like which pages they visited, what kind of articles they have read before, just to give some more context to the sales rep about the visitor journey, then that we are supposed to push into the CRM as a node or whatever that if about, but in no case the CRM team, the sales team will get logged into the WordPress.

So there is like a lot of these layers, like so everything is access is given on need to know basis. Like if you can do your job without accessing WP Admin, why you want to, I need just this three data point or we’ll, we will push it into yours. We will give, we will deliver it to your home, like stay at home, we will send it to your home.

Robert Abela

Yeah, so there’s a reason why enterprises move slow, but at the end of the day, as you said, there are more checks and, yeah, more secure where possible, right? By the side, just curious the question, have you seen any other proprietary platforms, CMS, or that that’s outperform WordPress in specific areas especially enterprise level.

Rahul Bansal

I will be very biased because actually I never use any other CMS in my life. I mean, yeah, the only time we touch other CMS is when we are moving people away from that. So our, we jump to the like, where is the data export screen or where we can, like sometimes we just need to understand like how something worked in the previous system so we can re-architect similar experience or equivalent experience in the new system. So I think I it’s not I’m not I’m not saying see every like there’s so many players in the market. So somebody something they must be also doing right.

Like we cannot say like everybody selling selling proprietary software is just a good sales team that that that make us believe that everybody buying proprietary software is a fool, which is not the case. Like there are people running successful business. So then there is a something we need to evolve iterate. And that’s a good thing, like otherwise that’s how we go from here. Like if you have nothing to do better compared to any other software, then what are we going to work on next? So, yeah, so it’s like I don’t know any specific things. Like I cannot say like AEM does this better or Sitecore does this better or so and so that is better. But yeah, so people do things in different way.

Robert Abela

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Last question, rtCamp contributes 140 hours per week on WordPress through different teams. First of all, that’s very impressive and we, like many other vendors, thank you for it. We do it as well, but smaller scale. Just so people understand the whole WordPress support system, can you explain why contributions make sense for a service company like rtCamp?

Rahul Bansal

So there are many reasons. For example, how to put, like as I mentioned, we had this journey. Like we started as a very small agency and we kept moving up market. So there were multiple forces played. It was not like the full choice. We ended up being enterprise and now we love it. Now we love it. I won’t say we regret it. But then how do to put like so. So there was a time in our journey that like we were dealing with small businesses and we had this amazing engineering talent.

So as we were charging less, we were paying decent salaries, like decent from the, actually we were paying better or way above the average salaries in India, the cost of living in India. But we didn’t know that we are exposed or open to the global competition. So, so we need to match the average in the world or like that. And that’s when that.

So that was there was a window of this tech tool to trigger where a lot of attrition happened because we had these amazing engineers and they were getting paid more than what we were charging our client. And that ended up us forcing us to hire fast. And then we ran out of people who knew WordPress or people who knew any other CMS. So we ended up going to colleges like the academic institutes and hired people. So 90% people in rtCamp, for them, this is their first job.

So for more than 90% people. So these people came from the colleges, we taught them WordPress, but we also needed external validation, like these are good engineers before we vouch them in front of the client. So we thought like, we don’t have any more budget left. We already trained them. We are short on money. Why don’t we put them in WordPress Core? They submit some patches and we see like how the core committers or the like give the feedback on their patches.

And that initially started as like a stopgap arrangement or like necessity because we take pride a lot in our quality. Like we didn’t want to put somebody on the client project later to…client complaining, hey, that might be good, but this is not like a good fit for us. Like, oh, your engineer doesn’t know how to deal with security or how to send pull requests, blah, blah, blah. So even after training, we had this mandatory period, like you go to the WordPress Core, make some contribution and come back. And then later on, as we started going enterprise, sales team noticed this, that our core contributions are actually giving us some brownie point in client’s evaluation process.

So as I mentioned, like, so there is a tendency of people to think like big companies are run by fools. No, they are some of the smartest people. They move slow because of the, there’s like so many things. Like as rtCamp is growing, we are also slowing down. Like we felt some slowdown. And those people are some of the smartest people who work at these large companies and they can like they know the difference. Like somebody making tall promises, we are the number one company according to that survey and that like paid review article list us among the top two places to work. They cut this crap, go through, see through it. Oh, your people are contributing to WordPress Core. Can I see their patches? These are the Trac tickets, nice. We will give you a shot.

And we literally got that feedback from the initial, so it’s like then we found this whole system like hire from the colleges, train them, and now we have something like six months you have to spend in WordPress Core contributing, and actually we have been doing it from for a long time, like it’s like it recently started getting highlighted. We have been, I mean, I think WordPress started the…the WordPress Make team writing that article of month in a WordPress where they kind of some of the contribution by company.

That’s how we kind of started getting highlighted. But we have been doing this long and now we are in a bigger size. So earlier we were doing like one person doing 20, 30, 40, 50 hours. Now we have like 6 people spending 160 hours per month plus 10 people spending 160 hours per month for six months. So that’s like a lot of hours, almost like 10,000 hours every year we are putting into WordPress. So it is, so the size of number is getting that attention, but I still believe like that is one of the best hack and we replicated.

Somebody asked me a question about Frappe, which is another open source community in which rtCamp is entering. Same playbook we are running there. Like we went there, we contributed so much to the community with just one or two landing pages on our site. We are getting so many leads. So contributing to open source is the best growth marketing, I would say. I learned it by accident. But now after repeating it twice, I can confidently say that go contribute to the open source community that you want to be part of, you want to represent. And you will be surprised how fast you climb up.

Robert Abela

I was going to say it’s a win-win situation because you are contributing. But yeah, as you said, you’re with customers through it, but also your team is learning at the same time.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah

Robert Abela

So it’s like, it’s a win-win.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah.

Robert Abela

Thank you very much, Rahul. Thank you for your time. Is there anything else we missed or you’d like to mention before we end the session?

Rahul Bansal

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Robert Abela

Thanks. Where can people reach you or reach rtCamp?

Rahul Bansal

rtCamp is the like website, social media. We rtCamp both are available across like all the platforms, like X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook also, GitHub. Yeah, so rtCamp is a lot of, if you’re an engineer, like you can interact with our codebase on GitHub. It depends, like, yeah, but yeah, rtCamp website is always there.

Robert Abela

Yeah. I’ve seen some of your posts as well. You’re not very active on LinkedIn because of course of the lot of stuff.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah

Robert Abela

So ideally a lot, yeah, good. Thanks a lot, Rahul. Thanks for your time. And we’ll see everyone next week. Thanks everyone for joining. We’ll see you next week.

Rahul Bansal

Thank you for having me Robert.

Nathan Wrigley

Hello there. Hello, I’m going to say hello for about 5 more seconds. Hello, The reason for that is that the audio for the first five or 10 seconds is rubbish. And it kind of figures it out slowly over the 1st 10 seconds. So there we go.

Now I’ll begin. Hello. Welcome to This Week in WordPress, episode number 350. Thank you for those people who’ve already made a comment. That’s really nice. Appreciate it.

We’ll get to you guys in a moment. Before we do that, I would just like to introduce our panel. We’re obviously here to natter about WordPress and what better than to have a bunch of enthusiastic WordPressers joining us. And let’s go first. Let’s go this way.

Firstly, we’ll go. Yeah, he’s hiding. It’s Taco. Taco Verdonchot. How are you doing, Taco?

Taco Verdonschot

I’m all good, yes.

Nathan Wrigley

He’s all good. Every bit of you is good. I’m pleased.

Taco Verdonschot

Every single bit.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, I was very lucky to spend a bit of time with Taco over the last few days. We hung out, went for a late night walk around London because it was, there was a couple of events happening in London, which we were both attending. There was Loop Conf and then there was also the WPLDN meetup. And it was a pleasure having some time with you. It was really nice. Thank you.

Taco Verdonschot

Likewise absolutely.

Nathan Wrigley

Hanging out and spending time with me. So who is Taco? Let’s find out. So Taco is the CCO at Progress Planner, which is a plugin that helps you maintain your website by rewarding you for completing important five-minute tasks on your site. He is also active in the WordPress Community Team, WordPress Accessibility Day organizer, WP Meetup organizer, and regular volunteer at his kids’ school. He and his family live in unpronounceable…Let me try, let me try.

No, you told me the other day.

Taco Verdonschot

I did. That’s why I put it in.

Nathan Wrigley

Vichen.

Taco Verdonschot

No. Wijchen.

Nathan Wrigley

Wijchen.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, Wijchen.

Nathan Wrigley

Viken in the, of course it’s a bit, I knew that, in the Netherlands and his wife says he’s, his wife says he’s happily married. Lovely. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Okay, let’s go around the houses. So that was first. Let’s go in a sort of clockwise direction. That means we’re over with Rob. How are you doing, Rob Cairns?

Rob Cairns

Doing good. How are you?

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, good, good. Rob joins us from Canada. He’s been on the show many, many times before. And he is the founder and CEO at Stunning Digital Marketing, which is an agency that specializes in WordPress security. He’s also the creator and host of the SDM podcast. And in his spare time, he loves sports, music, reading, and time with his partner, Tiz. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Those 2 panelists have been on the show many, many times before, but we’ve been joined by somebody for the very first time. And that is Rahul, Rahul Bansal down there.

How are you doing? Rahul is, let me get the bio. There it is. Rahul is the founder and CEO at rtCamp, which is an enterprise grade WordPress agency, consultant, sorry, consulting agency that recently launched a video first digital asset management or DAM solution. And you’re going to find out a little bit more about that. It is made specifically for WordPress. We’ll find out about that in just a moment. But that is our panel. 

Now, it would be lovely if we just spoke to the panel. I’d enjoy that tremendously. It would be the highlight of my Monday. But what would be better than that would be if you guys felt that you had it in you to comment. Anybody watching this, if you want to comment, that would really help bring the show along. Certainly keeps the conversation going. The best place to go for that is this URL. And sorry, Rahul, it does tend to cover somebody’s face up unless I get this setting right.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me see if I can do that. It’s supposed to be there. 

No, it’s not working today. There we go. That apparently is it. Yay. Go to wpbuilds.com forward slash live. Bring your, you know, your friends and your colleagues there. And there’s a YouTube set of comments over on the right of the video. If you’re on a desktop, it’ll be on the right.

If you’re on mobile, yeah, that right. The other right, that one. And if you’re logged into Google, you can comment there. However, if you don’t have a Google account, fear not, there’s a little black box at the top right-hand side of the video itself. If you look top right of the video, it says live chat. You can just click that button and you don’t need to be logged into anything. 

So yeah, perfect, perfect, perfect. It looks like there’s a few people who’ve already joined us and given us a comment. That’s really nice. The first one is Lawrence joining us from, well, typically Australia. Hello, he says, or hello, he says. Tammie, who was there in London, joining us and saying good afternoon. Oh, it’s the evening. It’s probably late. It’s probably like brutal o’clock where he lives, like, I don’t know, 11 at night or something. You’re going above and beyond, Lawrence. 

Courtney, who was with us in London also is joining us and she says, clearly it’s still the morning. 

Okay. Marcus Burnett, we’re talking about you in a minute, Marcus. Stay tuned. Says, my This Week in WordPress show starts at 9 am. That’s in the morning. Yeah. We’re at 2 am where I live.

I don’t know what time it is where Rahul lives. What time is it for you, Rahul?

Rahul Bansal

It’s 6.30 pm. 6.30 in the evening.

Nathan Wrigley

Dave Dunn, who joins us from London. He was there over the last week. Good afternoon from this side of the planet. Marcus says, I’ve already had a call this morning with someone in Australia where it was nighttime there. So my day is very confusing. Indeed, indeed.

And the comments just go on. Patricia says, hello. Paul Bedford, hello, Paul. Joining us from Pretoria in South Africa. And Amber Hind’s talking about you as well, or at least something that you’re involved in a little bit later as well. 

So there we go. Isn’t that lovely? Now, look, the comment, now, look, we’re not back to normal now. Auto shift. Let’s try that. So that is our panel. There are some of the audience members. 

Keep the comments coming in. Really, really appreciate that. It’s WordPress, isn’t it? We’re here to talk about WordPress. So let us do exactly that.

I will share my screen. Firstly, apologies, a little bit of self-promotion. This is us wpbuilds.com. If you head over there, is a single text field form just here. And if you put your e-mail address into that, we’ll send you a couple of emails. The purpose of this show really is to liven up your WordPress week, but also to repackage it and send it out on a Tuesday morning. So I will strip out the audio and the video and send it out as a video, but also send it out as a podcast episode. And if you subscribe, you’ll be notified when that happens.

But also every week we release a podcast, a audio podcast where I interview somebody. And I don’t know if you met this chap over the last week, Taco. This is a lovely guy called Sebastian Webb. And he was in London. And we talked last week about his brand new plugin called Amenda. Very cool, by the way. His brand new plugin called Amenda, which I just said, allows you to edit your content despite whatever tool you use to create it. So if you made it with Elementor or Beaver Builder or Gutenberg, he kind of steps in at the last moment and allows you to edit it with his tool. Click save and kind of a really neat tool. 

I don’t know, let’s say that you’re in, you’ve got somebody that’s inexperienced with those page builders or something like that. You can play with that.

Rob, I don’t know if it’s you. I think it might be, but there’s quite a lot of keyboard clickety clackety. If it is you, would you mind muting your mic if you’re doing the keyboard clickety-clackety? Carry on.

Rob Cairns

I was muted.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, don’t let me stop you doing the keyboard. That’d be lovely. But if it’s possible to mute when you’re not speaking, maybe that’s Rahul. I’m sorry. It could be anybody, but yeah. Thank you. Okay. There’s our self-promotional bit. 

However, I always give an opportunity to our guests to have a little bit of a promotion. That’s a nice quid pro quo, a nice back-slapping opportunity for those people who come on the show. 

And here is something that Rahul and his team over at rtCamp have been building. It’s called GoDAM. We mentioned it a moment ago. It’s on version 1.4. Rahul, briefly tell us what this is and what version 1.4 brings to the table.

Rahul Bansal

So GoDAM is a, like the name, it basically is a Hindi-Bengali word, which means warehouse. And our idea is to create a media warehouse that can act as a central digital asset management platform for all your WordPress site. It has a provision to extend beyond WordPress, but we are focusing on WordPress as a CMS because we are from the WordPress ecosystem. 

And since video is a popular format, most of the initial features are focused on videos, even though a digital asset can be anything, like it can be PDF, it can be an image, which are also on the roadmap. Our approach is to go with the integration into WordPress.

For example, we are integrating with the forms, LMS, e-commerce platforms, and basically the idea is anything that can benefit from any form of videos. And when we say videos, it’s not just would I put like a video as you see in YouTube for example most of the forms integration that you see uh like two of them are released in 1.4 total we have nine form Integrations SureForms, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Jetpack Forms, all forms are supported uh usually we integrate with forms in two ways one is that on the form page like uh when you create a form you have ability to allow people to add a video field through which they can do a screen recording, something like you might be helpful in job interview or any kind of video file, like for any purpose, like a video, audio, camera, mic, whatever you want, it records, put it in the central warehouse and shows seamlessly into your form into dashboard.

Likewise for LMS, we are doing how to put like so we started with LifterLMS, but we plan to eventually extend to other LMS also. The idea is that if you have a course where you expect people to watch a video lesson, so your course progress can be linked to the video player.

So unless people finish watching video, the course won’t be marked as complete. Sorry, the chapter won’t be marked as complete and they won’t be able to go to the next chapter.

So that is, so yeah. So this is our main motivation because there are like things like YouTube, Vimeo, so many players exist, but we wanted to build something that’s made for the WordPress ecosystem, which understand like the nitty gritties of how Gravity Forms work versus how LifterLMS works, which are like, so these are the things that WordPress people knows better.

They’re not just like dumb form or dumb content system.  There is like a reason so many people are building with WordPress and we thought like anytime they are, hitting the limit with amazing video features. We can allow them to do more rather than just embedding YouTube videos.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, video, I suppose, is a really great place to start, isn’t it? You mentioned that you’re going to pick other formats, maybe audio and stuff. That would obviously, somebody like me, that would be great because I mainly produce audio. But the idea being that you consume, if you don’t want to house your stuff all on YouTube for obvious reasons, if you’re like an LMS or something and you want your course to be hidden away, you can do it and the assets will be in this digital asset management system, in this case, built around the WordPress interface. And then, you can stream it natively if you like. Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. And now you’ve, on version 1.4, you’ve added the support for Ninja Forms, MetForm, and LifterLMS. I’m guessing Ninja Forms and MetForm, that’s a way of consuming data. So you can drop your video file, say in, and you know, the description that goes with it and so on. Yeah, okay.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, so it’s like somebody’s, say, a WordPress site is in Ninja Forms. With GoDAM, they can add a field like e-mail name, text area, they can add a recorder field through which people can record their screen. Yeah, so it can record screen also and camera also. So if some, say you’re reporting a bug, so you can turn on screencast.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, I see, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rahul Bansal

And it also records the audio. So it’s like we are video first, but on the way we are taking care of other formats as we encounter. Although we are not podcast ready yet, but that’s one of the goals to not only give the podcast, but also monetization option.

Nathan Wrigley

Can I make a feature request? Just I had this idea years ago, right? And I never saw it through, but I thought it would be a great idea. What if the WordPress commenting system, oh, my camera is going to do this today for reasons I don’t know. It just switches off every few minutes. When it goes black, I’ll just click the button and it’ll come back. Can I suggest that something like GoDAM allows me to do video comments on a blog post. So instead of writing text and clicking enter and it goes into the moderation queue, what if I could do a video reply to the comment and then other people could reply with a video, you know, just like me, just saying, yeah, that was a really nice piece. I really enjoyed that. I love the part where you talked about this, that and the other thing. I’ve often thought in the, you know, in the year 2025, a video comment thread, it’d be kind of fun.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay, I’m going to plant that seed and leave it. Over to you.

Rahul Bansal

I think we already have it because GoDAM is a successor to one of our old platform called rtMedia Transcoder. And rtMedia Transcoder, I think you put that feature some 10 years ago.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, darn, okay, I know.

Rahul Bansal

I’m still verified because it happens sometimes during refactoring the features that were less talked about or not used often go missing. But if it’s missing, then we can bring it back in two days.

Nathan Wrigley

Well, the cost of video hosting 10 years years ago was quite high. Now it’s basically free.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah

Nathan Wrigley

If you use something like Cloudflare, you don’t really, you pay to ingest it, but you don’t pay to see it over and over and over again. So you can distribute it infinitely for the same cost as it was to upload it. So maybe that’s worth another, anyway, there it is, GoDAM, version 1.4. 

I noticed a couple of comments in here. Dave Dunn, for example, saying, looks, sounds quite nice. Yeah, go check it out. It’s GoDAM spelt like you see, G-o-D-A-M.i-o. You can check it out. And they’ve got a blog, as you can see, so you can go and check that out. Okey-dokey. Right, let’s move on to the next piece. This is here. So we’re over to Taco, very much over to Taco here, because it’s a piece given to me by Taco. Site Spotlight. Tell us about this.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, so with Progress Planner, we want to help people move their sites forward. And one of the important things is knowing what needs work. And we’ve done site reviews in the past. We were actually on the WordCamp Europe stage with a couple of people doing live website reviews. 

And we figured, hey, this might actually be a nice YouTube format as well. So we have a couple episodes out now. We’re not keeping track because I don’t like to count, but there’s quite a few sites that we’ve reviewed and we’re only looking at, so you’ll see that the format has shifted already over the course of the episodes.

But right now what we’re doing is we look at four different areas for a site. So just the homepage, just the content, technical and accessibility. And will give you some feedback on each of those in each of those areas and turn that into a video so that everyone can learn from it.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice. And do you do you take submissions from the general public or is it?

Taco Verdonschot

Absolutely. Yes.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah. I love to have the submissions because typically what we see is those are the people who are actually also doing something with the recommendations that we give. Whereas if we take a public site, it might be gone unnoticed by the site owner. 

Nathan Wrigley

So where would we submit that if we want it to be part of Site Spotlight and have our site reviewed by you guys? Where do we go?

Taco Verdonschot  

You go to progressplanner.com/sitespotlight.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay.

Taco Verdonschot

Site-spotlight. And there’s a super short contact form. It basically asks for your website and if there’s a specific portion of the site, especially for the really large ones that you would like reviewed.

Nathan Wrigley

If only there was a solution out there which would enable you to capture a video, for example, where somebody could show what it was about their site that they wanted you to look at. That would be great if, oh, wait, it’s called GoDAM. Yes, there is. There is such a thing. Okay, so there we go. Site Spotlight.

What I’m linking to here, what you can see obviously is YouTube and you can see the backlog of the Site Spotlight endeavors, but also so you can find out more generally about Progress Planner as well. The URL is unreadable. It’s just loads of junk after the initial bit, but I’ll link in the show notes to that.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, or just go to progressplanner.com slash sites hyphen spotlight and you’ll find the link as well.

Nathan Wrigley

Good, OK, thank you so much. Right, OK, let’s move on. Actually, before we move on, let’s just address some of these comments because we’ve got a few going in. It seems to be a while. So for example, Hilay is joining us, says hello from India. Let’s make the screen go away. Hello, nice to have you with us. I’m probably going to miss a load out.

Taco Verdonschot

Reese says hi as well.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay, Reese says hi. Yeah, we’ve got somebody called On Your Mark Designs, good morning from Jersey. That’s really nice. And then somebody mentioned about, where was it? Video commenting, I was talking about that. Video comment says On Your Mark Designs, I wonder if this is somebody called Mark. Let us know in the comments. Video comments would need to be transcribed to help with moderation, I guess, unless they’re doing something visually. Definitely more involved than moderating text, but at least by offloading, you don’t need to consider how much space bandwidth the vids are eating off.

And then Amber joins in, yes, but moderating text is faster than moderating a video unless you have automated transcription. I feel like we’ve just started a whole product chunk conversation here. If we could just take this, take this over to get in touch with Rahul.

Rahul Bansal

We have AI transcription, by the way.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, okay. Nice nice, Amber, who is one of the founders, I’m not sure if that’s true, Amber, apologies if I’ve misspoken of WP Accessibility Day, but certainly one of the founders of Equalize Digital. The other concern, the other concern is accessibility. Could you force people to only include videos if they provide correct caption cards? So I guess we’re talking about the thing that I mentioned, the idea of having comments. Yes, good point. A transcription embedded underneath in sort of like a details block or something like an accordion or something might be quite nice. And then it just goes off in sort of AI verse where they talk about how Gemini may be able to. I’m going to let you guys thrash it out in the comments.  

Taco Verdonschot

There’s a very important comment because On Your Mark Designs is not Mark, but Lisa. 

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, sorry, Lisa apologies. I just, yeah, incorrectly assumed that there was something in the title there. Thank you for all of those comments, though. Really appreciate it. That’s great. Okay, let us move on. 

Let me change here. So this is a post that comes from the quite stunningly amazing Anne McCarthy. She has a blog called Nomad.blog and writes a load of stuff about WordPress. If you haven’t heard about Anne, then it’s definitely time that you did. And this is V2 of a post that she published all about WordPress 6.9. And if you haven’t been keeping track of what’s coming up, this is just a bit of a refresher about some of the things that are heading your way in WordPress 6.9. Some of these I’d actually not seen. So there’s video which accompanies it. 

So if you’re listening to this, pause it, go to wpbuilds.com, search for episode 350, and the links for everything are in there, including this one. The piece is called, like I said, exploring work in progress for WordPress 6.9v2. And the first thing she wants to mention is what I think is actually a really nice new thing, the ability to hide blocks.

And there’s a little video where you’ve got a simple show-hide toggle in the little menu, which pops up when you interact with a block. And I just thought that was quite nice. The ability to show and hide things in the back end is a neat idea. I’ll go through this and then you guys can jump in and let us know if any of this stood out. Then the command palette, think Spotlight on the Mac or what’s it called? Oh, there’s like a property’s name.

Rob Cairns

Alfred

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, Alfred or something like that.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley

Now, there was talk about whether or not this might be available on the frontend at some point. And I think the dust has settled on that and it’s not by the looks of it.  It’s just going to be backend, which kind of feels like the right decision to me at least anyway. I can’t see why you might want to use that on the frontend. But that’s now going to be more or less everywhere. The intention is that it really will surface almost anything that your page builder can do and your Gutenberg editor can do and all the settings and myriad different things that are in your WordPress backend. That’s quite nice. 

This is possibly the most talked about thing, I would imagine, is the idea of interacting with multiple people inside the same post. And the first step towards that Google Docs-like experience is to enable block commenting. So the idea that a specific block you can add comments to. If you can see the screenshot here, you can see it’s got like that Google Docs kind of feel. You click into a block, let’s say a paragraph, and then you write a comment, but it’s bound to that block. You can’t still highlight a bit of the paragraph and say, I don’t know, change these words. You’d have to be a little bit more granular. Once it was closed, it couldn’t be opened.

And so that’s what’s being addressed here, is the ability to reopen, close things, which kind of, you know, makes a lot of sense. And a load of new blocks, which are going to be coming down the pipe, maybe, not. So for example, the accordion block, terms query block, post breadcrumb block, icon block, stretchy text has to, I never know what the heck that is, but I like the sound of it. Stretchy text, tabs block, stabilize, oh, the time to read block and something about stabilizing the time of contents block as well. 

There is a load more in this post about simplified site editing, but I’ll leave it there. I’ll just throw it open. Please feel free to interrupt each other or me. Anything in there that catches your attention? If not, I’ll move on.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, the show and hide is definitely something that I think is very interesting as a first iteration, but hopefully, eventually will turn into a more of a dynamic show and hide version on the frontend.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, I mean, it’s a real kind of like nothing, but at the same time, it’s quite a lot. you might, I don’t know, you might be kind of in the middle of iterating through a block, a portion of the text that you, I don’t know, you just want to hide for now or something like that. It’s pretty cool. And you can see it on the screen if you’re able to watch it.  Thanks, Taco. Anything else from anybody else?

Okay. In which case, I will draw a line under that piece of content. You can find it on nomad.blog. Right, okay, this week was a bit of a strange week for me. Very occasionally, I get to interview somebody on the podcast who has been in my life for more years than I care to mention. And Dave Winer is one of those people.

He, I don’t know, I’ve been using the internet since it was, you know, very soon after it was available in the UK and a real consumer of it. And one of the first things that made the internet interesting, I think, was links, obviously. And then soon after that, people trying to find ways to discover and make your content discoverable. Dave Winer, who I managed to interview, was the person that basically invented RSS. I think there’s a little bit more of a story to it than that. But he’s been iterating on all sorts of cool ideas for many, many years. And very recently, although Dave would probably say he’s been into WordPress for a little while, he is now full on behind the WordPress project in a way that I rarely see. You know, he is all guns blazing about how profoundly great WordPress is. I was taken aback actually by how much he lauded its amazing capabilities. 

He loves the open web. And he’s got this idea called textcasting and also a project called WordLand and FeedLand. And he basically wants to turn the social web, so think Facebook, Twitter and so on. He wants you to basically surrender using those and start using this idea called text casting. And it will all be RSS based and it will be based largely on your WordPress website, but it could be any platform. And he explains it to me. 

I am butchering what it is. But what, if somebody else had said it, you’d be kind of like, yeah, that sounds interesting. But when you get somebody of his caliber and they say it, you’re kind of like, okay, I’m going to sit up and pay attention. It is well worth listening to. So it’s all about making WordPress. So think something like Mastodon, but much more closely integrated with technologies like RSS and what have you.  So absolutely fascinating. I have no idea that if anybody wants to comment on that, ’cause you probably didn’t listen to it, but if you do wanna comment, let me just pause and go for it.

Taco Verdonschot

I’m just curious to see if he still has it to launch something that is going to be so widely adopted that no one remembers life without it.

Nathan Wrigley

He’s older than I am, that’s as much as I know. And if you’re older than I am, it’s probably time to sit in a chair, but not Dave. I’ve got the feeling that Dave has masses of energy. I don’t know if you noticed on one of the things that we mentioned earlier, I think it was this one. Where’s it gone? 

There was a, was it this one? No, Anyway, we posted it there. Yeah. Well, anyway, I saw a comment from him a moment ago, right at the top of one of the, oh yeah, it’s one of the ones that we’re going to get to. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, he’s full gongs blazing. And if you like the idea of an open social web and you don’t want to have your stuff corralled behind Facebook or the Twitter platform, and you don’t want a limit on text and you want to be able to add images and you want to add hyperlinks and all that kind of stuff, stay tuned. Go and Google Dave Winer. Absolutely fascinating. Anybody else? Mark says RSS is awesome. It is. And we have Dave Winer to be thankful for.

Rob Cairns

Makes podcasting easier, Nathan.

Nathan Wrigley

It makes podcasting possible, doesn’t it? If you think about it, there is no such thing as a podcast without the RSS technology. And so he is, that I think is largely why I’m so a bit, a bit kind of like, well, I don’t know, I’m a bit of a fanboy, put it that way. I was actually really tongue tied when I started interviewing him, which doesn’t often happen. I kind of have to explain. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m a bit of a fan. If my words don’t come out straight.

Rob Cairns

I think we’re all fans.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah. Okay, there’s a few comments come in all about the different bits and pieces that Anne shared. I’ll just leave you to thrash those comments around between each other. I won’t raise those on the screen, but yeah. Okey-doke, let us move on. 

We’re back to Taco. Although, to be fair to Taco, he didn’t ask me to put this in. I put this in the show notes of my own accord. I thought it was a really interesting observation though. It’s entitled WordPress Flagship WordCamp, sorry, WordPress’s flagship WordCamp strategy is a mess. You’re not holding back, Taco. And 2026 will be hell. He says, go on, lay it for it, lay it out for us. Because there’s not many of us that go to all the events, but for those of us that do try to get to all the events, this is is very important. Tell us what’s the problem?

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, so first of all, I think it’s a good thing that we’re not all trying to go to all of these events because we don’t want the flagship work camps to be sort of the same 1000 people just meeting three times a year in different places in the world, because from a sustainability perspective, that’s not what we should be aiming for. 

However, there are quite a few companies, for example, and let’s take a smaller plug-in shop like WS Form. If Mark doesn’t go, none of his other employees, wait, he’s alone. So he’ll have to go to all three if he wants to represent his company. But even a company like Yoast, that I happen to know a bit about, only has so many people they can send to events.

So you will see the same people traveling over and over again. But also from an organizing perspective, those resources, even within larger companies, are fairly limited. So there is a significant portion of WordCamp attendees that goes to a lot of WordCamps. 

Now, the three flagships, before we only had one, only WordCamp Europe, then that was in 2013. Then in 2015, we got WordCamp US as the second flagship. And we were supposed to have the first WordCamp Asia in 2020, but then we had COVID. So that was postponed a couple of years. 

But now we have 3 flagship WordCamps. And historically, those have been separated in over the year pretty well. However, next year, the three of them, WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, and WordCamp US are happening within 4 1/2 months from each other. 

So WordCamp Asia is happening in April, and WordCamp US is happening in August. And that’s creating a very condensed schedule for those flagships. And that makes it really, really hard for those who have to attend two or three of them to properly organize their presence and well, also financially it makes it a bit harder if it’s not spread over the year, but all so condensed. 

So I think that we shouldn’t have competing flagship events. And right now, those events are competing for time and money and that’s not helping anyone. 

Nathan Wrigley

So the, I guess maybe some people will sort of say, if you’re in the privileged position to go to these WordCamp events over multiple, multiple, three, let’s say, or four or whatever it may be, you might go to all the smaller ones, that you’re in a very good position. However, I think you made the point really well that it’s not really about that. A lot of these people will be employees and they will be, you know, expected to go. It’s part of their job description and what have you.

So it’ll be a lot of travel. And if they’ve got a family or, dependents or whatever it may be, there’s a lot of things that are coalescing at the same time. But also just the organisational side of it, takes a lot to get your stuff ready. And if it’s a part of your job description, then it may be that, you know, you’re going to struggle with your regular job. A lot of money is involved and so on.

And obviously these events cannot happen without the kind sponsorship of many of these companies. And I guess in some respects, it may feel a little bit less attractive. If you’re going to be seriously worn out, you maybe step away from one of them or something like that.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah.

Rob Cairns 

And but even more so, Nathan. And I just want to jump in. Sorry, Tako. If you’re talking sponsors, are the sponsors getting the best bang for the buck if all this is happening condensed instead of spread out from an issue of visibility? And I’m not so sure, being a marketer, that they’re getting the best bang for the buck if it’s all condensed. Long-term visibility is better. So I think condensing the schedule doesn’t really help the sponsors either from that perspective.

Nathan Wrigley

Just raise a couple of comments that have come in and then I’ll come back to you, Taco.  So the first one is Patricia. Let’s just make sure that Rob’s face doesn’t get erased. I remember WordCamp Europe says Patricia had to be in June because in the past WordCamp US was in December. Okay, so that’s separating them by a full, what’s that, six months or so, half of the year.

So that was obviously a decision which was made. Somebody sat there and decided to move things around, shuffle the chess pieces around so they were all evenly spread.  Amber, back again. Hello. WordCamp US being in August is very difficult for parents with the start of school. It’s the first week of school for us and will not be, so will not be there again this year. Okay, so there’s a direct consequence right there. Amber will not be attending because of school.

I mean, I think we can all agree, getting the priorities right, but it would have been nice if you didn’t have to have that conflict of interest. Taco, go on.

Taco Verdonschot

And I think that is specifically for WordCamp US being in almost mid-August. If you look at typical attendance for WordCamp US, it’s obviously a lot of people from the US, but also a lot of Europeans typically travel to WordCamp US.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah 

Taco Verdonschot

And in Europe, we have July and August as the main summer holiday months. And so it is going to be challenging for parents, absolutely. But even if you’re not a parent and you take time off over the summer, and the first thing happening when you come back from your vacation is WordCamp US, usually those last six to four weeks before the event are hard work. Especially if you have a larger presence, if you build a booth, if you have to come up and bring goodies, all of that. A lot of that happens in the last couple of weeks before the event.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, yeah.

Taco Verdonschot

And now this time, that is smack in the middle of the summer. So if you’re dealing with staff being on leave, on vacation, that will add to the complexity of having an event in August. And especially because it’s very hard to organize beforehand, because that’s when WordCamp Europe is.

Nathan Wrigley 

Yeah, really, really interesting. Everything colliding over this small amount of time. I mean, obviously, given the nature of how WordCamps are set up and structured and run, then everybody is free to do what they want. But I suppose what you’re saying, and I’ll just pop the piece back up on the screen, let me take Amber’s comment away, you have some thoughts on potentially how we might do this better in the year 2027. And yeah, okay.

Taco Verdonschot

As much as I hate to say it, because I love going to WordCamps, and I would love if I could make that a full-time job, just traveling around the world, meeting WordPress people all over.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice.

Taco Verdonschot

I know it’s not a job, so I’m, you know, that’s not possible, but we might be better off slimming down to having only two flagship WorthCamps a year, and then have them travel across the globe. Because over time, we’ll add a flagship event in Africa, probably. We’ll add a flagship event in South America at some point. We might have a flagship event in Australia. And we can’t do five or six a year, can we?

Nathan Wrigley

We have to make some hard decisions at that point.

Taco Verdonschot

Exactly.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah.

Taco Verdonschot

So if we have only two, that makes it a lot easier for sponsors. And you can still travel the world because I see in one of the comments, or we have to accept you can’t go to everything. And that’s absolutely true. However, we have a lot of big companies in our ecosystem. where the people in Asia would absolutely love to meet those companies who are from Europe or from the US. And if those companies decide to prioritize, always prioritize WordCamp US and WordCamp Europe over Asia, then our Asian community will not meet those European or American companies and vice versa. rtCamp might not be able to attend all three, prioritize Asia, and then miss out on the US market. So, it’s not as easy as maybe just don’t go to everything.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, thank you. Okay, so I will obviously link to this in the show notes that I put out tomorrow, but you can find it over at progressplanner.com and then search for, maybe just Google it, WordPress’s flagship WordCamp strategy is a mess and 2026 will be hell with some options for how 2027 might be run. Okay, speaking of that, let me just, I’m going to miss that one out for a second and I’m just going to skip to this. We’ll come back to that other one in a moment. 

This may be a solution. I don’t know what Marcus feels about this, but Marcus over at the WP World, so the WP.world, has been curating the WordPress community over the last couple of years in all sorts of ways. So, you know, you can set up a profile and tell people about yourself and you can bind it to where you’re going to these events and so on. But what you’re seeing here is the 2025 upcoming events page.

Now, whether or not we would want to rely on Marcus for this, I don’t know, but it seems like a certainly a credible way of going about it. Having some central repository for this kind of information might be kind of interesting. And then everybody could go in not just the WordPress events that are run under WordPress.org or the chapter program, but also all the other meetups and other things that go on in the WordPress space. 

Like we had an event in London last week that many people attended, but it was not done under the WordPress.org auspices. So if you didn’t know that was going on, you may have missed that. So having one place, so maybe the WP World would be a good spot for that or something similar. So Marcus, if you’re still in the comments, I’d be interested to know what your thoughts are on that. Tammie’s got another comment.  Sorry, Rob, or yes, your head keeps disappearing. Just get the top of your head. The cause impact needs to be balanced, different for sponsors and also attendees. That’s a point, but it’s also not a solid approach to say, and it’s truncated to reduce them. Some can’t travel. Okay. Oh, David. Oh, sorry, Dovid, apologies. GatherPress. Does GatherPress offer a central repository, Dovid? My understanding is GatherPress is more of a I’m running an event, so I’ll use GatherPress in order. I didn’t.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, it’s a meetup.com alternative.

Nathan Wrigley

Right. Oh, but does it have a platform in the background? So, like we were looking at on the screen there with…I don’t think it does. I think it’s just for, so it’s not a central repository showing all the different bits and pieces. But anyway, a bit of thinking in advance and checking out what all the other people do. I know it’s a lot of extra legwork making sure that the calendar is clear and then obviously, you know, hard decisions would need to be made anyway because there may be inevitable clashes that can’t be overcome.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah. And that’s the thing. There’s more events happening than we have days in the year. So there will always be a clash. But for our three main events to clash, that’s just bad planning.

Nathan Wrigley

I’m so sorry, Rob. Every time I put up a comment, your entire face is erased. That’s not my intention. So here’s Marcus, back to us. Right, so here we go. I’d love to add meetups as well, but I need something I can automate. I add all events manually right now. Okay, so that’s quite a lot of work for you to do, but having something over there would be quite amazing. So, okay, now we’re talking. Okay, David, it’s a WIP. I don’t know what’s WIP.

Taco Verdonschot

Work in progress.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, thank you. Okay, thank you. Yes, it is very much a work in progress. Sorry, it’s because it’s surrounded by W&P. I’m thinking it must be a WordPressy thing. No, it’s not. Yes, it’s a plugin that you can self-host. Amber is adding a cautionary note saying it’s not good on the accessibility. 

So there we go. There’s my camera that’s gone again. I shall lean over and press the button. What fun. Marcus says he’s been talking, oh, he’s been talking to the GatherPress folks and that may be the answer long term. Okay, there we go. Oh, isn’t it fun when we get involved in these conversations? That’s great. Right, okay, shall we move on? Do you think we’ve done that one?

So that was all about Taco and his bits and pieces. I’m going to stay on the events space and then we’ll come back to your other piece there, Taco. This piece is not new, but I just thought it was worth resurfacing. So we’re talking about flagship events. The next one coming up is going to be WordCamp Asia. 

And the dates have been announced and the venue has been announced. It’s going to be the 9th to the 11th of April 2026. And obviously that then puts it right at the beginning of the 4 1/2 month schedule. Taka was talking about, and it’s going to be in the, forgive my pronunciation here, the Jio World Convention Centre, which is in Mumbai in India. And that was announced about a month ago. So it’s no big news, but nevertheless, if you want to attend, that’s something you’re going to have to think about. 

This has now got ticketing available for it. This is PressConf. I think you can now get early bird tickets, which wasn’t the case just a week ago.So I don’t know what the cost is, but you can now join the list and get yourself on the early bird. This is one of the colliding things, though, if memory serves, PressConf, which is independently run outside of the chapter programme by, oh my goodness, I am so sorry. 

Taco Verdonschot

Raquel.

Nathan Wrigley

I’m sorry, Raquel. I feel terrible. Raquel didn’t know that there was going to be this collision and found out about it live in her seat when it was all announced. It’s going to be colliding with WordCamp US. So you have to make a choice. 

Taco Verdonschot

PressConf is colliding with WordCamp Asia.

Nathan Wrigley

I apologize. WordCamp Asia. 

Rahul Bansal

WordCamp Asia

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, WordCamp Asia. Written on the screen right in front of me. Yeah, you’re quite right. Thank you. 

So, and the last few that I want to mention, here’s another event happening in the WordPress space. This is the much talked about WordPress Accessibility Day. This is a 24-hour live event. So you can, you know, depending on where you are in the world, you might be able to consume bits. My understanding is all of the bits and pieces have been recorded. So rather than it being live, it’s being recorded so that the presenter gets the best version. However, 

Taco Verdonschot

Except for Q&A.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, Q&A and the chat is all going to be live. So the person who is speaking will be available for you live.  And I did a podcast episode with Dave, who’s in the comments, Dave and June. Dave and June joined me. I’m going to be putting that out on the Tavern this Wednesday. So hopefully you can learn about all the bits and pieces in the background. But yeah, that’s coming up. You can obviously register. Now, when I last looked, there were still some sponsor slots available, I think for bronze and micro, some of the smaller sponsor packages. So if you’re into that, go and check it out. You can see the link up here. Become a sponsor. You can check it out. No doubt Amber will have any something to say about that. Marcus says, what does he say?  Apologies. Oh, I’m so sorry, Rob. This is getting ridiculous.

Rob Cairns

It’s OK.

Nathan Wrigley

PressConf and leave the tickets have been available. Oh, apologies. OK, maybe it’s because they’re only available until tomorrow. I caught that sentence the wrong way round. So they’re available until tomorrow.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, which is the 30th of September for those not listening live.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, so you’ve got to rush on. If it’s past the 30th of September, you’ve missed out on that. But if you haven’t and you’re listening to it by tomorrow, you might still getting under the wire. That’s nice. Okay, thank you. Yay, says Amber. Show of hands. Woohoo. That’s great.  Okay, was that the last eventy thing? Yes, I think it was. So let’s quickly return to this one.  You sent me this in the link in a private chat a minute ago.

Taco Verdonschot

It responds to Nick’s article that we’ll talk about.

Nathan Wrigley

In which case, we will go to Nick’s article in that case, and we’ll come back to this one in just a second. Right. Okay, we are, in fact, in that case, going to move on. This made a bit of a wave this week. I don’t know if you were on social media, but each week there’s one post from somebody somewhere that seems to get all the hotness and all the buzz. And this week it was this one. 

Iconick, very nice, very clever. This is Nick Hamze. I’m going to pronounce it that way. Apologies, Nick, if I butchered your name. Nick has a blog post. I love this site, by the way. I think it’s really kind of retro cool. And this is now the second time I’ve seen this font. And I want to know what it is. I think it’s very cool. I like all the bits like the little kink in the D there. Anyway, Nick has penned a post called why WordPress lost the cool kids and how to win them back. Now, first of all, are we all in agreement? Did WordPress lose the cool kids? Show of hands on the panel. Let’s go back to the do you think we lost the cool kids?

Taco Verdonschot

Ages ago.

Nathan Wrigley

Ages ago. 

Rob Cairns

Ages ago.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay. Have we admitted to ourselves that 21-year-olds are not that bothered about WordPress? I could be wrong. Initiatives like WP Campus Connect doing great work, making sure that, you know, that the young people of this world are getting a chance. WP Campus as well. But if I put my children who are kind of, I think, really in the targets of Nick Hamze here, they take one look at WordPress and they’re like, who wants a blog? Who needs a website? 

I’ll just go and use, I’ll use Twitter, I’ll use Facebook, I’ll use whatever the cool thing at the moment is. The idea of owning your own content is kind of so like, oh, you’re a 1990s dad. We don’t care. It’s all disposable. Until, of course, they suddenly realize one day, oh, I got locked out of the platform. Anyway, the point that Nick is trying to make is that WordPress is no longer cool with the kids. And he really is talking about kids. He says the following. 

WordPress runs 43% of the internet, but try mentioning it in a design Discord and watch the cringe reactions. While WordPress quietly powers the New York Times and Microsoft, design Twitter celebrates every exodus to Webflow like it’s a prison break. And he says that WordPress is no longer cool because of 1000 paper cuts. 

But here’s some of them. The PHP stigma. Okay. that hurts. Interface chaos. Okay, that’s probably true. The accessibility curse, I wasn’t sure what he meant here because I’m going to read it. WordPress made web design democratic, which is incredible, but in creative communities, accessible gets read as amateur rather than powerful. I didn’t know what he meant there. 

Amber, can you shed some light on that? And the security perception, go on, Taco.

Taco Verdonschot

I’d say that the accessibility curse is the right heading, but with the wrong explanation in this case. because whereas he says accessibility isn’t perceived as cool, I think that it would be much cooler if we actually did accessibility better?

Nathan Wrigley

Okay.

Taco Verdonschot

Because then we wouldn’t have to talk about it so much.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, from what he said, it felt like when people talked about accessibility, they thought that wasn’t cool. So maybe I’ve just paused it incorrectly. Okay. And then the security problem, you know, if you’ve been in the WordPress space, all of those have been a part of your life for the last 10 years. It’s, you know, PHP, the interface is a hot mess and it’s getting more messy perhaps.

We’ve got this accessibility thing and then security perception as well. And then people like Webflow and Framer come along, chuck the billion dollars that they have at their, that’s an exaggeration. I have no idea how much money they have, but they certainly do a cool job of marketing themselves out there online. 

You know, they’ve got the slick videos, They do the TikTok and all of those things. And they just do a really good job. They professionally market themselves. Their assets look amazing. They’ve built communities and they are bragging about their tech stack. And so basically saying, you know, we’re in trouble. But then he offers us a way to fix it. 

He says we can fix the interface. We can integrate with design tools, which are cool already, like Figma and Sketch and things like that. We can write about success stories. We can embrace the new technical narrative about things like the REST APIs and all the cool things that graduates out of university are probably going to want to play with more than PHP. And we can keep building our community. This actually resonated with me. I don’t know if you got offended by it or thought that he was wider than Mark, but yeah, over to you guys.

Rob Cairns

Two things I’d like to jump in. First of all, the security perception. I think, and I’ve said this and I’ll say this again, is security all comes down on trust. So if you’re having problems in a WordPress ecosystem with sketchy plugins, then I think you have to, as a designer and developer, weed out what you’re using. It’s a trust factor. That’s #1. Number 2, the marketing of WordPress, I think, is why we’ve lost the cool kids. 

And it was a big discussion on X, and I think you saw, Taco, where we were talking about marketing and marketing in the community. Guess what, folks? We don’t need to market to the WordPress community. We need to market to the people outside the community. Marketing to ourselves is not good for the project. Bringing other people in is. And I kind of attribute this to where before I got into tech and marketing, I was very much a programmer. And I programmed in an old school language called COBOL, which is, again, not the cool language, but powers 75% of the financial systems in the world too.  So I think that’s where we’re at kind of.

Nathan Wrigley

Is it a case, though, that you can never be cool for a long period of time? So let’s take the music industry, right?

Rob Cairns

Yes.

Nathan Wrigley

If you’re born in the 1960s and you were into the Beatles and the Stones, like fabulous, everybody loved it all, then you go forward 10 years, the generation growing up, they’re not interested in the Beatles and the Stones. And it doesn’t matter how hard the Beatles and the Stones try to make themselves cool, they’re now not cool. So maybe there is something in that, there’s just this cyclical nature to the way these things work. 

Technologies have a legacy. It’s going to be difficult for WordPress to step out of that. Maybe this is, I don’t know, if there’s anything in what I’ve just said, but Tammie, it is. I take it, I take it on the chin. She says, maybe if we want to be cool, we should stop saying the TikTok. 

I do it deliberately, Tammie. I do it so that I am not cool. The TikTok. You notice I put my hands up as well. Okay, any thoughts on that apart from Rob, who’s obviously chimed in? What do you think, Taco? What do you think, Rahul?

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, I like the discussion on X as well. And I think that Mark Wilkinson asked a good question in the comments. He says, who is we and we need to market. And I think that is where the biggest problem is, that we need to define who we is, because right now what we see in WordPress is that the companies marketing WordPress are marketing their own solutions.

Every hosting company has their own WordPress solutions. And implicitly, we all market WordPress, but we’re also heavily competing. And there’s no, I mean, as much as I love the people on the WordPress marketing team, I think it’s the team that’s been dissolved most often in WordPress’s history. And that is problematic. We need to have a strong foundation that has funds and has a marketing budget. And we probably spend the money that the WordPress Foundation gifted to the Internet Archive a lot better on doing proper marketing for WordPress.

Nathan Wrigley

So the marketing, I remember a quote, sorry, I’m muddling my sentences up a bit here.

I remember a quote and it was from Bill Gates. Now you may or may not like Bill Gates, but he was actually quite good at what he did. And he was asked once, what would he do if he only had a dollar left in his pocket? He said, what would you spend it on? And he said, marketing that was to him, it doesn’t matter how cool your product is, unless people know about it, you have no product, essentially, if there’s nobody to purchase it and buy it. And we are in such a curious position in the WordPress space at the moment in that, you know, we’ve got hurdles that we have to jump over if we wish to use the word WordPress. I guess that’s part of the puzzle, you know, that people are trying to be very cautious about that.

But also, there’s no, if you’re in a marketplace, let’s say hosting, you work for a host company, it’s hard for you to give over loads of your column inches to WordPress. You’re just going to be talking about the features and the benefits of your hosting platform. WordPress is not really the bit that you want to talk about. You might sort of add it, you know, oh yeah, and it bolts onto WordPress. But it feels like some percentage of all of the marketing that goes on in the WordPress space, if we could crowbar a bit of WordPress into that, would be a cheap way of doing it.

But I guess what Nick is saying is that really, we need to actually put our money where our mouth is. There’s a whole other marketing in WordPress conversation that went on this week that I didn’t really get into. But thank you, Taco. Rahul, anything for you?

Rahul Bansal 

Yeah, so we face the PHP part quite strongly because we hire a lot of college students. So the WordPress is something they haven’t heard much at their age or their exposure level, but the PHP is something they dread upon. And so how would I put like, and when you say PHP, it’s not like they’re always looking or competing with React or something like the modern tech. There’s always something changes like from last two years, this is AI and machine language wave. So it’s not about WordPress or web anymore. They want to build machine learning platforms, something like they want to work for companies who are building expertly for AI. So WordPress gets hammered across different ways, not just the PHP as a language, but also tech trends. So whenever a new trend rises, it actually makes the distance bigger.

Nathan Wrigley

It’s kind of interesting. So you can judge by the amount of comments that are coming in. I don’t know if you 3 can see the comments coming in, but some pieces that we talk about don’t get much commentary. This one’s had quite a few, so it’s obviously pushing some buttons. So let’s just go to a few of them because it’s kind of interesting. So here we go.

I’ll just make that so sorry, Rob. It did lose the cool kids. But some are coming back and new ones are arriving. I hope that’s true. I would love that to be the case. Obviously, Nick is somewhat skeptical that we’re at that crossroads quite yet. Tammie says, sketch is not cool. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder is all I’ll say. Some people love it, I’m sure. And then so devs and amateurs can use WordPress. Right, we’ve done the one about Mark, which says, who is the we that we need to market to? Yes. No idea. When you’ve got 43% of the web trying to distill who your target market is, isn’t it just everybody? It’s really, it’s kind of really hard to zone in on who they are. But I suppose in this case, it’s everybody under the age of 30, which is only about, what, probably 3 billion at this point, something like that. It’s quite a big audience. Paul, hello, Paul. I don’t know that we’ve met, but Paul Buncombe joining us. I thought this was a great post, he says.

But the examples given of technology that have changed their perception didn’t include any that have fallen out of favor and risen again. Okay, interesting. Yeah, good point. And maybe Tammie’s making the same point that the post uses dated terms. And I think that’s probably it. No. I keep hearing that we need to market WordPress, says Mark, and lots of talk about amazing videos from the likes of Framer, et cetera.

But who does that for WordPress? Who pays for it? Yeah, this is the point, right? Who would pay for that? It would need to be, can you imagine the cost of those Framer, Webflow videos, Squarespace, Wix. My understanding is the Squarespace team, isn’t it? Somewhere in the region of, no, maybe it’s Wix. Anyway, one of those platforms has got something in the region of 400 full-time employees just on the marketing side of things. And their budget is many, many, many, many millions. I don’t know how you compete against that, Juggernaut. That is truly a difficult thing.

Taco Verdonschot

Well, by not giving away 100 grand to another organization instead of spending it on marketing.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay. To expand that, because I kind of didn’t follow. What did you mean? Sorry.

Taco Verdonschot

So I think it was late last year, the WordPress Foundation posted that they had done a 100 grand donation to the Internet Archive.

Nathan Wrigley

I see.

Taco Verdonschot

And what if we had used that money to market WordPress or even to pay developers to work on WordPress full time?

Nathan Wrigley

Did we just get lucky with WordPress? What I mean by that is did it kind of market itself? Because there was a bunch of people who were just willing to jump on board that ship. They could see the utility in volunteering their time for something that they would put in a bit of time, but out of it with all the combined time would come out something way better than the amount of time that they put in. So, I contribute, I don’t know, let’s say that I did 3 hours a week.

But if lots of people are doing 3 hours a week, out comes this brilliant piece of software, which then I can use. My 3 hour a week investment is time, money, well spent. And it had that kind of open source vibe that the early internet did. And now we’ve moved into a, you know, really different time where the internet is definitely a bunch of walled gardens and stuff. So I don’t have the answer to it, but what would be nice is if somebody who is, I don’t know, let’s say a trillionaire just comes over to us all and says, look, there’s a couple of billion. Use that to market WordPress. That’d be nice.

Taco Verdonschot

Yes and no. I’d rather have a sustainable system where we get a lot less money every year, but it is recurring and we can keep it up forever than a one-time huge donation.

Let’s build an ecosystem where talking about making money doesn’t scare half the community away. Because I think that is still one of the challenges that we have in WordPress is that making money is a little bit dirty. You can’t really talk about it and we should. Because if people don’t make money, how are they going to invest into the system? How are they going to invest their time?

Nathan Wrigley

So this is an interesting comment from Corey. I’m not sure which Corey, but hello, thank you. Does it matter though, if Framer is cooler, if no one is getting six to seven figure projects for a Framer website? Yeah, interesting point. I don’t know if that’s the case. I feel like Webflow has only recently started to take on six-figure, high six-figure projects. This is more in Rahul’s wheelhouse than mine being that he’s, you know, leading up a WordPress agency, which is at the enterprise level. Corey carries on. This just feels like the evolution of a maturing platform. Not to say we don’t have problems. Interesting. Anything to say, Rahul, or shall we knock on that?

Rahul Bansal

Like every time any of something like Webflow or some of these kind of company starts their marketing or outreach partnership team usually approach all the large WordPress agencies like the special enterprise space. So I really never took on any Webflow lead. So I don’t have the idea about their mathematics, but we’re happy with our side of math. In fact, we are growing with WordPress and like it might sound more philosophical, but I believe in infinite game, we don’t have to do anything. The closed source will die eventually.

Eventually they will have to pay the investor back. Then they will start squeezing their customers, keep rising the price, and then we will get more Webflow to WordPress migration projects. So in a way, I thank them because now I have, they’re consolidating my future user base. Five years later, probably I will have 50 Webflow to WordPress migration project in six figures.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice, yeah. I think essentially Nick has just sort of encapsulated a hot bottom topic and he’s managed to do it and everybody kind of stuck in. It’s an age-old thing. I think maybe there’s lessons to be learned from things like the Drupal project. Drupal have this system, which is a little bit like Five for the Future, but it’s much more you do A and you get B as a result. So in other words, if you do this checklist of things, then you can, I don’t know, for example, appear at events and what have you.

Obviously, as a sponsor, as the person putting in that money, that may not be something that you want, but at least there’s a flow of money going directly in. And then, the marketing team might be something that is prioritized. But the consensus that I was seeing on Twitter, for those people who decided that we needed to work more hard on marketing, it all came down to where’s the money coming from. And if that money’s not earmarked at some point, then marketing is going to be difficult not impossible.

WordPress itself, I think, stands on its own 2 feet. But, you know, if you can throw a lot of money at marketing, you’ll probably have a greater reach. Whether or not, you know, that’s ideal, I don’t know. Taco, it looks like you were about to…

Taco Verdonschot

Well, I was considering if I should bring it up, but I think having spent some time with Linux Foundation projects, I think they have a model that works quite well to have open source projects that actually have financial stability.

Nathan Wrigley

Do they have more specific rules around the way that money is gathered in and spent? I confess, I don’t know anything about the Linux Foundation, really.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah. So the way it works for a lot of Linux Foundation projects is that you have a board of companies that will advise the technical leadership of the open source project. And in order to be on that board, you have to be a member of both the Linux Foundation and that specific project. And there’s a cost involved.

Nathan Wrigley

It’s kind of interesting because in the WordPress community, I imagine there’d be a lot of pushback of that, wouldn’t there? Because you’d have the people representing the companies on the one hand who would probably love that, and then you’d have a whole load of individual contributors and what have you. You’d probably think, wait, hang on, how is that all going to work out? And how are my hands going to be tied and rah rah rah?

Taco Verdonschot

No

Nathan Wrigley

No, OK.

Taco Verdonschot

This is, for example, what we’re doing with FAIR. It’s also a Linux Foundation project, and it’s also set up in a way that the technical steering committee directs the direction of the project. But there’s an advisory committee that’s formed as soon as it has members, etc. that will advise the technical steering committee on, hey, if you want to make this decision, this is the impact on the business side of the project. So it’s really going hand in hand. And it’s not that you’re surrendering any autonomy or any authority to whatever company. In fact, this system makes sure that there will never be a single person or company in charge of your entire project.

Nathan Wrigley

Interesting. Okay, thank you for those insights. Now, because time is moving on, I think we should probably press on, but just to let you know that Nick Hamze on his website, he does offer what he feels are some solutions, and they are basically fix the interface, integrate with design tools. 

I did mention some of these, but we’ll do it again. Create new success stories, embrace the technical narrative, and build community around creation. It was the hot topic of this week, so just head over to Twitter, and no doubt if you use the hashtag WordPress, this will crop up for you and you too can get stuck into it in the way that I did. Now this then presumably was the piece that you were trying to bind to that one. Do you want to just quickly dig into this or is that what you just said?

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, some of it. So Joost makes a slightly larger argument that we need both a product and a marketing team and not just a marketing team like we just talked about.

Nathan Wrigley

Can I just say that on this, I’ve often seen, Joost’s face highlighted and then your face is highlighted when you do your posts and Marieke as well. I’ve yet to see a post by the bird.  I’m waiting for the bird to write about. I’m fascinated. I’m guessing it’ll be something to do with Twitter.

Taco Verdonschot

Actually, so this is the outside of our office building.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, it’s nice. It’s lovely. It’s very nice. Okay, let’s move on. Okay, repository. We know Rae. Rae writes a lot about bits and pieces, and she’s got her take on this as well. She goes into great, great depth, so you can read all about that. I’m going to, what am I going to do? I’m very quickly, I’m not going to labor on this. And I don’t know the background, but we never like to talk about when people are laid off. It’s never a good thing in the WordPress space. But over at Fueled, there seems to be a discussion that I don’t quite know how this story arose. 

It seems like this story is preempting. the possibility that people are going to be laid off. Certainly some way through this post, it seems that the author who wrote this was suggesting that they had advanced information. I don’t quite know how that would be. But 10up amalgamated with Fueled, a digital agency, a couple of years ago, I’m going to say something like that. 

And it would appear from this piece at least, is that maybe that hasn’t worked out for the best. The reasons are listed down below. It’s speculation, I would say. This isn’t coming from either Fueled or 10up, but it would seem that there’s maybe been a sort of clash of cultures, let’s put it that way. The things that Fueled did best weren’t necessarily the way that 10up did things best, and perhaps this is a consequence of that. 

Obviously, it goes without saying that if you are affected by this, I do wish you the best, and I hope that you managed to find some work. On that bombshell, we’ll go to this one. It’s a pretty poor segue, but there you go. I hope that’s all right. Because you over at rtCamp, Rahul, I believe it’s true to say that you’re constantly looking for developers. Is that true? Did I read it somewhere that there’s like basically never a period where you’re not looking for?

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, we’re always hiring.

Nathan Wrigley

And go on, sorry, you carry on.

Rahul Bansal 

So the thing is that so first, like our work culture and like a lot of internal structuring is very different. So we always look out for people, we scan them. So I would say we are always hiring, we’re always accepting application. The response time varies between one week to one month.

That’s the only slide factor that changes with the demand. But we’re always hiring, like we’re always accepting application. In fact, this is our new site. On old site, we used to have waitlist features. So no job was ever closed. People can always, how would I put like, so if they say a job is closed, they can get on the waitlist. As soon as we have a demand, we will shoot them e-mail.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, I see. So you’re sort of like, okay, yeah, just keep me on file, basically. Okay, that’s interesting. So this is careers.rtcamp.com. And you can obviously filter by the different bits and pieces. I’m showing that there are two jobs available, for example, in the engineering facility at the moment, but 12 in total, two in design. I don’t know what is this word, Frappe? I don’t know what that is. Forgive me. But anyway, there we go. You can see the different bits and pieces there. Okay, right, let’s move on. We really are running out of time. Oh, it’s this. You mentioned this over here over on Twitter, our recent FRAP hiring announcement is just the opening up. So what is Frappe, Rahul?

Rahul Bansal

So it’s an open source framework, something which was inspired by WordPress, but it is more useful to create business applications or any kind of data-driven application. So Frappe is more like Laravel. On Frappe, they have something like ERPNext. The goal of ERPNext is to be the WordPress of ERP world. And we started with ERPNext as our own internal business operating system. 

That is what I have mentioned that in rtCamp, layoffs are extremely layered because we are super data-driven. We do the math very well. So every time we make an offer, we literally keep two years payroll in mutual funds aside.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice.

Rahul Bansal

For each of our employees, we have like a two years’ salaries deposited in banks.

Nathan Wrigley

Nice. So if you get a job over there, you’re in good position.

Rahul Bansal

Not a single layoff of any, say, 16 years.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh, wow. Good grief. That’s quite a statistic. Okay, in that case, I’m going to reintroduce you to this page careers.rtcamp.com. Go check it out. That’s phenomenal.

Taco Verdonschot

I mean, Nathan, you were at WordCamp Asia where rtCamp was one of the sponsors, right?

Nathan Wrigley

It was, yeah.

Taco Verdonschot

I mean, have you met anyone on their team who’s not awesome?

Nathan Wrigley

No, not yet.

Taco Verdonschot

Same.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, that’s going to be our quest to find somebody on the rtCamp team who is not awesome. Oh, that’s lovely. What a lovely, lovely story that is. And if you get a job there, you’ve got two months of, two years of salary banked already. Okay, apropos, oh, let’s move to this one quickly, because we are running out of time. 

I didn’t, I think this is new. I got some confirmation that this was new by some of the guests when we just did the little preamble talk before the show started. Shopify have launched a plugin. Obviously, if you’re selling things online, the traditional way of doing that would be some WordPress plugin. 

Perhaps WooCommerce is the most common way of doing it. But we do know that a lot of clients like to go to Shopify. Well, you can now integrate that with a couple of blocks inside your WordPress site. There’s a plugin which will enable you to build different bits and pieces in WordPress. Honestly, I’ve got nothing more to say about it than that. It exists. It may be that, you know, you can bolster your WordPress solution without the need to stretch over to WooCommerce.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, I’m really interested in seeing what this will mean for the future of WooCommerce.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, I mean, it’s a big play, right? It’s a small launch with just a couple of blocks. But they’re building, well, a product which is, I don’t know, I was on the London Underground this week. I don’t know if you saw any of them, Taco.  There were tons of Shopify adverts all over the place. 

Those ads, they are not cheap. And there were many, many of them. So here we come to marketing again. You know, you stick an advert on the London Underground and suddenly, you know, you’re finding 10s of millions of people who probably 99.9% of them would have no interest. But look at the power of what they’re doing. They get in front of people. 

And now apparently, you can do your Shopify itinerary and checkout process and all of that inside of your WordPress site with a plugin. Beyond that, I don’t know if anybody else has had a play yet, but it’s there. Okay, let’s move on. There it is. Next one then.

Rahul Bansal

That cool kids are moving to WordPress in a way.

Nathan Wrigley

Say that, say again, sorry.

Rahul Bansal

So with Shopify taking WordPress seriously, finally we can say some cool kids are taking WordPress seriously.

Nathan Wrigley

So there’s an interesting talking point, right? Would it, I wonder if it’ll swell WordPress numbers. Because you can do things, obviously, if you want a blog or something like that, I imagine the Shopify constraints are pretty great around that kind of thing. And if you just want a website with contact forms and all that kind of stuff, WordPress is guaranteed to be better than Shopify, I would imagine in that scenario. So I wonder if it will draw people in. 

I’d be also curious to see how much they promote it outside of the WordPress space. Obviously, they’re doing it here. But whether or not they’ll, talk about this on their Tube adverts, I’m not quite so sure. Time will tell. Okay. Righty-ho. Okay. It never stops though, does it? So we’ve got one thing on the Shopify side and now we’ve got this on the WooCommerce side. 

Again, I think this is new. WooCommerce now offers you the availability to do POS, point of sale. You can do card payments from what looks like a mobile phone app. As simple as that, I mean, obviously we’re looking at the example here. You’ve seen this a million times over you, haven’t you? Somebody deploying a mobile device or an iPad or something like that to do the checkout process. You go up to the counter, something gets scanned.

Well, yeah, look, here they are, a couple of links to the Apple iOS, the App Store, but also the Google Play Store and now you have the solution available to you. It does say it’s currently only available in the UK and the US, but yeah, what more can you say? So on the one hand, Shopify’s eating WooCommerce’s lunch, on the other hand WooCommerce fighting back with Android and iOS apps to make it possible to all of that.

Rob Cairns

Nathan, two cents here going back to the cool kids whole discussion. If you want to be a cool kid, you’ve got to be first to market. And I’m sorry, WooCommerce is way behind in this space. PayPal’s already been there, Square by Jack Dorsey’s already been there. There’s multiple other platforms. And I think I hate to direct this conversation back there, but if we want to keep being that cool product, we got to be back on the frontend of this stuff.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, I think I, when I, don’t know if you noticed in the show notes that I put, I wrote something to that effect. I put something like, you know, I wonder if this is too late or, you know, something like that. 

Rob Cairns

I think so. 

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I really, I think I’ve been able to do this with, something like Stripe or what have you for the longest time, but obviously it would have bound to WooCommerce.

Rahul has disappeared. Let’s hope his internet connection is staying around. But whilst he’s not here, I think we should mention this because he probably would be embarrassed. Yeah, look, Deveden says, I see a lot of awards behind Rahul in the camera back. Yeah, they are legit awards. 

He is like, you know, he’s an an A1 enterprise agency and he runs that. And I think, wow, he’s quite the person to have on the show. It’s pretty amazing. Okay, so maybe we’re late to the party there. 

Mark Westguard was in the comments earlier. I hope that he forgives me for saying this. Mark, way above my pay grade here. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re on about. I do kind of. He’s written a tutorial and it is that. 

So I’m just mentioning it. He’s written a tutorial about how you can create an MCP server in WordPress with the abilities API and the MCP adapter. So the idea being that you can combine AI with the abilities API, which I don’t know, for example, the ability might be create a blog post or create a user or something like that. 

And that sort of stuff is really difficult to do. And Mark has explained in this tutorial how to do it. I won’t go into the nuts and the bolts of how to do that. Welcome back, Rahul. I hope that, I hope all is well. Sometimes these things happen. Okay, so there we go. That’s that. Anything want to say? Anybody want to say anything?  But I’m so conscious that we’ve got almost no time left. Okay, great. I’m going to quickly move on. This one.

Taco Verdonschot

Marked in a nice TLDR in the comments, by the way.

Nathan Wrigley

Oh. Mark Westguard, there we go. Oh, and now it’s Rahul’s face that’s getting wiped out. It’s not Rob anymore. Oh, sorry, Rahul. 

TLDR, says Mark Westguard, the creator of the article we’ve just put up there, how to get AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to safely interact with WordPress. Thank you. You’ve summarized it lots better than I did, which is great because you wrote it. 

I’ve read it. I’ve read every word, but I was trying to figure out how to say it in 12 sentences and there wasn’t an easy way. Thank you. Just flipping back just for a moment, SinanWP, says, Shopify is an insanely expensive solution. And the more you scale, the more, okay, it gets to unlike WooCommerce. I did not know that.

Rob Cairns

So hang on a sec. I would humbly disagree with a bit of that comment. If you’re WooCommerce, store scaling, your hosting has to scale. So let’s watch where we put our dollars. It’s where you want to put your money and how you want to do it. I’m not I’m not supporting Shopify. I’m just saying the obvious. We’ve got to. People don’t think of stuff that way and we’ve got to start to think that way.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, the graph curves upwards regardless of which platform you’re using. But I suppose you have to do it.

Rob Cairns

Exactly.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah, see, which way the graph curves for both of those things. Okay. And thank you, Mark, for explaining that in a very, very thrifty way. Right. Okay. The next one. This is so great. Let’s hope this and it’s kind of blanked itself out. I don’t know if we, oh, there we go. You can see it now. 

So this is the demo of 2.1 version of the Blocks Accessibility Checks plugin. Maybe this is really old hat and I’ve never come across it, but I’ve never seen this before. So let me just click play. I’ll just scrape back a little bit. So imagine you’re in a post and you, I don’t know, you’re dropping in paragraphs and images. It’s very limited at the at the moment, I think it only works with headings, paragraphs and images, something like that. But you drop in, let’s say, oh, and buttons. You drop in a button and it will immediately in real time give you feedback about the accessibility of where you are at right now. So in this case, the message being read is buttons are required to have a link. Well, yeah, that button will have a link, but it hasn’t yet. And so the plugin is kind of intercepting and saying, okay, get on with it, make us a link. And then you can imagine what happens.  You put in a link, that nag goes away, and a different one would come up. 

And so this video then shows you, for example, problems that you might have with tables, problems that you might have with buttons, problems that you might have with text, with images. And I just think this is such a clever way of surfacing the problems as you begin to type the problem, as you solve them, the problems go away. New ones are ingested and displayed in front of you. And I just think this is really cool. Amber, please tell me I’m wrong. If there’s some problem here, let me know. But it seems like the first steps into what I think is a very, very interesting workflow for solving accessibility problems.

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, and now let’s imagine a future where we combine this with the comments on the block so that you can get a suggestion that you can actually respond and have a chat on a possible solution. And then you combine it with Mark’s MCP and you can have AI respond to your comments and solve these problems for you.

Nathan Wrigley

And WordPress is cool again.

Taco Verdonschot

It is.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah. We just figured out how to make WordPress cool. It is cool. Oh, look, as if that happened at the same time. It is cool, says Amber. She must have written that about 15 seconds ago because there’s a bit of a lag, but that coincided beautifully. We’ve talked about doing this too.

Yeah, Amber, when I watch this workflow and I see that, you put a link in and that thing just disappears and you move on to the next thing and the things don’t get listed before they’re needed, it’s just really, really clever. A beautiful UX, basically. So let’s hope that project. get some traction. It is called Block Accessibility Checks and it’s only available for core blocks and only a few of them right now. There’s a little UI where you can toggle things on and off in the background. So that’s one thing.

Another plugin I wanted to mention was this. I have wanted this in my life, it turns out forever, but never knew it until this week. It’s the ability to simply bookmark something inside a WordPress. Maybe this exists, maybe somebody’s done this already, but I haven’t seen it. So for example, I don’t know, you want to say, I keep coming back to this page. And because I’ve got 900 pages on my website and I can’t remember what the heck I called it and everything’s organized alphabetically, I can’t ever find it. 

Well, now you can. You just star a bunch of things, posts, pages, whatever. And now it’s bookmarked. So you can come back to it and say, okay, there it is. So I thought that was quite cool. It’s just called Admin Bookmarks. And it just does that one thing. Very nice. Moving on. This is, I don’t know if this is good or not. 

Amber, again, from the accessibility point of view, you can tell me, maybe this destroys accessibility, I’m not sure. It’s a plugin called BlaBlaBlocks Formats. Great name, by the way, love it. And it enables you to do all these funky different ways of highlighting text, curly, underline, crossed out, strike, and so on. That’s what that does, thought I’d mention that. 

And then lastly, just because he’s awesome. Justin Tadlock has created a Breadcrumbs block, which does exactly that. It enables you to drop in a block and it will tell people where they are in the sort of the breadcrumb nature of your website. So you can go and check that out as well. 

And we had absolutely loads more. We had Telex to talk about. I was going to show you this fun thing, which enabled you to get really annoyed with captures. That was fun. We were going to talk about e-mail being launched as a CloudFlare service in private beta. We were going to, we were going to do, should we just quickly, have you all got a minute? 

Very quickly. Jono Alderson has done what I consider to be some epic work. He’s it’s so good. And can you imagine how many hours he sunk into this just because he was able to put the word Impo in front of Lighthouse. So he’s created Impolighthouse. And basically it’s like a it’s like a full on legit Lighthouse replacement, only it’s really mean. It’s just really rude. It’s deliberately rude. So there are various levels. You get the idea. You put in a URL and you want some Lighthouse feedback, as you might. You can then choose a level of annoying. The first one is irritated, which is what I used. You can go for silly, which they call Monty Python. And apparently Taco’s tried this out. You can go for scathing, which is called nuclear. Is it pretty brutal?

Taco Verdonschot

Yes.

Nathan Wrigley

Okay. I just went for irritated. And this is the kind of feedback that you get. So it’s a bit, so normally you just get your metrics and it’d be making nice, polite suggestions. This just leans in on meanness, which is just so funny. This site behaves apparently like an organization that’s given up on its users. Critical basic decisions, avoiding pointless redirecting chains and limiting third-party JavaScript haven’t been fixed, which means the team either can’t or won’t prioritize, simple high impact improvements and it goes on. And I would like to applaud anybody who makes anything on the internet which is funny. And that. Presumably that’s all this is.

Taco Verdonschot

So the thing is, if you’ve ever met Jono, you can only read this with his voice in the back of your head. There’s only one way.

Nathan Wrigley

Yeah. I’ve never, I don’t think I’ve ever, I’ve met Jono in that I’ve been watched his presentations. Jono, is it Jono? Jono talks at the speed of light. Is that, are we talking?

Taco Verdonschot

Yeah, 

Nathan Wrigley

About the same Jono. So I’m imagining that if somebody else was to build this, it’d probably take like a week. I reckon Jono probably did it in like 8 minutes or something. If he types at the speed that he talks.

Taco Verdonschot

Yep, that’s not unlikely.

Nathan Wrigley

But I absolutely love it. It’s really, really good. And here we go, a little comment from Rhys. Hello, Rhys. I mean, Jono yelling at you for being useless is pretty much part of the course. Okay. And Amber says, yes, I was definitely hearing his voice. So bravo, Jono. Go and check it out. It is at the johnoalderson.com website and I will link to it in the show notes, but it’s basically jonoalderson.com forward slash Impolighthouse.  Whether or not it actually has useful nuggets of information in there, I do not know.

Taco Verdonschot

It does.

Nathan Wrigley

But it will certainly make you laugh, which is kind of the main point, I guess. Okay, we were going to talk about Matt Mullenweg and listening to music as you play websites. We were going to talk about this SpamGPT tool, but time has run away with us, so we will not. We will save those for another week. I know. 

That’s how it goes. So that was This Week in WordPress episode 350. It featured Taco, the Don Shot. It featured Rahul Bansal, and it featured Rob Cairns and myself, Nathan Wrigley. We’ll be back. We’re back all the time. There’s never a Monday that goes by where we’re not back.

Well, unless it’s Christmas or something like that, or I’m on a plane, then we’re not here. But every other week we’ll be back. So we’ll be back next week. But before we go, we have to do the slightly humiliating hand wave. Rahul’s going, what What the heck? We do this. What? We do that. 

There we go. That’s all that I require. We do it so that I can make the album art. Any suggestion? Did anybody think of anything that we could call this title? I’ve got written down here only one and it was the need to slim down. Taco said it at one point. And I thought that would apply to me beautifully. I need to slim down.

Taco Verdonschot

I feel seen as well.

Nathan Wrigley

So I’m going to go on a diet when this episode finishes. Right, that’s it. We’ll be back next week. You have a lovely time. The guests, if you want to stick around and have a chatter after this is done, that would be lovely. We like to do that as well. But see you next week, everybody. 

Take care. Bye.

Taco Verdonschot, Rahul Bansal and Rob Cairns

Bye.

Nathan Wrigley

Bye, bye, bye, bye.

Gautam Khorana

From freelancing as a blogger to leading an enterprise WordPress agency, and now building a world’s video-first DAM for WordPress, today’s guest has continuously reimagined what WordPress can do. Welcome to WP Legends. I’m Gautam, co-founder of Seahawk Media. 

Today, I’m joined by someone I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at several WordCamps over the years, most recently at WordCamp Basel. Rahul Bansal, founder and CEO of rtCamp. 

Rahul leads one of the most respected enterprise WordPress agencies in the world, a WordPress VIP Gold Partner, and serving brands like Google, Meta, and Al Jazeera.

Under his leadership, rtCamp has grown to over 200 engineers and expanded into product innovation with tools like GoDAM, a WordPress native digital asset manager for video and Web Auditor, a no-code lighthouse-powered site performance tool. 

In this episode, we’ll explore how Rahul built rtCamp’s enterprise-first ethos, why he keeps launching innovative tools, and how WordPress continues to evolve as the foundation for high performance, large scale digital publishing. Rahul, welcome to WP Legends.

Rahul Bansal

Thanks, Gautam, for having me here. And thanks for that wonderful intro.

Gautam Khorana

It’s a pleasure. Nice to see you again. We just met, it’s like I met you yesterday. We were at WordCamp, and hopefully I see you at WordCamp in US. I think you mentioned you’re kind of undecided at the moment, but we’ll discuss it in a bit. 

But let’s see the beginning. I want to know your origin story? Because when I met you in person also, I don’t think I ever asked you 16 years ago, what happened? How did you start?

Rahul Bansal

So 16 years ago, actually, rtCamp started before that, so I started before rtCamp, like, so I started as a blogger, first as activist blogger. So my first blog was not even a technology blog, it was a political blog. So, and business was never on my mind. In fact, politics was the career I was aspiring for.

Gautam Khorana

Oh, wow I didn’t know that.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah. So it was a political blog now archived from the internet, just because my political views has changed a lot from those days. So, but then, so that blogging started as a part of a movement in 2006, I guess 2005-6. There was some student movement brewing up.  But I found this tool, when that moment ended, I thought, this is something I can use further. And as an engineering student, I used to code a lot, I used to write a lot of notes in my personal notebook. So I kind of found it natural to put them online and they started catching up. People started using my code.

Gautam Khorana

When you started blogging, it was not on WordPress, of course, but somehow you found WordPress open source and you kind of like the concept of open source. Like what made you choose WordPress? Because at that time, Drupal was popular, Joomla was popular, Magento was popular. Everything was, you know, starting to pick up. Blogger was there from Google. I can’t even remember because I was not in this ecosystem. So what drove you to WordPress?

Rahul Bansal

So I was on actually Blogger only. So yes, my heart was into open source, but then like the first blog, the political blog that was like literally launched overnight. So there was like, whatever, the first thing we saw Blogger just launch it, start publishing content, gathering people, organizing movement. And then when it ended, I was familiar with Blogger. 

So it was natural for me to put my technical content on Blogger. Then came the second part, like now I was started to think blogging as a serious, something serious because I was in my last year of graduation. I had to figure out how to make a living also at the same time. So I thought like maybe we can take blogging as a full-time career.

And at the same time, there was an article about Google AdSense in Times of India, the newspaper. So I read about Google AdSense in a print paper in the morning, and then I configured ad network on my blog, and then I realized to drive traffic, I need a lot more customization, something that only open source provide. Open source gives that power to you.

So I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress and then there was no looking back. Once I was on WordPress, I have started customizing it heavily, started themes and plugins, started taking some small, like a tinkering request from friends. And my blog used to get a lot of traffic.

So I had a good problem first, I had this problem much earlier that how to scale WordPress, that was the first problem I faced, like high traffic, constantly crashing. So that made me explore Nginx and some amazing WordPress architectures, so that kind of set, so many good things happened in those early 1-2 years before even rtCamp started.

Gautam Khorana

Like you mentioned, good problem.

Rahul Bansal

Good problem, yeah. More traffic led to, and then another, in hindsight, another good problem happened was, even though my blog was very popular, I was constantly used to get covered in the top Indian blogger list and blah, blah, blah. There was speculation about how much money I was making. There was like the most Google keyword like Rahul Bansal AdSense income.

That was the I had to complete Google suggestions to give because people used to know how much money I was making. And honestly, I didn’t make a lot of money because I didn’t took a lot of ads like the text link ad or I had disguise as a editorial, so or pay tributes, many things I didn’t do. So I had high traffic but low revenue.

And then that means I had to make my site run in very low resources, like in as low cost as possible. That prompted me to look for something like Nginx, which set another career path later on. So it’s like, so I managed to run WordPress at scale in very low resources in very early, something that become my unique advantage offering, something which I later gave to other blogger friends.

So there was a blogging community in India. There were like bloggers meetup, BlogCamp, before WordCamp, there was a BlogCamp. And there was other blogger, even at an Indian BarCamp or BlogCamp, there was some meetups also, so other bloggers who were only writing used to hire me to do their work, and that’s how I started freelancing, and that freelancing later turned into rtCamp, so it’s like

Gautam Khorana

I see. So let me understand. 2009-10 is when you started your WordPress journey, etc., you know, from ground up, you know, on your own. And then WordPress Enterprise was launched in 2013 or 14, VIP, sorry, WordPress VIP and you were safe to say one of the first few people to get that status, WordPress VIP.

Rahul Bansal

Not first few, how to put like…

Gautam Khorana

Or the initial year or two, you were part in the initial or joined in the initial year or two, right?

Rahul Bansal

We joined in 20, so we were in touch with VIP quite early, but then, as I mentioned, our initial clients were not very enterprise, like they were like blogger friends and small businesses, and we were famous to run a lot of stuff in very low cost, so we were like a cost-effective agency, so naturally we were attracting people with less budget and that was not even a problem for me.

So I used to choose my client based on what they do. It’s like good people, good work. That is our value system. So good people also means good clients.

If somebody’s doing some shitty work, I don’t care how much they pay, we won’t take them as a client, not then, not now. But so we were like a lot more into like this bloggers, small businesses, hobbyists, nonprofits. The problem is when VIP approach us, so when we got in touch with VIP, they had some initial criteria that, and which was a valid one because they kind of heard about us. They heard about us, they got many good reviews about us, like this company in India has an amazing engineering practice.  We had open source contribution to backup, but we didn’t have a VIP client, we had a VIP client, but under the NDA, we were subcontracting through other agencies.

Gautam Khorana

I see.

Rahul Bansal

And we did, so we knew VIP platform very well that they also knew, but we were not ready to disclose the name, honoring the non-disclosure agreement with the other agency client through which is subcontracting. That was like, we stuck there for two years. They wanted us to give one direct client to them or convert one client they will send to them. So they were very kind. VIP was very kind that, so they were leads, even low quality by VIP standard, which other partners were refusing to take.

Gautam Khorana

I see.

Rahul Bansal

So they used to send it to us, but now they were very low quality. So it’s like in two cases what happened, VIP sent those leads to us. They were low budget, they hired us. So we got some business because of VIP even before becoming VIP partner. But those clients had such a low budget, they refused to become VIPs hosting client. 

Gautam Khorana

I see.

Rahul Bansal

So we got agency business, but we couldn’t tick that box that, hey, this is a VIP customer referred by or managed by rtCamp. And that partnership is stuck for two years, but then like karma or whatever luck happens. First WordCamp US, I met somebody in after party. They were using one of our plugin, rtMedia, and they were already on VIP. They wanted to use it on VIP and then dots got connected, and then we hired them as a custom client, like we onboard them as our client, and then that tick. And so I think we officially become VIP client in 2016.

Gautam Khorana

That’s not bad at all, almost 10 years now, huh?

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, yeah.

Gautam Khorana

It’s so funny as a fellow agency owner myself, like our businesses are the same, essentially. It’s just that the scale is completely different, like I don’t, I won’t touch enterprise at all, at least for now. I have actually collaborated with you on a couple of projects also, and I’ve seen the strength of your team and, you know, your team does an incredible job, which leads me to another thing. 

I think I read somewhere online that you have been contributing to WordPress for a really long time also, I think you have 30 or 50 contributors. How do you manage that? And I think a lot of core releases also you’ve been part of. Correct me if I’m wrong, I would love to learn.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, so in 2014, we had first patch in the WordPress core and since then, every release we had patches. The point that I think for last few WordPress releases, we were second biggest contributor in terms of number of people that sent patches to the core and I think number of patches. So it’s like how to put like, so contributing was always like, we always want to give back because whatever I earn, I earn from WordPress, like everything in my life I got because of WordPress. So there is like this sense of gratitude that I need to give back to the community, which gave me everything.

Gautam Khorana

I see, of course, of course.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, the level of contribution kept changing because based on circumstances in positive ways, like for example, so we had different approaches. Like initially we were this blogger focus, small business focus, blogger to WordPress and like, small business, I would say, not even enterprise.

Then we had one enterprise client and then for 2-3 years, some enterprises client, and then almost in 2014-15, we started becoming fully enterprise focus agency. But then at every focus point, there was like, we wanted to remain this boutique agency where I had this in mind that we will never cross 100 people.

And so we wanted to have like less number of people, but like a quality over quantity kind of approach and I think until COVID, before COVID also, we were like less than a hundred people.

Gautam Khorana

I see.

Rahul Bansal

But then suddenly we realized that we have a lot of potential that we can unlock. We have systems in place where we can turn a lot of people and we formally created a training center and it worked out very well. Like the training center worked out very well, so we started ramping up rapidly. Now, so while building this training program or training center, we had this idea that people only, so most, so this is a mismatch. 

We have this enterprise clients who really want to work with senior engineers. But then WordPress ecosystem didn’t have a lot of senior people. Most people find WordPress through friends. They’re not like, not long before there were WordPress courses in college.

Gautam Khorana

It’s true, I agree I agree 100%, 100% with you on that.

Rahul Bansal

So same bunch of people keep rotating between different agencies and businesses, so if you want to build, hire like 500 senior workplace engineers, I don’t think that those are the number of people exist in ecosystem, like high quality.

Gautam Khorana

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, tell me about it. We both have our struggles with hiring. Listen, I can confidently say that we are always hiring. I think so. Once you cross a certain threshold, like 50 people or 100 people, of course, then you are always hiring because of some reason or the other I think so.

Rahul Bansal

So yeah. And that is where we try to approach things differently, like inspired by, it’s just like, see, well, one thing I learned very early in my career, even in like life, like people are not absolutely good or bad, like while the agencies are not absolutely good or bad, like a businesses. So they’re like, you have to pick the good thing.

So Indian IT, the top five companies, I would say, are often like looked down for many reasons, like the employment bond and the low labor, low wages and many things. But one thing they did very well is that they took a lot of unskilled or semi-skilled people, put them into like a six month training, a very curated, amazing training program. And then it’s like in six months, they’ve kind of like gave them two years of experience. And inspired by that, we created our training center.

We started with 10 people-20 people. I think the highest match, we trained 70 or 80 people in one year. And then these 70, 80 people, like all trained in a classroom fashion, courses, daily assignment, check-in, quizzes, everything.  And then still, I was not, so there was internal assessment like this people has graduated, passed, put them on client project,, no, no, no, no.

We have made a name for ourself and before I put them on client project, I want to test them in battleground. And so what is better battleground than WordPress. Put them, put these people to WordPress. If they can contribute meaningfully to the WordPress Core, if they can pass review of WordPress Core committers.

Gautam Khorana

That’s a very, very good idea, that’s a strong, that’s a very good idea. That you have to create. That’s like an ultimate test.

Rahul Bansal

It’s like your ultimate test, yeah.

Gautam Khorana

It’s like the 12th board exam or your graduation fourth year college.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah. And then the pass, like to my surprise, they’re not even pass. Like I’m really feeling ashamed to not even recall my colleague’s name, but two of them become, I think, performance team representative. These were like people who were 12 months, like less than a year before they were in colleges. Just imagine somebody 10 months before was academic and now they are a performance team rep. Somebody was become notable contributor, I think they put so many patches, they had their picture on WordPress credit page, something like that. And I got all these updates for LinkedIn.

So it’s like, our training center runs so autonomously and as a well-oiled machine, that I get their update on LinkedIn in my feed – hey, I saw this guy. Oh, I saw this person in Slack and then I realized, oh, this person and me work in the same company.

Gautam Khorana

That’s crazy to understand that, unbelievable. But I’ve never seen, I’ve never heard of any program where somebody trains you to that level and pays you for the training also. It’s not free, of course, you are paying them too.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, we are paying them for training and there is no strings attached. They can take the training and join our immediate competition, no problem. I would love them to stay in WordPress. That’s the only expectation I have.  Again, it’s not in writing or in legal sense that we are investing so much you in to learn WordPress, stay in WordPress ecosystem, whichever company you like, there are amazing companies in WordPress ecosystem.

But through this training program, we managed to crack the hiring problem, and in the process, we ended up becoming such a large contributor to the WordPress. In a sense, we are giving back, but at the same time, this is working very well for us.

Gautam Khorana

All I know is that the core is becoming very strong now over the past year, especially, it’s become so good, you would agree. The plugins are getting faster, approvals, everything is becoming so much better in the WordPress ecosystem. I have a question which I ask every person who I interview and I will, I’m dying to take your take on it. Where do you think WordPress is going in five years from now? Not two, not ten, just five years. Consider with AI, so many improvements happening. Look at what Lovable is doing. Look at what Base 44, Framer is there. I know WordPress is not going to go anywhere 40% of internet is, but where do you think your personal opinion, where is it going?

Rahul Bansal

So they’re like, a lot many things, for example, so AI is first like multifaceted. So in the end, I believe like it is, the way I read it is AI is assistive intelligence. It’s here to assist you. So for example, it can give you a draft, but you are responsible for reading publish button. So AI is definitely going to speed up things. I use AI a lot. Thanks to AI, I coded in languages that I didn’t understand. I built one iPhone app just for a card game that I used to play with my friends. I built a Mac app just to unlock PDFs automatically, all the bank statements I get.

There is this huge, so AI is definitely a game changer. It is going to change the way WordPress is used, built, developed, but at the same time, I feel like…so AI won’t be anybody’s differentiator.

So that is my maybe controversial or contradictory take. Like if everybody’s using something that cannot be a differentiator, for example, like if all agencies are using AI-assisted programming, then everybody will save 60 to 80% of development time. So then hire us because we use AI to solve problem fast. The fast won’t be differentiated because everybody will be fast eventually. Sites build fast again, 

Gautam Khorana

Everybody’s hosting is becoming better every day, managed hosting is becoming every day. Cloudflare is there, CDN is being built in, security scans. Patchstack has made a massive name in the ecosystem and integrating with a lot of hosting companies. So yes, you’re right. So I think WordPress, overall, the reputation of WordPress is only becoming stronger every day.

But I wonder, will the market share remain the same? Will it go up or down the same? Possible to predict, but the way innovation is happening in AI is unbelievable.

Rahul Bansal

So it’s like there are two ways like, as an open source platform, we definitely won’t be left behind in the AI race. So it’s like, we are, so it’s like everybody, so the battlefield will change, but we will be there also. So it’s like, so, I’m more curious about what is post AI, because eventually this AI noise is going to get settled, whatever it’s like, for example, so another thing I realize about AI is that AI is like ChatGPT came and took the world by storm. And then you see how fast Gemini caught up, then Grok catching up and all, so then there’s a DeepSeek and all. So it’s like, so AI cannot be anybody’s differentiator. 

Gautam Khorana

It can’t be.

Rahul Bansal

Because like today, even after say 25 years, nothing comes close to the Google search quality. But when it comes to writing any essey, ChatGPT, Gemini, all other LLMs kind of do more or less like similar job.  So it’s like whatever AI boost we’ll have, so for example, let me put, Framer brings something with AI, no problem in three months, we will deliver it. If somebody catches Figma to Webflow conversion, somebody else will figure out similar logic in three months for WordPress themes.

Gautam Khorana

So true

Rahul Bansal

So what I’m trying to say that whatever people are innovating in AI, that uniqueness won’t last for more than three to six months, because I don’t know the way it is working, 

Gautam Khorana

I know yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rahul Bansal

So I believe the next race, that is where I have a different, so AI definitely as an agency, we have people working on AI, doing things in AI, I’m using AI and blah, blah, blah. But I’m thinking beyond AI or apart from AI. And that is where I think, so the WordPress need to compete with something like…

Gautam Khorana

I think Wix and Squarespace, I think also Wix and Squarespace so that it can go even to more masses. And masses can just click a button and launch. And I think Elementor is trying to solve that problem also very quickly. For example, by having hosting-launch-AI all-in-one bundled in. So it used to go to the masses now.

Rahul Bansal

And that is where my hope is that WordPress can still grow from here because until now, we were, as a WordPress ecosystem, we used to, we had this journey in mind, people will choose WordPress. Then they will enter our ecosystem and they will log, hey, plugin theme, should I use this plugin, that theme, this, so this journey need to be reversed. 

Something like, for example, they will come across very good, so they’re looking for a problem solution, they will come across a YouTube video and then they will relate this is a plugin or theme, but now they don’t have to go through that pain of, oh, I cannot use it without WordPress, oh, I cannot use WordPress without a hosting. Then so many decisions rather than every theme plugin business or anybody who has anything to do with WordPress should be able to, like a buy now button, can have embedded hosting launch, something like WP Cloud can do. 

So my biggest show of WordPress growth is actually through the platform like WP Cloud, which will reverse this funnel. People will find solutions first. And without them realizing they will be on WordPress. So it’s like somebody will discover something like SureCart like.

Gautam Khorana

Yes, yes of course.

Rahul Bansal

And then…

Gautam Khorana

Our dear friends suggest…

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, so they won’t, yeah, sure so they don’t, like they will come across your Twitter, YouTube, and somewhere they’ll click a link and they will just launch in the launch like it’s like 

Gautam Khorana

I agree, I agree.

Rahul Bansal

So like that decision to choose WordPress and find a hosting those and manage a server and manage backups and all those things that doesn’t come with Wix and Squarespace. So that that entire chain of decisions will be transparent to the customer. And I think this is a trend that that that is that I believe WordPress will still grow.

Gautam Khorana

And hopefully, I hope, and I think you’re right. Otherwise, we will be go.

Rahul Bansal

Definitely, we will.

Gautam Khorana

So we have built our businesses around WordPress to think about it. But obviously, you have so much confidence in it, and that’s the reason you pivoted and launched GoDAM and Web Auditor. You want to explain to our audience what it is all about and what made you launch them?

Rahul Bansal

So again GoDAM, so again, so when I said about WordPress and AI, so AI, I’m not worried about it, WordPress will catch up. Everybody will eventually become at the same level in the AI, that is my hypothesis. AI is good, I’m going to use it.

Gautam Khorana

I’m an engineer, now I’m an engineer. I cannot code anything, I can’t code shit, but finally, yes, I am a coder and I’m an engineer.

Rahul Bansal

So again, with AI also, what are you going to code? Like, are you going to code another forms plugin or e-commerce plugin? There’s so many of them. We need to find out what is missing in WordPress. Like, for example, why people using WordPress use YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo, this kind of platform. And that is where we thought like WordPress has such an amazing content management system, such an amazing architecture. What we need for video is some transcoding servers, some content delivery networks, some specialized algorithms so we build them all on the GoDAM, bundle it into the WordPress, and that is the part one actually.

What GoDAM currently does is part one. The second part is where that WP Cloud shines because in the second part in GoDM, we plan to launch turnkey solutions, for example, Loom alternative, we already built the Chrome extension, we already have all the infrastructure, there’s just one feature pending that is going live next week, so that there will be team support and all, so you can have your Loom in $9, you can have unlimited members collaboration.

Gautam Khorana

I remember when I was in Basel and we were actually having this conversation at midnight at the hotel lobby bar, if you remember, It’s unbelievable. I remember seeing that very distinctly and playing with it. And a day before yesterday, I saw your link. I think somebody from your team posted about LinkedIn, about Web Auditor. And I personally signed up. You can see my e-mail ID, Gautam@SeahawkMedia. I signed up, ran a test, and it was pretty good. Like it was very comprehensive. So I know your solutions are pretty good. But yes, you are right about finding the traction. That’s the tough part with so much competition. And yes, you are right that you need to find the differentiator. And I think you’ve kind of found that already and working on that.

Rahul Bansal

Also, like it depends on people, like building something already just doesn’t excite me. It’s like, so like in this case, I won’t say what we’re building with GoDAM doesn’t exist. The things we’re building in GoDAM exist behind the SaaS platforms in proprietary ways, always. But I wanted to bring that power to the WordPress, like, for example, Wistia has this forms integration with Salesforce and all those expensive platforms, nothing against them. They have some enterprise focus good for them, but we also want some small business in WordPress to be able to harness that power where they can have lead generation through videos or e-commerce through videos.

And that is where rather than Salesforce, we can have Gravity Forms, we can have SureForms, we can have WPForms, all these forms plugin working inside video player. That’s what the GoDAM does is like it’s so unfortunately, some problems are such that we cannot do whole shared hosting or typical WordPress plugin approach. There are problems which require specific engineering, which is beyond scope of shared hosting clients, and that is where we need this hybrid approach where we build solutions that are built for WordPress, but because of engine restriction, we’ll have a small SaaS component.

And still, in our, and we are not trying to lock behind the SaaS, we are only charging people for whatever infrastructure they’re consuming from us, so it’s like technically the features are free, unlike many companies which have different features in different plans. We have all features in all plans, which is like just pay us for bandwidth, because that’s the only thing you are consuming, everything is free.

Gautam Khorana

Got it and Web Auditor, I realized, I thought maybe it’s just like kind of like, why do you need Web Auditor when you have Google Lightspeed or GTmetrix? Why do I need Web Auditor? But then I realized, no, it’s actually telling me, do this and it will lead to a 1% bump in your speed. Is that what is the core way to understand this, right?

Rahul Bansal

Yes so the idea behind Web Auditor was that all these tools are developers, like developer heavy, existing tools and then we have AI. So we thought like, what if we first gather all the information about your website, put it into LLM, do some prompt engineering and narrow down useful suggestions, something you can follow, like a marketing person can understand, hey, this change is something makes sense, and then they can drive decision, like they can tell their developer, like, why don’t we make this change, and this is probably like 10% speed gain we will have.

Gautam Khorana

I see.

Rahul Bansal

So that Web Auditor’s goal is to…

Gautam Khorana

I think that’s very smart. And I think, you know, that when end users start getting the hang of it and you have the freemium model, that’s the best way. So our listeners, please check out GoDAM and Web Auditor, the freemium model, and it’s pretty snappy, pretty powerful. And I wish you the best of luck for these two plugins. I know they, I must say they’re flawless, whether it’s design, the approach, even your launch, everything has been flawless. You have a lot of experience support, needless to say.

Rahul Bansal

Thank you, so we are just coming with a lot of white hair (pointing to the beard).

Gautam Khorana

We are coming up with time, so I have very few final questions for you. I’m very curious to ask you, like, I know you are a big believer in headless WordPress and you had, you have SnapWP also. So what do you think? What do you tell me? What is the future of headless? Because, you know, Kinsta also launched, Elementor launched, Seahawk has been exploring headless. We get some queries here and there about headless, but do you think it’s just overhyped? Do you think it will take shape in a few years?

Rahul Bansal

So let me put this where headless. 

Gautam Khorana

It’s pretty cool, it is pretty cool. I must say the overall thesis behind headless is not bad at all, but it’s not gaining traction at all. What do you think about it?

Rahul Bansal

Because it’s oversold and overhyped, that is my opinion.

Gautam Khorana

That’s what I wanted to know.

Rahul Bansal

So we are here to deliver headless if anybody wants it. But do people need it? The answer is 99% of the time, no. Like very few sites I will suggest to use headless, like as a consultant, like when clients walks-in and if they leave their decision, I should, we go for it. The pros and cons, like the ROI and everything, for very few sites, headless works. For most of the sites, traditional WordPress is much better approach. Like what people, so headless is not magic. Like people think like they can only get performance with headless like if you have properly fully pay cache, like.

Gautam Khorana

No, no, no, wow with speed plugins, now with so many speed plugins in the market, it’s becoming so easy. You just need to know how to use them well. You know, and there are no brainers like WP Rocket, but you know, FastPixel is there, Perfmatters. There’s so many in the market and you just have to configure and make a few tweaks. You can do really well. I also think you’re right.

Rahul Bansal

There is a new breed of hosting companies where like in the old days, we used to put our images on the CDN. These modern hosting companies put your entire webpage across CDN. So it’s like there are these edge nodes and all. So it’s like your website is actually not located in one web server. It might be hosted in one place, but it’s like cached it everywhere, like something like CloudFront also, sorry, Cloudflare, Cloudflare. 

So there are many advancement in technologies where, so if performance is, if somebody says I only need headless for performance, that is something I think like they haven’t explored all their options. But the reason headless is talked about so much, because people think it’s a silver bullet, like it’s a magic bullet, it will solve all their problems.  It doesn’t solve all the problem and it’s very expensive.

So that’s the idea when SnapWP to make it affordable by turning it magical. But it’s a very tough problem to solve, we are struggling a lot. 

Gautam Khorana

I know

Rahul Bansal

In fact, the SnapWP started much earlier than this GoDAM and the Web Auditor, but SnapWP is still in lab and other two products have the launch, they’re having the paying customers and everything. So that’s the thing like headless is tough problem. So either you pay a lot for it or it’s not going to be like turnkey, like turnkey is something you are trying, but.

Gautam Khorana

It’s not necessary for you to have it now because of the new solutions in the market that’s cool. And tell me about your team. Is your entire team in India or do you have remote workers from other countries as well?

Rahul Bansal

We have a lot of remote workers. The thing is that the way we do that fresher hiring in collaboration with colleges.

Gautam Khorana

That’s in Pune, India, that’s in Pune.

Rahul Bansal

That’s in India. So within India, we are spread everywhere. So our 80% team is in India. Then we have team members in the US, Bangladesh, a few more countries that I’m not able to recall. We have one person in Germany. So it is just like a few more countries, I think six or seven countries like, but we are more distributed within India because of the way we hire our freshers, like we get the students, train them. So that cycle is not, so that’s remote, but not a async, like people work from home, get training from home, but then there are Zoom calls, there are check-ins, there are like class teachers, there are like reviews, there is assignment.

So we need all people to be in the same timezone, and then we need to ship laptops, a lot of stuff, so logistics challenges are also there. Then this is a CapEx heavy program. Like we take like 70-80 people, pay them for a year without any revenue, then give them 10 hours. 

Gautam Khorana

That’s a lot.

Rahul Bansal

And if we get other cross borders involved, then there will be additional compliances.

Gautam Khorana

I don’t know. Kudos to you and your team. I don’t know how you do it because in services business like yours and mine, the capital, the expense of human resources and you’re taking a huge risk with spending hundreds of thousands dollars. It’s a gamble, but obviously it’s a calculated gamble and it has been paying off for rtCamp. So kudos to you and your team for that.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah

Gautam Khorana

Pretty cool, thank you. Anyways, thank you so much for being on my show. Thank you for being on WP Legend. And I hope I can see you at WordCamp Portland. You said you may be, may be not been traveling there.

Rahul Bansal

Yeah, yet to book my ticket actually, there’s some like…

Gautam Khorana

But I remember last year when we went, we enjoyed that ramen and lunch and Basel we went at that lobby bar. So if you come over, we should grab lunch again. 

Rahul Bansal

Definitely

Gautam Khorana

Okay, for sure. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Rahul Bansal

Thanks again for having me.